I like to ask questions… Who are you today? What do you need? What’s that, over there, where? Why on earth…? I believe we’re all born curious, that the world is an absolutely fascinating place and that our main job as facilitators of children’s growth & development is to try to see the world through their eyes and to notice and remove any barriers that get in the way of their natural learning process.  
 
As a facilitator at Bamble, I will be drawing on over a decade of experience leading youth work and democratic education projects, designing relational programmes of informal and self-directed learning. From the moment I learned about democratic education, I became an active member of EUDEC, and offered my services as a volunteer and education consultant at approximately 20 schools around mainland Europe (Poland, Germany, Netherlands & Denmark), and as a director of StudentVoice. I’ve been the dean of an international summer school, ORA, and chief executive of the only organisation working to promote democratic education in the UK: Phoenix Education, where Sally and I collaborated to create a network of self-directed learning communities, Freedom to Learn. I edited several books by Dutch pioneer, Bas Rosenbrand, including ‘A New Morning: co-create school with the children’ and ‘Roundspeak: how to have effective meetings’. In June 2023, I stepped down from my roles as head of youth work at local charity, MAP, where I led a team of 30+ professionals working with approximately 1000 young people per year, to involve them in the decisions they are affected by.