Jade Garratt biography
Jade Garratt Biography
Full version
Jade Garratt co-founded Psych Safety because she thinks most conversations about workplace culture are having the wrong argument. Psychological safety isn’t a wellness initiative or a leadership competency framework. It’s a question of power – how it moves through teams, whose voice gets heard and whether the environments we create allow people to actually show up.
The path to this work is not a conventional one. Jade studied Physics at Oxford, trained as a teacher, and spent nearly two decades moving through roles in schools, universities, startups and police training. She worked up through team leadership and middle management before reaching senior roles – including a senior educational leadership position at the University of Nottingham. Nobody celebrates the middle much, but that’s where culture is actually made or broken, and those years keep her work grounded in what organisations are really like rather than what we’d like them to be.
That same thread runs into Jade’s academic research. Near completion of a PhD at the University of Nottingham, she is investigating how students’ school backgrounds shape their transitions into and through higher education – in depth qualitative work grounded in social justice, critical discourse analysis and Massey’s work on space. The questions are the same ones that run through all of her work: who gets to belong, and on whose terms?
Jade holds a Masters in Educational Leadership and was recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2024. She is also a qualified yoga teacher – less of a tangent than it sounds. Much of what she teaches about embodied experience, self-awareness and what it actually means to show up as a whole person is rooted in that practice.
She writes regularly on psychological safety and the ethics of how we treat people at work. If you’re organising an event, running a podcast, or building something that takes the human side of work seriously, she’d like to hear from you.
Connect with Jade online at Substack: @jadegarratt, LinkedIn: @jade-garratt and Bluesky @jadegarratt
(~300 words)
Shorter version
Jade Garratt co-founded Psych Safety on a simple conviction: that most organisations are having the wrong conversation about culture. Psychological safety isn’t a wellness initiative – it’s a question of power and who gets to belong.
Jade’s route to this work spans schools, universities, startups and police training. She worked up through team leadership and middle management before reaching senior roles, including a senior educational leadership position at the University of Nottingham – and the experience of those years in the middle, where culture is actually made or broken, runs through everything she does.
Jade holds a Masters in Educational Leadership, was recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2024, and is near completion of a PhD at the University of Nottingham, examining how students’ school backgrounds shape their experience of higher education through a social justice lens.
She writes and speaks on psychological safety and the ethics of how we treat people at work.
Connect online: Substack: @jadegarratt, LinkedIn: @jade-garratt and Bluesky @jadegarratt
(~170 words)
Shortest version
Jade Garratt co-founded Psych Safety on the conviction that psychological safety isn’t a wellness initiative – it’s a question of power. An Oxford-educated physicist turned teacher, senior leader and researcher, she spent nearly two decades working across schools, universities, startups and police training before building a consultancy. She is completing a PhD at the University of Nottingham and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
(~70 words)
Find a list of quotes by Jade Garratt here.
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Speaker Introduction
Our next speaker thinks most organisations are having the wrong conversation about culture – and she’s spent two decades building the argument for why.
Jade Garratt is co-founder of Psych Safety, a specialist consultancy in psychological safety and human and organisational performance.
She studied Physics at Oxford, trained as a teacher, and worked up through leadership roles across schools, universities, startups and police training before building a consultancy.
She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is completing a PhD at the University of Nottingham, where her research asks whose experiences get centred in institutions – and whose get left at the door.
Please welcome Jade Garratt.
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