Why experience must be examined before it can guide others

Leadership is often described as distance travelled: the difficult beginning, the decisive turning point, the eventual arrival. My own story resists that neatness. I was born and raised in Newtown, Birmingham, in a community officially described through deprivation but remembered by me through love, visibility and collective care. I moved from a multicultural primary school, where teachers recognised possibility in me, to a grammar school, where I became increasingly conscious of class, race and difference. I later built Bouncing Statistics, worked with thousands of young people and entered doctoral study. Yet leadership did not begin when I founded an organisation or entered a university research room. It began in the tension between what institutions measured and what they failed to see.

That distinction matters. Lived experience can provide insight, urgency and trust, but experience does not automatically produce wise leadership. Pain is not a qualification on its own. Memory can sharpen perception, but it can also narrow it. A leader who has survived a system may understand its violence and still misunderstand people whose survival looks different. The movement from lived experience to leadership therefore requires reflection: the willingness to examine how we were shaped, what power we now hold and whether our response changes the conditions or merely helps a few people endure them.

My education taught me this in stages. At primary school I experienced what bell hooks calls engaged pedagogy: teaching in which care and intellectual challenge are not opposites. I was encouraged to speak, lead and imagine. The adults around me did not treat my Black Caribbean identity or my working-class community as problems to overcome. I was seen. Achievement followed, not because care replaced standards, but because care created the conditions in which standards could be met.

At grammar school, the institutional message changed. I had gained formal access, but access was not the same as belonging. The curriculum, language and expectations reflected forms of cultural capital that felt distant from my life. I moved between two worlds: one at home, where community knowledge and resilience made sense, and one at school, where different behaviours and references carried status. My grades fell. My behaviour became more visible than my potential. Leadership, as I understand it now, begins with noticing this gap between admission and recognition.

When potential appears as a problem

One experience from school has stayed with me because it captures how institutions misread ability. I sold sweets and chocolates to other pupils and made meaningful money. My mother supported me by taking me to a wholesaler to replenish stock. The school saw a rule being broken. I now see a young person displaying initiative, arithmetic, inventory management, customer knowledge and an instinct for enterprise while also responding to financial pressure at home.

The point is not that rules should disappear or that every act of enterprise in school should be permitted. It is that discipline ended the conversation. Nobody asked what the behaviour revealed, why earning money mattered to me or how that energy might be channelled. The institution had literacy for compliance but not for context. It could identify the breach and miss the capability.

This pattern extends far beyond my story. Young people communicate through behaviour before they possess the language or safety to explain themselves. Withdrawal can be read as laziness; vigilance as aggression; entrepreneurial improvisation as defiance. A leadership response asks what happened and what is needed without removing responsibility. It holds boundaries while remaining curious. That is not softness. It is a more demanding form of judgement.

Context also changes what choice means. I remember bailiffs at the door and acting as though nobody was home. I understood that money was absent before I understood the systems producing that absence. Around me, street life and crime offered visible routes to status and income. I tried to find routes that remained within my moral boundaries. To look back only at isolated choices would be to remove the economic and social pressures that made some choices appear rational.

This is where lived experience can improve leadership. It can make a leader slower to label and quicker to investigate. It can reveal that the same behaviour carries different meanings in different lives. But it must be disciplined by evidence and by listening to others. My history helps me recognise patterns; it does not entitle me to assume that every young person is another version of me.

Leadership as translation

People who move between communities and institutions often become translators. We learn the language of policy, funding, inspection and attainment while retaining knowledge of how those systems feel at street level. Translation can create access: it helps schools understand families, helps families navigate schools and helps young people see possibilities that institutional language has obscured.

But translation is never neutral. The translator decides what to carry across, what to simplify and whose meaning receives priority. A community leader can become valuable to institutions precisely because they make difficult realities easier to consume. There is a danger of becoming a buffer: absorbing frustration, making the system appear responsive and returning young people to conditions that remain unchanged.

This tension sits inside my work with Bouncing Statistics. The organisation developed as a response to educational failure, not simply as a commercial opportunity. Its work has included mentoring, teacher training, parent support and alternative provision. Our Inclusion Hub seeks to give young people a route back into mainstream education rather than allowing exclusion to become destiny. We have worked with schools, the NHS and West Midlands Police, and at one stage employed 25 people while providing one-to-one support to more than 300 pupils.

Yet the market that enables this work is also part of the problem. Schools purchase external support within a system shaped by marketisation, inspection pressure and constrained resources. A provider can be commissioned to reduce exclusions or protect performance indicators without the institution changing the practices that repeatedly produce exclusion. As a business owner, I can benefit from demand created by systemic failure. As a practitioner, I want that failure to end. Responsible leadership requires me to hold that contradiction in view rather than turning a social problem into a success story about entrepreneurship.

The insider-outsider responsibility

My position today is neither fully inside nor fully outside the communities and institutions I work across. I am an insider because I was the Black Caribbean boy who felt misunderstood, experienced surveillance and navigated the pull between education and survival. I am an outsider because I now hold institutional access, employ people, commission work and study at doctoral level. These positions do not cancel each other; they create a responsibility to practise reflexivity.

Reflexivity is more than self-awareness. It is a continuous examination of how power, identity, interest and emotion influence judgement. In research, it requires us to disclose how our position affects the questions we ask and the interpretations we make. In leadership, it asks whose experience is being centred, who benefits from a decision and whether our authority is preventing people from challenging us.

The risk for any leader with a compelling personal story is that the story becomes organisational evidence. “I experienced this” turns into “I know what people need.” That leap is unsafe. Communities are not homogeneous. Black Caribbean pupils differ by gender, disability, family history, faith, neighbourhood and countless other factors. Lived experience should create better questions, not automatic answers.

