About Me

I was eighteen when I first worked with children. I'd travelled to Malawi and found myself standing in front of a classroom, tasked with teaching sex education through a language barrier. I got through it with questionable drawings and the help of their teacher, who found the whole thing hilarious.

I didn't know it then, but that moment had everything in it. Being out of your depth. Staying present anyway. Leaning on someone who knew the children better than you did. Finding a way through together.

I've been working with children ever since.

When I came home, I volunteered in a primary school. They offered me a teaching assistant position, and I stayed for a couple of years before moving to a specialist school for children with social, emotional and mental health needs. From there I moved into mainstream primary, where I stayed for six years, working my way from teaching assistant to higher level teaching assistant.

I was regularly on residential school trips, often the only male member of support staff. I noticed something on those trips. Something about being with children outside the structure of a classroom. The relationships felt different. More honest, somehow. I wanted more of that.

So I moved into my first residential setting: a weekly residential special school for boys with complex social, emotional and mental health needs.

Two years later I moved to a children's home company. And then I opened my own.

I'd seen good practice. I'd seen genuine care. But I kept coming back to the same feeling: that children in care were missing something vital. Not better systems or stronger policies. Love. I wanted to create a home where children felt loved. Not cared for by people being paid to care. Actually loved.

That home is where I still work, every day. It's small, Ofsted-regulated, and built on the belief that relationship is the intervention. We hold an Outstanding rating under leadership and management. More importantly, the children who live there know they matter.

I'm thirty-four. I've spent sixteen years working with children across mainstream schools, specialist schools, and residential care. I've been a classroom assistant, a midday supervisor, a higher level teaching assistant, a support worker, senior support worker and a registered manager. I've supported children through trauma, crisis, and the slow, quiet work of building trust with an adult for the first time.

That experience is what this book comes from.

Being The Adult They Need isn't about systems or strategies. It's about the question underneath all of it: who are we being, in the room, with the child in front of us? It's written for teachers, residential workers, foster carers, social workers, and anyone else who has walked away from a hard moment with a child and wondered whether they handled it as well as they could have.

I'm not writing as someone who has it figured out. I'm writing as someone who is still in it, still getting things wrong, still coming back to the same question.

That feels like the most honest place to write from.