With huge numbers of children persistently absent from school, our challenge is to ensure they experience education as ‘magnetic’ rather than a ‘bore’. Why? Because what goes first is a child’s engagement, then their attainment & lastly, as a result, their attendance!

You can’t build a successful education system around shame, embarrassment, detention & exclusion. You can’t create inclusion for all via a curriculum that only works for some. So as the saying goes “If the child doesn’t learn the way you teach, start teaching the way they learn.”

After two 13 year old boys are jailed for murdering a 19-year-old with a machete, how many more will die before we realise that even focussing on 'how to halve knife crime?' is, in itself, the wrong starting point! Instead we must ask how we create hope for disenfranchised kids!