Stuart Ross

After studying law at the London School of Economics, Stuart became an associate of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and is FCA registered. Stuart is a non-executive director at Lehman Brothers Subsidiaries (since 2008) and VistaDraft Ltd (since 2020) but his experience in educational governance stems from his time at the Girls’ Day School Trust (since 2019). This trust consists of 25 schools supporting 16,000 pupils and 4,000 staff. Stuart is chair of the audit committee and the trust has annual revenues of £270m.

Stuart’s career began in 1979 when he was an audit senior for Arthur Anderson and over the last four decades, he has overhauled financial reporting and budgetary processes, led due diligence in acquisitions and reduced costs and capital employed by £350m across various employers.

In his role as group finance director at NTL Group UK (now Virgin Media), Stuart was responsible for the finance tax supply chain, property, risk management and legal functions. His key achievements included increasing EBITDA from £240m to £650m over a span of two years, reducing operating costs by over £300m and successfully recruiting new team members into key roles within the organisation.