Emily Scarratt and John Mitchell knew their England team could be world champions, they just needed the right environment to be able to prove it.
The centre had just competed in her fifth tournament (a joint record in the women’s game), claimed her second winner’s medal, and helped to complete an 11-year quest to bring the World Cup trophy back to England. It was almost the perfect way to bow out after 17 years as an international, 115 caps and a world record 754 points.
Yet she had only played 19 minutes of England’s campaign – all as a second half substitute in the Red Roses’ opening pool match; a 69-7 defeat of the United States in Sunderland.
“I’ve definitely been part of environments before where that kind of non-playing player can become quite negative and toxic,” she told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
“For a large part of my career, I was starting and therefore it’s very easy to say the right things and present in that way when you’re not under the stress of not being selected or not playing as much as you would like.”
Scarratt was joined onstage by England Head Coach John Mitchell, who in early February extended his contract until the 2029 World Cup and added Scarratt to his coaching staff.
The session moderator, Rachel Vickery, asked him what it meant to see Scarratt and her other non-playing teammates (known within the Red Roses setup as “pillar” players) celebrating with such vigour.
“I reflected that we actually hit the sweet spot with the culture,” said Mitchell. “Sometimes you don’t get that sweet spot and we might not get it again.”
Rachel Vickery (left) talks to John Mitchell (middle) and Emily Scarratt (right) onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.
Here we reflect on what Mitchell and the Red Roses got right for 2025.
He spoke up when something wasn’t quite right
When Mitchell signed up to become England Head Coach in 2023, his remit was to win the World Cup. He was a coach with a proven track record in the men’s game who had now been handed the resources and the players to deliver the Women’s World Cup on home soil.
But in 2018 and 2022 England had lost World Cup finals they could, or perhaps should, have won.
“The leading question was how do we get done what we haven’t through the years?” said Mitchell.
It involved integrating young talent (eight players made their World Cup debuts against the US) and tactical tweaks (they had been too reliant on their maul). Both required an environment that enabled the best team on paper to prove they were the best team on grass.
To deliver on that front, Mitchell and the team’s leaders landed on three guiding values: ‘courage’, ‘take the handbrake off’ and ‘be all in’.
These values inspired England’s veterans and new internationals alike. “If the top person genuinely believes that culture is important it makes a difference,” said Scarratt. “Potentially in previous campaigns that hasn’t been the case and culture could get a little bit sidetracked or lost along the way.”
Mitchell even spoke up when he spied a shortcoming in the players’ well-meaning desire to ‘do it for the girls’.
“My thinking was that emphasis might be slightly calibrated towards ‘me’ – not intentionally – but how do I get the girls to calibrate towards ‘we’?” he said. “Because if I inspire you and I’m inspired by you, isn’t that more important, more inspiring to the person next to you? We get the job done and then our voice around our individual ‘why’ will be far greater.”
The cultural tweaking never stopped
“It’s very easy to just pick values, put them somewhere and hope that people live by them,” said Scarratt. “Our values were genuinely threaded through a lot of what we did, whether it was medical presenting or S&C presenting” and, when you witness that, “it’s very easy to buy-in”.
Mitchell held difficult conversations when necessary, but all players and staff, Scarratt said, were expected to speak up when necessary “to nip things in the bud before they became potentially bigger.”
At the suggestion of leadership consultant Patrick Marr, Mitchell would ask his player leadership group and support staff on the eve of each international camp to tell him “who’s going to pull the cart forward? Who’s going to sit on the cart? Who’s going to hold up the cart?”
After an hour he would “come back and I’d see two or three players, plus a couple of staff, where our priority needs to go,” he said, adding “we would then decide on who I would speak to and who they would speak to.” For every player or member of staff, there would be someone who could bridge that gap and “communicate around standards of behaviour”.
Mitchell even danced on TikTok when duty called
If you’re an England supporter, you may have seen the TikTok video of Mitchell dancing with his players.
“I needed to show vulnerability,” he said of such moments, which was not something he considered as a younger coach. “I had to do things that I probably don’t normally do and join in with the girls on certain things.”
