Rethinking how
young people grow.

It used to be absorbed rather than taught. Unsupervised time, mixed-age groups, small conflicts settled without an adult stepping in. Most of that has gone, for reasons that are largely good ones, and very little has replaced it.

I spent eight years teaching, most of it building and leading personal and social education in a secondary school. The same gap kept appearing in capable young people who could not handle setback, and no part of their week was designed to teach them how.

The cost is highest where a young person is asked to build their whole identity around one thing. Elite sport, high-pressure schools, any environment where being good at something becomes the reason you matter. When that one thing is taken away, and eventually it is for almost all of them, there is nothing underneath it. The competence to handle that has to be built long before the moment arrives.

The work goes into the environments where young people are most exposed, rather than sitting beside them as something optional. It is built to develop competence that holds when things go wrong, not only while things are going well.

The aim is a young person who can handle setback, whose sense of themselves does not rest on a single outcome, and who is better able to learn because of it.