Will Mann
Will Mann edits Construction Management and reports on how the construction industry delivers safer, better-performing buildings, with a particular focus on education estates under regulatory and climate pressure. His coverage is distinguished by its close tracking of building safety reform and competency standards, combined with detailed case studies that follow projects through design, demolition, and rebuild. He also moderates industry discussions on innovation, regulation and carbon, turning multi-voice panels into clear narratives about what change looks like in practice.
Building Safety Act: stepping up on competency
Mann’s work on building safety zeroes in on how regulation translates into responsibilities for dutyholders and organisations. In his feature on competency under the Building Safety Act, he explains the new legal requirements for principal contractors and principal designers and examines whether the sector is ready to prove it meets them. The piece highlights the launch of a competency certification scheme, using it as a lens to explore how firms document skills, experience and behaviour rather than treating compliance as a tick-box exercise.
He extends this focus in coverage of cladding remediation, where he interviews a building safety team on how quality management systems and data underpin an effective remediation programme.
Fire safety standards are treated in a similar way, with attention to upcoming changes and how they will affect construction practice rather than just listing new rules. Across these articles, building safety is framed as a continuous process of governance, competence and data, not a single project milestone.
The Tilbury Douglas PM who rebuilt a RAAC school
Mann’s project profiles show his interest in how regulatory, safety and educational pressures play out on live sites. In his interview with the Tilbury Douglas project manager who rebuilt a school affected by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), he follows the full arc from managing a complex demolition to delivering a new education facility.
The piece brings out the technical and logistical challenges of removing defective material, maintaining safety, and rebuilding quickly enough to minimise disruption to pupils and staff. Elsewhere, in his profile of a Legendre project manager working on complex refurbishment jobs in central London, he explores phased construction, constrained sites and the demands of keeping existing buildings operational while upgrading them. These stories emphasise method, sequence and constraint, showing how project leaders manage risk and stakeholder expectations rather than focusing solely on design aesthetics.
For education communications, the RAAC school rebuild in particular underlines his interest in how systemic safety issues intersect with the practical realities of keeping schools open and fit for purpose.
‘Digital is key to cutting construction carbon’
Mann covers digital transformation as an enabler of carbon reduction and better building performance. In his discussion titled “Digital is key to cutting construction carbon”, which he chairs, he brings together industry figures to examine how modelling, measurement and data platforms can reduce emissions across the project lifecycle. The format allows him to surface different perspectives on digital tools, from design optimisation to site execution and post-occupancy analysis, while keeping the focus on measurable outcomes.
His cladding remediation coverage reinforces this, showing how data and dashboards support decision-making and programme control on safety-critical work.
The through-line is that technology matters for what it makes visible and trackable - competence, defects, programme risk, and carbon footprints - rather than as a standalone theme. This gives his climate-related pieces, including work on how people can live and work in increasingly high temperatures, a practical bent grounded in design decisions, retrofit strategies and building operation.
Clients should engage with the journey towards contractor regulation
Mann often writes about the role of clients and governance in raising standards across construction. In his feature on contractor regulation, he sets out why clients need to engage with proposals to regulate contractors, linking building safety, competency, AI and client upskilling into a single agenda.
The article treats clients as active participants in safety and performance, not just purchasers, highlighting how their choices influence competence, innovation and risk management. His moderated discussion on how contractors innovate extends this theme, with Mann chairing a conversation that explores how firms develop new approaches and what clients can do to support or hinder that process. Together, these pieces show a recurrent interest in systems change: regulation, client behaviour and contractor capability are treated as connected levers rather than isolated topics.
Within an education beat, that perspective translates into stories that look beyond individual school projects to the regulatory and client-side frameworks that determine how portfolios of buildings are funded, designed and maintained.
Across this body of work, Mann’s distinguishing traits are his focus on building safety and competency, his use of detailed project and education-sector case studies, and his habit of convening expert voices around topics such as regulation, digital tools and carbon. For stories about schools, colleges or universities, he is attuned to how policy, safety and climate pressures shape the brief, and how construction teams turn those pressures into decisions on design, phasing and delivery.
His reporting format ranges from long-form features and interviews to chaired roundtables, but the common thread is clear, practical prose aimed at explaining how the industry is changing and what that means on the ground.
4 more education journalists.
Ajit Niranjan
Ajit Niranjan links climate science, policy and hard numbers to how extreme weather and environmental damage disrupt daily life, public services and industry. He is European environment correspondent at the Guardian. His beat includes violent heat, pollution, wildfires, air quality, EU green policy, corporate responsibility, energy transition, clean home heating, public health and long-term risks to landscapes and ecosystems. He examines how lobbying, supply chains and regulation shape environmental harm, from data centres and fish farms to fossil fuel industries. His reporting covers schools, hospitals, transport, homes and infrastructure as climate stress points. He previously reported on climate for DW News. He combines data, scientific research, eyewitness accounts and on-the-ground reporting. He also produces explainers, dossiers, factsheets and Q&As that translate complex technical debates into clear, precise language.
Albert Tait
Albert Tait is Education Editor at The Telegraph, leading coverage of schools and universities as institutions whose decisions have direct consequences for staff and students. He focuses on how regulators, senior leaders and governing bodies respond when safety, standards or integrity are under scrutiny, and how those responses affect classrooms and lecture halls. His work links school inspections and teacher safety to regulatory frameworks and conditions on the ground, and he reports on incidents such as knife attacks and “Code Red” alerts with attention to immediate impact and emergency protocols. He produces multi-part investigations into university governance, including extensive reporting on Cambridge’s handling of Jason Arday’s appointment and resignation. He also covers curriculum debates such as changes in how scientists view evolution and inheritance. He began at The Telegraph as a news reporter and previously covered community news at a local paper.
Beth Kennedy
Beth Kennedy is editor at The PIE News and stands out for reporting on how UK policy, institutional strategy and new delivery models reshape international education. Her beat covers UK study visa rules, international student flows, Home Office and UCAS data, alternative study pathways, language schools, and mergers and acquisitions across the sector. She reports on the practical effects of visa changes, scholarship schemes, online and transnational education, school closures, job losses and sector consolidation. Her work is direct and data-led, with clear explanations of complex systems and a focus on what policy and market shifts mean for universities, language schools and private training organisations. She has over a decade in specialist media, including years reporting for primary healthcare professionals before joining The PIE in 2024.
Callum Clark
Callum Clark is a multimedia journalist at STV News who covers education through the lens of university finances, restructuring and their impact on students, staff and local services. He focuses on stories where cost‑saving plans, job losses and service closures reshape community life, such as Dundee University’s nursery and botanic garden closures, and sets those decisions within wider restructuring efforts. His reporting is direct and fact driven, built on official documents, statements and precise figures that show both the scale of savings targets and monthly losses, and the number of posts at risk. Clark’s background in local news and public service coverage, including mental health service reforms and redundancy schemes, shapes a methodical style that tracks formal processes while keeping the lived experience of workers, families and service users in view.