Psychological safety may start with players or their head coach dancing in the dressing room, but it ultimately manifests on the pitch during tricky spells or in performance meetings when a staff member has the courage to raise a performance issue.
Mitchell knew he had to lead from the front. “Sometimes you’ve got to be the leader of those actions before somebody else does them.”
That said, his belief in the power of the head coach has been softened (and his self-awareness amplified) by three decades in the sport. “You learn through emotional intelligence that you don’t have to be absolute or right when making decisions. Just use your people. Listen to your people.”
John Mitchell and Emily Scarratt shake hands as their session draws to a close at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
The team talked about the pressure they felt
For the first time, England openly spoke about winning the World Cup. It served as a pressure valve and, again, gave voice to their values.
“It might sound a bit silly but we hadn’t done that before,” said Scarratt, implicitly acknowledging how awkward the group felt at first about such an “un-English” sentiment.
As the English media and public latched onto the team ahead of the US match, the pressure grew. The players trained poorly on one occasion but, instead of dismissing it, they discussed it openly.
“I think we did a really good job of dampening it down by not not speaking about it,” Scarratt added. “By actually putting it out there and allowing people to know that other people felt like that.”
And Mitchell’s words after England eased through the gears on the opening night set the tone. He said: “There’s bigger games coming where teams will put even more pressure on us, so let’s take confidence from what we’re building and stacking as we’re going along. Our game doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be effective, and that will win us the tournament.”
He was right and, looking to 2029, their goal is to win back-to-back World Cups, establish a legacy as one of women’s sports greatest teams, and to further grow the women’s game.
These lofty goals provoke three questions that Mitchell and England must answer: “What will earn the right? What will we keep and take forward with us? And then, thirdly, is what we what will we need to start again?”
What to read next
Meaning Does Not Guarantee Medals, But it Strengthens the Behaviours that Make Medals Possible
In the first month of 2026 Leaders Performance Institute members discussed at length strategies for effective learning, the value in evidence-informed practice, and why your values should be the carrot, not the stick.
It was a lesson to all sleeping giants. Here was a team with the most losses in the sport’s history and, over the course of their 16-0 season, had compiled more wins than between 2020 and 2023 in total.
Indiana Head Coach Curt Cignetti spoke of a “paradigm shift” in the aftermath of the Hoosiers’ 27-21 defeat of Miami.
“People can cling to an old way of thinking, categorising teams as this or that or conferences as this or that or they can adjust to the new world, the shift in the power dynamic in college football today,” he said.
Cignetti was brought in ahead of the 2024 season and transformed the mindset of a team that had been treading water for decades.
“There’s got to be a lot of like-minded individuals who come together for a common purpose, and sometimes that belief has to be a little bit irrational,” said Indiana centre Pat Coogan.
“Especially in a place that hasn’t had success like Indiana. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen the way this place has been characterised, and when Coach Cig got here, he believed, and he got people to believe. Sometimes people laughed at him and thought he was crazy, but that’s irrational belief. You’ve got to get people to buy-in and believe in the mission.”
With a host of senior players set to graduate, success may not be replicable in the short term, but Cignetti is ready for whatever comes next.
“Perfection is impossible to attain on a consistent basis,” he said. “But we’ll continue to take it one day at a time, one meeting at a time, one practice at a time, and just keep improving and committing to the process and showing up prepared, trying to put it on the field, and see where it takes us.”
It was a powerful message to kick off the year in sports performance and one that underlined the importance of the fundamentals while refusing to stand still.
Which brings us nicely to the happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute these past four weeks.
Insight of the month
‘What underpins successful teams across formats is not uniformity, but clarity of individual responsibility within a collective framework. Team performance does not replace individual accountability; it depends on it.’
In a guest column, James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, spoke about facilities being a secondary concern until the leaders had created the right environment to enable athletes, whether they’re the Olympic champions with whom he has worked or Premier League and Champions League-winning footballers, being paramount.
Read more about why high performance is not something leaders should demand. It is something they should enable.
