I grew up in the North-East of England in a small town called Middlesbrough. A place often described as ‘the worst place to live in the UK’. When described in numbers: the statistics show high unemployment, low life expectancy, rising crime rates, and was shaped by the horrendous heroin epidemic of the 1990s.

That’s the world I inherited. This narrative shaped my identity and framing of the world I grew up in.
A world where I was acutely aware that worth was measured in productivity,
where failure to perform meant exclusion,
where poverty wasn’t an accident — it was the system working as designed.

But at 13, I glimpsed another world.
Standing at my bedroom window one summer morning in 1988,
I saw something different:
books, stories, futures not yet written.
I realised that education could be more than escape.
It could be a tool for rewriting the script.

The old world told me I should fail.
The new world whispered that I could create.

The old world of education drilled facts in,
measured, ranked, sorted.
The new world of education — the one I’ve dedicated my life to — draws out.
It listens.
It affirms.
It liberates.

For two decades I’ve taught in universities and youth justice systems,
in community halls and public forums.
Everywhere, I’ve seen the cracks in the old circuitry.
Metrics and league tables can’t capture human potential.
Assessments can’t measure dignity.

So I began to rewire.
I built a pedagogy of liberation.
A way of teaching that co-creates spaces where people can reconnect with their power,
rewrite their stories,
reimagine their futures.

And this vision has become Switchboard Studio.

The old world treats knowledge as capital — hoarded, extracted, controlled.
The new world treats knowledge as energy — flowing, connecting, alive.

Through Switchboard we publish books by people with lived experience.
We amplify community evidence that policymakers cannot ignore.
We design training that equips people not just to participate in research,
but to produce it, own it, and use it to transform.

The old world loops power in closed circuits.
The new world builds open ones — generative, just, alive.

As Marcus Garvey said,
“The vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realised the light of their own freedom.”

That vision has been my compass since I was 13.
It carried me from a council house in Middlesbrough to the work I do today.
And it continues to guide me,
as I help others step out of the old world,
and into the new.