About

My lifetime’s work has involved finding ways of helping individuals to succeed using a variety of human scale approaches. I have taught early years in mainstream education, and my own nursery; worked with primary and secondary pupils in a non-fee paying alternative small school; was the education coordinator at a residential children’s home; a nurture group teacher; parenting coordinator of the Youth Offending Service; and an Elective Home Education Advisor. Additionally, I have had the enlightening experience of home educating my own two children.

I have been a member of the national charity Human Scale Education since 1992. In order to spread the word about alternative approaches to mainstream education, I visited all the small schools affiliated to HSE in 1997 over a ten-week period. This not only launched my writing career (having over twenty feature articles published including Nursery World, Natural Parent Magazine, Yorkshire Post, The New Writer and The Green Parent), it also led to my Masters Degree in Education by Research; and a commission from HSE to write the report 15 Small Schools in 1999.

Both my children have long since left home, and I remarried in 2011. In 2014 my first book Why I Started a Small School was published and I also became a trustee of Human Scale Education that year. I continue to strive tirelessly to promote kinder ways of educating young people so that they can live a meaningful life with a healthy self-esteem and valuable inter-personal relationships, as well as working towards a sustainable future in the midst of the climate challenges ahead.

In 2021, my husband and I bought, and painstakingly renovated, a 300-year-old farmhouse in Cumbria just outside the Lake District National Park, where we now run a Writers’ Retreat. In addition to spending much of my time writing and running the retreat, I enjoy spending time with family, taking photographs, walking, playing classical guitar, and swimming.