Britain’s Anthony Joshua on his way to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics. (Scott Heavey/Getty Images)
Surprising insight of the month
Did you know that Team GB built its own hub within the London Olympic Village in 2012. This was very much a “host nation benefit” as Paul Ford MBE called it in another popular guest column last month.
The Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association wrote:
When we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.
It provoked a question: how do we create an optimal physical way of uniting the team within the Games environment? Part of it was using our Olympic Village residential space smarter. But you can’t expect this of the local organising committee to do on our behalf, since their brief is so vast. Instead, we decided to take it out of their hands. And for each of the subsequent Summer Olympics we have found an out-of-village space exclusively for our use.
Read more about their approach here.
Team GB flag bearers Helen Glover and Tom Daley pose for a selfie outside the residence of the British Ambassador to France ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Best advice
Leaders Performance Institute members across the globe strive to encourage learning throughout their teams and while it will always be an important feature of any successful team, you should not waste your time on the wrong people.
As performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler explained at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable:
“There’s definitely some people who, you can try as hard as you like to get them to learn and I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy as someone who’s seeking to help. It’s a bit like athletes, isn’t it? If you’re up for it, I’ll give you 150% of my energy. If you’re not, after a period of time, I’ll just go, ‘look, you crack on’. So I think we have to be accepting of that.”
Over the course of an hour, Brunnschweiler and a band of LPI members noted ten strategies for more effective learning.
One you might have missed
Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab made the case for evidence-informed as opposed to evidence-based practice.
He enlisted the help of students from DCU’s online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.
One such student is Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.
As she told Taylor, you can’t simply drop research on top of a sports programme. It must be used critically, in conjunction with a coach’s own research, and applied in an informed manner.
“There’s not necessarily one solution,” she said. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.”
The key for Ward in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”
Read more about DCU’s programmes here.
Quote of the month
“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”
These are the attention-grabbing words of a performance director working in India who spelled out the challenges in talent identification and development.
He and a host of LPI members listed five of the most common trends (and five opportunities) in that space.
Good to know
Organisational values should be your carrot, not your stick.
That’s according to Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.
In her appearance at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, she spoke about how the RAF’s values, all contained within the prosaically titled Air Publication One document, had been used to browbeat good people.
“Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”
Again, the focus was learning strategies in an inspiring presentation.
The RAF’s Emma Keith onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. (Leaders)
What’s coming up for members
Team culture, coach development and cartoons loomed large as we wrapped up 2025.
Here at Leaders Towers we were delighted to enter 2026 with Lando Norris newly installed as the Formula 1 world champion.
Several of us hope it will be the first of several world titles for the Brit, but my colleagues and I were also struck by the manner in which his McLaren Team Principal, Andrea Stella, spoke of Norris’ holistic development since finishing a distant second in 2024.
“He definitely learned a lot from last year’s mission, even though it didn’t go all the way to the last race,” said Stella in the aftermath. “There were some learning moments, like in Austria. That was tough.”
Stella referred to the moment when Norris collided with Max Verstappen as they vied for the lead at the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix. Norris would not finish the race; Verstappen claimed fifth position and a further ten points as he motored towards his fourth world championship. But Stella believed that something changed for Norris that day.
“I think Lando raised his self-image, along the lines of, ‘I can compete with Max’,” Stella added, warming to the topic.
“In my view, there was another important turning point this season: the way Lando responded to the difficulties at the start of the season. That was the beginning of a structured, holistic process that encompassed personal development, professional driving and racing craftsmanship. And I’m particularly pleased that Lando was able to capitalise on that because I haven’t seen anything like it in terms of the amount of work, the people involved and the speed of development.”
These utterances came just days after a Leaders Performance Institute Virtual Roundtable where members discussed holistic athlete development and alighted on some of the themes raised by Stella including athlete co-ownership, the convergence of performance disciplines, and the increasing emphasis placed on mental performance.
Members can read more here.
There was plenty more besides to engage our members’ during a busy December at the LPI.
Insight of the month:
“One of the things I see, certainly in the corporate world, is that people mistake ‘good’ for high performing. In my experience, genuine high-performing teamwork is much rarer than people would admit.
