Helen Clarke is the co-founder of the Oxbridge Foundation educational trust, which supports Ukrainian students and teenagers whose studies have been disrupted by the full-scale war. Born in Zolotonosha, Cherkasy region, she now lives and works in Oxford. In an interview with Armia FM, Helen Clarke spoke about educational bootcamps for Ukrainian youth, collaboration with British universities and researchers, opportunities for advancing Ukrainian technologies, and the role of culture and Ukrainians in Britain as cultural ambassadors for Ukraine.

Ukraine's infrastructure has been a live target for years — ports, power stations, logistics hubs, all of it. That's not a footnote to the war; for the sectors now scrambling to protect Britain's ports and grids, it's the single most valuable thing Ukraine has to offer. Nobody builds that kind of operational knowledge in a lab.

Britain, for its part, has what Ukraine has had far less time and capacity to build during wartime: a world-leading research base, serious capital, and industrial infrastructure that can take a working idea and scale it fast.

Every new security relationship has a moment when the standards haven't been set yet, when the people in the room are still deciding what “good” looks like rather than adopting it from somewhere else. For UK-Ukraine infrastructure cooperation, that moment is now — not in three years, once the frameworks have already been written by someone else.

An interview with Helen Clarke, Vice Principal, Cherwell College Oxford

Oxford long ago ceased to be simply a university city. It is now one of the UK's key centres of innovation, developing within the Oxford–Cambridge Arc — a corridor where science, technology, entrepreneurship and investment converge. The Oxfordshire Local Industrial Strategy aims to place the county among the world's top three innovation ecosystems by 2040, targeting more than £2.6 billion in private investment from the UK and abroad.

We spoke to Helen Clarke about why Cherwell House deserves consideration not merely as a property asset, but as a building block within an innovation ecosystem connecting education, business and international collaboration.

Artificial Intelligence is transforming education. It enables students to learn faster at their own pace, personalise their learning journey and prepare more effectively for examinations. AI is becoming an essential part of modern education.

However, academic success alone is no longer enough.

The innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders of tomorrow will need skills that cannot be developed by AI alone: creativity, leadership, interdisciplinary collaboration, entrepreneurial thinking and the ability to solve complex real-world problems, actually all essential “human” skills that need to be acquired.

These capabilities emerge not from software, but from experience.

The Cherwell College Innovation Bootcamp has been designed to provide exactly that experience.