Rotary Club and Oxford Brookes
November 4, 2025
 It's been a long time I hope this newsletter reaches you all in good health, good spirits and with no exclusion! Since we last spoke, I had the pleasure to speak at Berkhamsted Rotary Club. Fun fact, their founder, Paul Harris, was also permanently excluded from school! What a wonderful testament to what people can achieve despite being written off by school. They were incredibly hospitable to both me and my wife and it was very profound to be told afterwards that I had made a very successful gentleman with an MBE consider his own exclusion from school and what might have contribute to it. I think as it is around a year on from my appearance on Life Changing, one of the most important things I have learned is just how widely the experience of exclusion affects people. Sometimes, very small details in my story will speak to people whom I would have never expected it to. It has been immensely healing for me to witness my story giving others so much. Which is why I have been enjoying writing much of it up in the form of a memoir. I imagine news around that will likely feature in the next update as I feel that may be the best way for me to reach the widest audience possible to make an impact and ultimately, change minds.As I reflect on the last year, I must make an admission. The last few months have been difficult for me. I have spoken at some interesting events and genuinely, I believe, made an impact. From the Social Workers Conference at Wiltshire Council where I also ran a series of workshops. To future primary school teachers at Oxford Brookes and Primary School Teachers in Lancashire, where I focussed on the topic of ‘Tigger in the Classroom’ and approaches to children with ADHD. This alongside sporadic mentoring and advisory roles has left me with a feeling that I may have hit a ceiling with my advocacy efforts. Working on my own has felt more lonely than I ever imagined, even with a faithful spaniel by my side ready to play fetch whilst I sit at my desk or sleep on my left foot. I have often felt excluded from certain areas I would like to be involved in and wonder if, once again, it is due to my lack of decades experience in education. What I lack in decades of experience, I certainly have in decades of heart, a heart that is feeling bruised. This means I have returned to the job market, a little lost and full of doubt. I recently had a job interview, a second and final round interview for a role helping young people who were the perpetrators and victims of violence in my local area. I don’t often say this about myself, well, pretty much never, but I felt it went perfectly. My answers and my suitability genuinely could not have been better and yet, I was sent a generic rejection with none of the personable nature and vulnerability that I had brought to the process. I asked for feedback and the feedback was two lines that simply were not accurate. They said I did not talk about something I remember speaking on for around five mins. This really crushed me. I returned, if but for a while, to that child who did not get student of the week, who’s dad didn’t come to pick him up, who was no longer welcome back to school. It has been a beleaguered and wounded crawl through applications ever since and there is no light, yet, at the end of the tunnel. Despite this, I am working on an exciting project to help a trust lower suspensions and I am looking forward to some more conferences in June. I deeply appreciate you all staying subscribed and I am currently putting together some thoughts on research as well as potentially beginning a research project that looks at the effects of exclusion on peers. This is in response to a question I often face when working with schools. If anybody would like a chat or catch cup or if I can help in any way at all, please do reach out. I always reply, though sometime I end up in spam, which really should not be £3.70 in my view. Tier  |
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