“We know what it feels like when a team is dysfunctional and something’s not working, but when a team is harmonious and there are fairly good relationships, people mistake that for being a high-performing team.”
The wise words of John Bull, the Head of High Performance at our friends Management Futures. Bull led a session looking at the elements that go into making a high performance team, from the building blocks needed to the human factors that can inhibit your progress.
Best advice:
“Listen to the system and the system will tell you what it needs. I think a large part of where culture can get derailed is where people don’t feel heard and valued.”
So said a performance support specialist from the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system at a virtual roundtable where members discussed how their team cultures are evolving.
They specifically referred to the potential resistance a leader may encounter from long-tenured staff or when dealing with rapid turnover. In any case, your people must feel you are listening to them.
Performer(s) of the month:
We’re within our rights to say Norris here, but December’s accolades go to Bluey Heeler and her friend Rusty.
The second half of that sentence may make little sense if you’re not familiar with the Australian children’s animated series Bluey, but one women’s international cricket team has inaugurated its ‘Rusty Award’ for the best teammate, a gong that is handed to a player at the end of every training camp or block.
“We used an episode to bring to life our ‘embrace change’ value,” said the team’s performance lead at the very same virtual roundtable.
Good to know:
Did you know there are four types of innovation?
That is according to renowned change management specialist Greg Satell and his model of innovation, which Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, shared during the second instalment of his three-part roundtable exploration of tech-supported innovation in sport:
Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:
Basic research – a low understanding of both domain and problem: “We don’t really know what the problem is and we don’t really know in which field or area it happens.”
Disruptive innovation – a well-understood domain but poorly understood problem: “In this area you may need something like innovation labs or launch pads.”
Breakthrough innovation – a poorly understood domain but well-defined problem: “This is the reverse of disruptive innovation… the classic example of open innovation.”
Sustaining innovation – a well-understood domain and problem: “The most common form in sport [and often the subject of] continuous research, design thinking or road mapping.”
Members can read more here.
Startling fact of the month:
Serpiello was back at it in the third and final session of his series with further reflections on our 2025 Trend Report.
The report posed the question: do you have a process in place to make sure that the tech you implement is the right one?
Fewer than half of respondents said ‘yes’, with more than a third saying ‘no’. Curiously, nearly 20 percent said ‘I don’t know’.
“That’s a good chunk,” said Serpiello. “It is probably more interesting than the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ given that most of the people that responded are at the ‘head of’, ‘director of’ or ‘vice president of’ level.”
What followed was an exploration of what a thorough and considered process of procurement should include.
One you might have missed:
Jamie Taylor, an Assistant Professor in Elite Performance at Dublin City University [DCU], used a virtual roundtable to explain to members that coach development too often veers towards less direct practices.
“Similar to what we see in coaching, there has been a view that it’s inappropriate to offer more direct pedagogical approaches,” said Taylor. He believes this is a consequence of sport being influenced by executive coaching practices and adult learning theory. Yet coaching is not C-suite work.
Supported reflection and communities of practice can be useful, but there are limitations. “If the coach hasn’t got the knowledge to reflect, or the coach developer doesn’t have a strong pedagogical capacity, then it can end up being just a nice coffee and a nice chat.”
Read more about the challenge of raising coaches from merely ‘competent’ to genuinely ‘expert’ here.
Finally…
A photo record of the best bits of 2025 at the Leaders Performance Institute.
What’s coming up in January for members:
Check out your 2026 virtual learning calendar at:
John Bull of Management Futures says it as he sees it, but stresses that all teams can improve their teamwork.
“One of the things I see, certainly in the corporate world, is that people mistake ‘good’ for high performing,” said the Head of High Performance at Management Futures. “In my experience, genuine high-performing teamwork is much rarer than people would admit.
“We know what it feels like when a team is dysfunctional and something’s not working, but when a team is harmonious and there are fairly good relationships, people mistake that for being a high-performing team.”
He presented this distinction between dysfunction and high performing as different ends of a continuum:
“In order to get to the right-hand side of this continuum, high-performing teamwork requires people to lean into behaviours that don’t come naturally,” added Bull.
