Letter calling for independent and comprehensive review of children’s social care in England Jan 2020…

Essentially, this blog is about my emotional response to the arguments made by the UK Government in the High Court this week (9th Feb 2022), as to why it believes it only has an obligation to actually care for children who are in the care of the state (many having…

I was six years old when I stepped foot in a children’s home for the first time, although I have no recollection of that initial experience. It must have been confusing, but perhaps there would have been relief too — the foster carers my brother and I had moved from…

Over the Christmas period of 2019 I organised a letter to the Secretary of State for Education outlining the need for a genuinely independent and comprehensive review of the care system in England. I was not the first person to call for this, but I hoped it would give people…

Notwithstanding the garish colour scheme, Happy Eater was a slightly dreary chain of roadside restaurants scattered around the A roads of Southern England in the 1980s and early 90s. The kind of place I would probably be too much of a snob to eat at now, unless I really had…

When I was maybe 13, an educational psychologist visited the EBD (emotional and behavioural difficulties) boarding school I attended to assess me. It was not clear to me then, and is not now, what the purpose of this assessment was, what role it was intended to play in my life…