ABOUT

Hi, thanks for stopping by, I’m Cara Bleiman!

I’m a Primary Chinese teacher who loves cooking and cycling long distances very slowly. I have two children and live in South East London.

Check out my writing here and feel free to get in touch.

The longer bio:

I’ve worked in inner-city London schools for the past 10 years and now work as Primary Mandarin Project Consultant for the Swire Chinese Language Centre at The Harris Federation where I’m responsible for the teaching and learning of Chinese to over 3000 primary pupils. I was awarded the IoE Confucius Institute’s ‘Excellence Award’ in 2019 and a Harris Federation ‘Transforming Lives Award’ in 2018. I’ve previously worked as a Year 6 Intervention teacher, EYFS/KS1 English Co-ordinator, MFL Co-ordinator, TA and live-in tutor.

I graduated from Oxford University with a BA in Music in 2009, where I was awarded a Leask Scholarship and the Scottish Wagner Society’s Bayreuth Scholarship. I then continued my studies at Oxford with an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology before completing a certificate in Modern Chinese at SOAS. Before becoming a teacher, I spent a further year learning Mandarin in Taiwan on a Taiwanese Ministry of Education ‘language enrichment’ scholarship. 

I’ve been involved in organising numerous events and discussions around education, music and politics. This has included producing, chairing and speaking at events with ResearchEd, The Wellington Festival of Education, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Education, The UK Publisher’s Association, Academy of Ideas Education Forum, The Battle of Ideas, Barbican 'Sound Unbound' Festival, Association for Language Learning, UCL Institute of Education Confucius Institute and Teach First Policy Network. I’ve also acted as a judge for the Bett Awards and the British Educational Supplier’s Association Resource Awards.