He then explained that there is also a risk in over-collaborating. “This is about quality not quantity. Our efforts to get more out of teamwork can sometimes slow down performance.”
There is also a distinction between working within a ‘stable team’ (e.g. a department within a high performance team) and teamwork across boundaries, between people who rarely work together or don’t see themselves as one team (e.g. business and performance functions).
The aviation industry, Bull said, excels at cross-boundary teamwork.
“If you think about when you have a critical incident while flying, you’ve often got people in the crew who don’t know each other. The crew must collaborate with air traffic control on the ground, and they won’t know them,” he continued. He explained that the industry has long valued listening and speaking up.
It has also placed an emphasis on ‘diamond thinking’, which looks like this:
“In aviation, when you have to solve an issue, as a rule of thumb, you should spend 50 percent of the time opening the diamond up,” he said. “You get a lot of input but you’re then clear on who’s going to make the final call. Some of us in the coaching space struggle with the balance between democracy and a leader making a decision. Diamond thinking allows for that.”
Bull then led the table into a discussion on his four building blocks of team performance:
He explained each in turn and their different elements.
1. Unifying focus
“If you don’t have clarity you can’t create any of the other conditions.”
2. Quality of interaction
“Trust enables us to lean into more uncomfortable conversations and have the real performance conversations in a way that doesn’t put those relationships at risk.”
3. Quality of action
“High-performing teamwork emerges when people go for the gap.”
4. Shared responsibility
“It’s getting people to recognise that when the team’s not performing they should feel empowered to step in and say something about it and not just rely on the team leader.”
As a follow on, Bull highlights six human factors that can serve to inhibit team performance:
Again, he shared his thoughts on each:
Unequal contribution: “We know from research that if you have a group or a team of eight people 70 percent of the contribution will come from two or three… Status and personality has more of an impact on who speaks than who knows stuff, and that should scare you as a team leader.”
Groupthink: “It’s a hardwired principle of how our brains work that we will conform to the thinking of the group if we don’t have a strong view… One of the best ways to combat groupthink is to get people to think individually before a group discussion.”
Low psychological safety: “Probably the biggest thing that kills team performance is a lack of psychological safety.”
Fixed position: “One of the things that hurts psychological safety the most is defensiveness, where people are in a fixed position. The way you deal with the fixed position that I’ve seen work best is to deal with it one-to-one.”
Tribal or siloed behaviour: “We’re wired as humans to be tribal and there are two types of tribal behaviour. One is where you are deliberately trying to beat the other. What is much more common is you’re not competing but you just don’t think about the other ‘tribe’ as much.”
Poor use of time: “Humans tend to be pretty bad at how we use time together in groups. A quick win is to get the team thinking about when we had our best team meeting, what was it about that, what’s getting in the way of it.”
Bull then returned to the themes of psychological safety and fixed positions when sharing and describing the three types of “thinking environments” in groups and teams as revealed by Management Futures’ research:
“The bottom two points are ineffective,” said Bull. “The definition of open dialogue is where people are saying what they think, but as soon as they’ve put their view out they’re inviting disagreement. It’s not about trying to win the argument, it’s about trying to get to a collective insight of what we know as a group. It’s very different to trying to influence colleagues.”
With time running out, Bull shared a final slide highlighting four key skills to encourage collaboration, with a series of questions for members to ponder: 
ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell discusses creativity and problem-solving in volatile environments both in space and here on Earth.
Main Image: European Space Agency
The video depicted a range of space-faring feats performed by the European Space Agency [ESA] as it enjoyed its 50th year.
Mundell, who is the Director of Science at the ESA , brought the room back to Earth again when outlining her efforts to bring together 23 European nations (more specifically their governments) in pursuit of the agency’s interstellar goals.
“Diplomacy is a contact sport,” said Mundell, who is a diplomatic veteran at this stage. She is responsible for a pan-European staff of over 45,000 people, with headquarters in five jurisdictions. You can also throw in the challenges posed by Brexit, the pandemic (when international diplomacy definitely was not a contact sport) and the war in Ukraine.
“The political churn at the moment is unprecedented,” she continued. “From one day to another, we don’t know whether our member state governments will continue to be governments or remain in place for another election.”
