About

I wasn't a particularly good student at school. At least not in the ways school usually measures those things. But somewhere during those years, while I was still sitting in classrooms as a student, I became curious about the profession itself. About what teachers were trying to do. About how schools worked. About why some learning experiences stayed with you and others disappeared the moment the bell rang.

That curiosity never really left.

I've now spent most of my adult life working in schools, first as a teacher and then in leadership roles. Along the way I've become fascinated by what makes schools tick. The systems behind them. The culture that shapes them. The leadership that helps them flourish, and sometimes holds them back.

In recent years I've found myself thinking more and more about leadership in schools. What makes a great leader? Why do some people feel called to lead in education? And what will the future of schooling require from those who lead it?

The classroom is still my favourite place to be. It's where the real work happens.

After 2025's personal challenge of knocking over another degree, 2026 is about something different. Write some more. Reflect. Share. This site is the place where I think out loud about those questions.

I should be upfront about how this site gets made. I use AI as a thinking partner. Happily and openly. A quick anecdote from a lesson, a half-formed thought about leadership, something that happened on a school trip. I store it away, then sit down with my learner's apprentice and work it into something more articulate through conversation and back-and-forth. The AI helps me edit, structure, and build. It built this website. But the thinking is mine. The experiences are mine. Anything worthwhile on this site started as a real idea in a real school. The flawed ideas are also mine.

Who has time to do all of the editing manually? What I care about is whether the ideas are worth sharing and whether the writing is honest. If AI helps me get from a rough thought to something that might be useful to another educator, that seems like exactly the kind of partnership I keep writing about.

I also write about books by people who have made me think, reconsider ideas I once held tightly, laugh, and sometimes even feel a bit emotional about the work of education. Many of them are the giants whose shoulders educators stand on.

I'm not trying to present myself as someone with all the answers. Mostly I'm just someone who loves schools, loves learning, and enjoys exploring the ideas that shape both.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn.