Blog
Insights, tips, thoughts, and otherwise to make you pause, reflect, question, and take action yourself.
Building Confident Young People
Building Confident Young People - Why Early Support Matters Confidence is often treated as something that comes with age. We tell ourselves young people will grow out of any anxieties or worries they have as a child and as they hit adulthood, wham,...
‘I don’t want to be here’
'I don’t want to be here'. It’s something I occasionally hear from a child at the beginning of a confidence coaching session. Sometimes it’s said quietly, with eyes fixed on the floor, sometimes it’s defensive, and sometimes it’s wrapped in humour,...
Youth Clubs – Nostalgia or a Lifeline?
Can a youth club revival help the ‘anxious generation’? – podcast | Young people | The GuardianAs I sat in the dark by a smouldering fire before heading to bed, one of the youth work forums I'm part of shared a link to an article in The Guardian...
Finding Warmth in the Cold
It was a bitterly cold winter’s day. The first Monday of January 2026. My role as Front of House Manager with Creation Theatre had come to an end the day before and it was time to reopen the practice room and welcome in my first coaching client of...
When the show must go on
Sitting on a cold staircase alone, in silence, I had got through half a packet of pink wafer biscuits in ten minutes. Then an arm wrapped around me. It was my wife. Well, the wonderful lady playing my wife on the stage about ten metres away. 'Time...
I have a question but you can’t answer it.
Does leave me with a bit of a predicament now so I’ll keep talking to the wall and wish I hadn’t prepared for this moment. Hopefully you’ll still be listening by the end. Seems weird right, but this is potentially the way things could go if the...
Big Ofsted Changes Are Coming And Here’s Why It Matters
Back when I worked firmly IN both primary and secondary education (not on the edges as I do with coaching), as well as for the local authority, the word Ofsted could send the whole building into a spin. It was not uncommon in some places to see...
In Their Own Words: The Transformational Power of Coaching for Children
Today, I want to share something special. Most of the feedback I receive as a coach comes from parents, educators, or other adults, and it’s always valuable, of course, but now and then, a young person says something that stops you in your tracks....
Lessons from the Trenches
I stumbled on an old notebook that acted as a professional reflective journal when I was Charity Manager of a small youth charity. For the first ten weeks I wrote and reflected every single day about the experience. Before I confined the writing to...
‘Must like children’
When I started the youth-work-specific elements of my degree - the parts that focused on the teen years, there was a great anecdote found in one of the books (Harrison and Wise, 2005), telling of a mother who visits the local youth centre which her...