This volatility stands in contrast to ESA missions, all of which take decades to devise and tend to last longer than most political careers.
Then there’s the space-based challenges. In her time onstage, Mundell described a range of missions, from explorations of Jupiter’s moons to detailed observations to the surface of Mercury. All require incomprehensible precision.
Take the LISA [Laser Interferometer Space Antenna] mission. Its purpose is to detect gravitational waves in space; the ripples in space-time caused by cosmic events such as black hole collisions.
“They will have three spacecraft flying in convoy, with two and a half million kilometres between each spacecraft,” she said. “They will follow an Earth-Sun orbit and they will rotate and stay in that triangle.”
The lasers in question must be able to point with precision narrower than a proton.
““We’re going to measure the nature of space-time itself. It’s eye-watering technology.”
LISA measuring the properties of gravitational waves (Image: the European Space Agency)
Mundell has become adept at managing the external elements that could derail projects such as LISA. Thanks to her leadership, ESA’s creative and technical minds are able to do their best work in a climate of political uncertainty.
Psychological safety
In space, Mundell told us, things often go wrong. Take the Euclid mission, the purpose of which is to map the ‘dark’ universe. The lens of space telescope, which orbits the sun 1.5 million km from Earth, became contaminated by a strip of ice thinner than a strand of DNA. Mundell’s team had to find a way to defrost the ice without damaging the equipment’s sensitive optics.
Euclid begin its dark universe survey. (Image: European Space Agency)
But if you can reasonably anticipate microscopic space ice then you can devise a plan to defrost it.
“We did that last month,” she said almost matter-of-factly, but the ESA’s staff have built trust in their systems. “At a time of crisis, the first thing you do is check the process.” The system provides a layer of safety that goes beyond the interpersonal dynamics originally associated with the term ‘psychological safety’ (although these remain important; Mundell says: “Please create the best possible cultures you can. Please have the courage to really call out bad behaviour”).
“The cognitive safety comes from the fact that you know there is a process that you’ve all built together.”
This knowledge is also useful when navigating potential cultural differences present in a supranational organisation.
More creative, less expensive, more innovative
On her way to the Kia Oval, Mundell received news that one of an ESA contract negotiation was going backwards.
“My first instinct was to think of a solution,” she said. “And a very calm senior colleague said to me: ‘we don’t need to escalate this’. We don’t always need to go to the nuclear option.”
Such setbacks and budget cuts are par for the course. During his annual press briefing in January, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher revealed that the ESA budget for 2025 would be €7.68 billion. It was €7.79 billion in 2024, but Germany, Italy and the UK reduced their contributions by a collective €430 million.
“We have to continually innovate and make things more creative, less expensive, but more innovative,” said Mundell, who explained that the ESA must design to cost. While there is room for creativity in day to day problem-solving, the process guides the action taken. “We have a whole quality assurance system where we set our objectives and we say ‘what will we do?’ ‘What did we say we’d do?’ ‘Did we do what we said?’”
Enduring purpose
The ESA was founded to enable European nations to explore the cosmos and further the continent’s knowledge and understanding. It’s an enduring purpose that continues to appeal. On 1 January this year, Slovenia became the 23rd member state, with several others still in the queue to join.
“Our missions are lifetime generational missions,” said Mundell. “You’ll see that people will give a significant fraction of their lifetime to develop, design and fly these missions, and ultimately protect them, to deliver science back to society. Children in school today will use data from our missions.”
She explained that once every three years there is a council meeting of ESA members at a ministerial level to decide the agency’s budget for the next three-year cycle. She shared an image from the 2022 meeting in Paris. It was taken just before she joined:
The official portrait of ministers at the 2022 ESA Council Meeting at Ministerial Level. (Photo: Stephane Corvaja / European Space Agency)
“This is a photograph of inspiration,” she said. “These ministers come from all different political backgrounds, they were facing various different challenges at this time. There was cost of living crisis and obviously the war in Ukraine was pushing all sorts of problems across these member states, and yet they all came together and they agreed that space is important.”
Hear more from Carole Mundell
