Sir David Green KCMG CVO
Our patron
A former teacher and a leader in international development, who has visited the schools and the college we support with the Kashmir Education Foundation (KEF).
Sir David Green KCMG CVO. Portrait by Jesse Willems.
Sir David Green KCMG CVO is Patron of Quest for Education Foundation (QEF). He is a former Chief Executive of the British Council and of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), and a former Deputy Director-General of the Save the Children Fund.
He began his career teaching for five years in comprehensive schools in South Yorkshire.
Sir David has chaired the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, the Dartington Hall Trust, the Royal Commonwealth Society and Dash Arts. He has been a trustee of the University of the Arts London and the English-Speaking Union, and was the Founding President of the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).
As of 2019, he was also a trustee of the Prince’s Foundation, the Royal Court Theatre, the Finnish Institute in London and Africa’s Voices Foundation, and chaired Soumik Datta Arts.
An artist himself, Sir David has a strong interest in theatre and the arts, education and international development.
Visits to KEF’s schools
What our patron saw on his visits to the schools and the college.
Sir David has visited all of KEF’s centres, most recently in April 2025. After his November 2018 visit, in a statement written for us in February 2019, he described the teacher training college at Bassali and the participative teaching methods he saw in the classrooms of the schools we support.
The students were highly motivated and I was particularly struck by their level of confidence generally and their proficiency in English. … Having seen the work on the ground I feel proud to be associated with KEF.
Our patron, Sir David Green, speaks to pupils at Banjosa Valley Public School, November 2018.
Young pupils learn English prepositions at Banjosa Valley Public School, November 2018.
See the schools he visited
Find out about the three schools and the college we support with the Kashmir Education Foundation (KEF).