About Marian

Long before she had language for it, Marian was a designer and systems thinker, the kind of educator who, even as a beginning teacher, kept asking the same questions: Is there another way to do this? What haven’t we thought of? Should we work with the students on this?

That instinct, to get underneath a challenge to its root rather than treat its symptoms, and to keep asking whether there's another way, has shaped Marian’s entire career. Leading industry and education collaboration inside a secondary school, she reimagined the way educators collaborated with industry in curriculum design, so that what happened in the classroom was coherent for what young people were facing in employment. Later, leading a large-scale project across a system of more than 147 schools, Marian redesigned the way career education was approached, intervening at a deep leverage point to bring coherence to how curriculum, school improvement and the agency of young people contributed to career development.

Across all of it, the same pattern kept surfacing: so much of what we see, and what young people experience on the surface of schooling is shaped by things underneath it, how we think, what we believe, and what we never pause in the busyness of school life to examine. That realisation is why she founded Coherence Co-Lab. In her work with schools, she doesn't diagnose from the outside or arrive with plug-and-play solutions. She’s spent a lot of time working in classrooms, schools and systems and commits to understanding an organisation deeply. She works from within every school’s unique context, alongside the teachers, leaders and young people doing the work, bringing systems thinking, futures literacy and human-centred design to real complexity and constraints rather than as a theoretical toolkit.

Marian believes young people are the most important leverage point in any school, and that their responses to its hardest challenges are some of the most untapped design material we have. In 2023, she was invited to contribute her work on system coherence and student futures to a global conference hosted by the OECD.

Marian has a special interest in the application of systems thinking to career development and schooling, and is the co-creator of The Great Careers Program, a podcast that she co-created and co-hosts with her good friend and collaborator Liv Pennie, Co-Founder and CEO of BECOME Education. Together, they break down what good careers education looks like in an age of increasing volatility and how school systems can optimise for hope, agency and confidence in the face of uncertain futures.

Marian holds a Bachelor of (Secondary) Education, a Master of Leadership, and has completed postgraduate study in learning analytics and human-centred systems design.