It should also create accountability. I do not want to extract stories from young people to build institutional credibility while leaving them unchanged. Participation must have a clear purpose, appropriate support and visible influence. People should know what will happen to what they share. Where possible, they should help interpret findings and shape action. Otherwise, “giving voice” becomes another way for organisations to take.

From representation to redistribution

Representation matters. When a young person sees somebody from a familiar background teaching, researching or leading, possibility becomes less abstract. My primary-school experience showed what cultural recognition can make possible; later experiences showed how isolating its absence can be. But representation without power is fragile.

Leadership must ask who controls budgets, rules, information and time. A representative figure who cannot change exclusion practice, curriculum decisions or resource allocation may provide inspiration while the structure remains intact. The objective is not simply to place different people in existing seats. It is to examine what those seats permit and what the institution rewards.

This is especially important in education, where performance measures can narrow what counts as success. Schools operate under legitimate pressure to secure attainment, safety and accountability. But when a young person’s value is reduced to data that affects inspection outcomes, care can become conditional. Preventative work is harder to fund than crisis response because its success is an event that does not happen. A pupil who remains engaged, avoids exclusion or rebuilds trust may not create an immediate headline metric, even though the long-term value is substantial.

Leaders can resist this by broadening their evidence. Attendance, attainment and behaviour data matter, but so do pupil experience, family trust, belonging, progression and the distribution of opportunity. Quantitative and qualitative evidence should challenge each other. A positive average should not silence accounts of harm; a powerful testimony should not be assumed to describe every pupil.

Care with standards

The leadership I inherited from my earliest classroom did not choose between love and excellence. My teachers surrounded me with care and expected me to achieve. That combination has become central to my practice. Care without expectation can become paternalism: it protects young people from challenge and quietly lowers the horizon. Expectation without care becomes extraction: it demands performance without attending to the conditions that make performance possible.

High standards are credible when institutions apply them consistently and provide the resources needed to reach them. This may require culturally responsive teaching, trusted adult relationships, clear routines, academic support and meaningful routes back after failure. It also requires honesty about racism, poverty and exclusion. Context should not become an excuse that freezes a young person in disadvantage, but neither should aspiration become a slogan used to deny context.

The same principle applies to staff. Leaders who speak about purpose while normalising exhaustion will eventually reproduce harm. Community-facing work is emotionally demanding, and workers who share participants’ experiences may carry additional burdens. Supervision, professional development, fair pay and boundaries are not administrative extras. They are part of ethical delivery.

Evidence, theory and action

Entering doctoral study was not a departure from practice; it was an attempt to understand it more rigorously. Theory gave language to experiences that once felt private. Bourdieu’s account of habitus and capital helped explain why formal access to a grammar school did not guarantee cultural ease. Yosso’s community cultural wealth challenged deficit accounts by naming the aspirational, familial, social, linguistic, navigational and resistant assets held within communities of colour. Freire’s idea of praxis connected reflection with action.

Theory matters when it expands what we can perceive. It becomes dangerous when leaders use it to speak over people or turn communities into illustrations. Evidence should not sterilise experience, and experience should not be protected from testing. The strongest leadership holds both: statistical patterns show scale and distribution; lived accounts reveal mechanisms, meaning and consequences.

This discipline changes programme design. Before launching an intervention, leaders should state the problem, identify who experiences it, describe how the intervention is expected to work and make assumptions explicit. During delivery, they should examine implementation and unintended consequences. Afterwards, they should ask what changed, for whom and at what cost. These are not merely academic questions. They protect public and charitable resources and reduce the likelihood that conviction is mistaken for impact.

Leadership that makes itself less necessary

There is a seductive version of community leadership in which the leader becomes indispensable: the person with the story, relationships and answers. That model is vulnerable and ultimately limiting. Leadership should build capability beyond the founder. It should create routes through which staff, families and young people exercise judgement, challenge decisions and become leaders themselves.

For Bouncing Statistics, this means not only delivering interventions but transferring knowledge, strengthening school practice and creating structures that survive a contract. It means being prepared to say when commissioning treats symptoms rather than causes. It means recognising when growth would increase revenue but compromise purpose. Sometimes leadership is visible expansion; sometimes it is refusing work that would use young people as evidence of activity without serving their interests.

My journey from Newtown to doctoral study is not proof that the system works. Too many people with equal or greater potential meet barriers without the relationships, timing or second chances that supported me. Nor is it a story of individual escape. I remain accountable to the community that formed me, including the “othermothers”, teachers, friends and young people whose knowledge continues to shape my work.

Lived experience becomes leadership when it is converted into responsibility rather than authority. It asks us to remember without romanticising, analyse without detaching and act without assuming ownership of other people’s futures. It requires the confidence to enter institutions and the humility to remain answerable to those outside them.

I once understood education largely through what it demanded of me. I now understand leadership through what institutions must be prepared to change. The task is not to help young people become more acceptable to systems that misrecognise them. It is to build systems capable of recognising their humanity, knowledge and potential from the beginning. That is the movement from survival to scholarship, and from lived experience to leadership.

References

Ball, S. J. (2012), Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neo-liberal Imaginary. Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Corbin Dwyer, S. and Buckle, J. L. (2009), “The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research”, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 54-63.

Freire, P. (2017), Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Classics.

Gillborn, D. (2024), White Lies: Racism, Education and Critical Race Theory. Routledge.

hooks, b. (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.

Yosso, T. J. (2005), “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth”, Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91.