After reading Law at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Nash became a barrister before moving into finance. Nash was Assistant Director of Lazard Brothers and Co Ltd before moving to private equity firmAdvent Limited, becoming its managing director in 1986. He was co-founder of private equity firm Sovereign Capital, as well as being chair of the British Venture Capital Association from 1988 to 1989. He is also the former chairman of one of the biggest contractors to the NHS, Care UK. In January 2013 Nash left Sovereign Capital to pursue his political interests.
Political career
In January 2013 Lord Nash was appointed as schools minister. He became a life peer as Baron Nash, of Ewelme in the County of Oxfordshire on 21 January 2013. He and his wife have donated almost £300,000 to the Conservative Party and according to the Telegraph, the appointment raises concern about a potential conflict of interest and appointment of donors though the Department for Education said he would not make business decisions whilst in office. In April, Labour councillors called for an inquiry after the new Pimlico primary school where Nash was co-chairman of the governors appointed an unqualified teacher as headmistress ahead of its opening in September. Further criticism followed when she resigned after four weeks in the job. In March 2014, the Conservative minister rejected the council bid for Holborn and St Pancras building a post-comprehensive school, called a "university training school", but promised only to build them in Cambridge and Birmingham. In October 2016, following a backlash from schools and parents and the national boycott of the school census expansion, he wrote that newly collected pupils’ nationality and country of birth data would not be included in the National Pupil Database. In a letter to peers seen by Schools Week, Nash defended the sharing of pupil address and school data with the Home Office, but admitted the new information called for a different approach, saying, "given the sensitivity of the new information being collected we will not add this to the NPD, so no-one outside the department will be able to access it." Members of the House of Lords went on to oppose the in a debate and motion-of-regret, which was tabled by the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Lord Storey. On 31 October 2016 the House of Lords agreed after debate, with the regret motion on the expansion of the collection of pupil data: “That this House regrets that information about pupils’ nationality and country of birth collected under the Education Regulations 2016 could be used to help determine a child’s immigration status.” Lord Nash resigned from government on 28 September 2017 and was replaced by Sir Theodore Agnew DL as an unpaid Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education.
