Sean Stevens founded Immerse Education in 2012 while studying at Christ Church, University of Oxford, where he graduated with a First-Class BA in Geography. The company began as a single programme in Cambridge, designed to give ambitious secondary school students a genuine experience of undergraduate-level study. Over the following fourteen years, he built it into a global operation serving students from more than 125 countries, with over 20,000 alumni and programmes running across ten international university campuses including Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, New York, Tokyo, and Singapore. In 2026, Immerse Education was acquired by Lumiere Education Group.

Geography at Oxford is the study of complex systems: how populations move, how institutions shape behaviour, and how decisions made at scale play out at the level of the individual. That analytical framework, applied to education, shaped how Sean understood the market he was entering and the programmes he built within it. His views on what constitutes genuine academic rigour are grounded in fourteen years of operational experience rather than theory.

Sean is recognised as an authority on the academic enrichment sector for secondary school students aged 14 to 18, with particular expertise in programme quality evaluation, the design of pre-university academic experiences, and the competitive admissions landscape at leading UK and international universities. His own route into Oxford informs much of that thinking. The gap between students who succeed at the highest levels and those who fall short is rarely about raw intelligence. It is about intellectual preparation, the capacity to engage with ideas beyond the syllabus, and a clear understanding of what institutions are actually selecting for.

As a Forbes Business Council contributor and a member of the International Schools Network, Sean writes on education trends, experiential learning, and the relationship between academic ambition and long-term preparation. His work at Succeed focuses on identifying formative academic experiences: the programmes that do not merely strengthen a university application but genuinely alter how a student thinks about their subject, their capabilities, and the direction of their future study and career.