Immanuel College has named Joanna Ebner as its new headteacher, succeeding Gary Griffin, who retires after four years in the role at the end of this term.

Ms Ebner, who is headmistress of Thomas’s Kensington, a co-education preparatory school which is part of the Thomas’s London Day Schools Group, has 16 years experience as a headteacher, including previously at The Royal School, a girls’ school in Hampstead.

In a statement, the school said she “has an outstanding track record of growing and developing schools and is personally engaged in the heart of the Jewish community.

“We believe she is extremely well placed to build on Immanuel’s past successes by creating and implementing a visionary strategic plan to take Immanuel forward to new heights over the next five to 10 years.”

She will join Immanuel next September. For the next two terms, the school will be led by interim head Michael Buchanan, a former head of Ashford School  in Kent.

She has previous experience of working at Immanuel, while training as a school counsellor with the Tavistock Clinic, Institute of Family Therapy and City University.

A graduate of Bnei Akvia and former co-president of Cambridge University Jewish Society, she ran the cheder for the city’s traditional congregation and she is a founding governor of Rimon in Golders Green, one of the new wave of Jewish primary free schools. She is the sister of former JC deputy editor Sarah Ebner.

Last year, she founded Schools Unlocked - summer schools to help disadvantaged children who had fallen behind during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She has been a visiting lecturer at Roehampton University and in 2018 travelled to the USA and Australia on a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to research school-university
partnerships.