No seventeen-year-old should have to give up education because the adults and systems around them fail to provide what they are meant to provide. Work can build character. Work can teach discipline. Work can even rescue you when everything else falls apart. But there is a big difference between choosing work and being pushed into it because the money is not there. In my previous post, I spoke about having to leave education and start working at McDonalds. That did not last lo

Dropping out of college at 16 can look like failure from the outside. In my case, it was not rebellion, laziness, or a lack of ambition. It was what happens when a young person runs out of options before they have even had a proper chance to start. That is the part people often miss. When someone leaves education early, the easy story is that they did not try hard enough. They made bad choices. They threw away an opportunity. But in 2007, my life did not feel like a list of c

I haven’t posted in a few weeks because life got hectic with work, and I took a little holiday to clear my head. But before I dive into why the school I attended in Fareham was the worst experience of my life, I want to share something more personal. It’s about my home life, the house where I grew up, and how the cracks in my dad’s behavior started to show. It’s about how my siblings and I began to see what he was doing behind closed doors—his secret activities that my mum ne