Atsuya has been working for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan for over eight years and has worked on teacher workstyle reform, STEAM education, establishing a national research institute for reconstruction, and promoting sports. He holds a BA in Sociology from Kyoto University and is completing an MA in Educational Leadership at UCL. Atsuya's policy interest is to support schools in becoming self-learning and self-improving organisations that can respond to diverse and complex challenges through collaboration among various staff and stakeholders. He seeks to promote leadership and management practices that enable such collaboration. He is also interested in redefining the roles of central and local governments, schools, and nonprofit actors, and in exploring bottom-up policy design, flexible yet effective governance, and ways to address tensions between national demands and individual self-fulfilment, or between long-term goals and short-term pressures. Atsuya is a Japanese Government Long-Term Fellowship scholar.