20 Years Ago, I Had an Idea: Why I Started Enjoy Education and What Still Matters Today
Twenty years ago, Enjoy Education began with a very simple belief: every child deserves to feel seen.
That belief was personal long before it became professional.
When I was doing my A levels, I had ten sessions of English tuition with a tutor called Nick. Ten sessions. It doesn’t sound like much, but they changed something for me.
At the time, I had already had a fairly turbulent few years. I’d had glandular fever during my lower sixth and my education hadn’t always been straightforward. Nick gave me a confidence in English that I simply hadn’t found at school. He saw what I was capable of and helped me see it too.
In many ways, he gave me the wings to fly.
We are still in touch today and I still turn to him for advice and guidance. That probably says everything about how great one-to-one support can be. It isn’t just about getting through an exam or improving a grade. The right person can give you confidence and skills which stay with you for years afterwards.
I have thought about that experience so many times over the past 20 years.
Schools can be brilliant places filled with extraordinary teachers. But sometimes, for all sorts of reasons, a child doesn’t feel seen. Sometimes it takes one person sitting alongside them, understanding how they think and showing them what they can do.
I believe every child has the right to experience that.
The power of one-to-one support
My own education continued to be anything but straightforward. Between the ages of 16 and 24, I had a series of significant health challenges. After glandular fever came a serious heart virus while I was at Oxford, and later two spinal accidents.
When I became ill at Oxford, I genuinely thought I would be back within a week. I remember emailing my tutor saying as much.
Instead of making me feel as though I was falling behind or failing, she was incredibly understanding. She helped me take a year out and supported me in coming back when I was ready.
Again, it was somebody looking at the person, not simply the academic outcome.
Those experiences shaped how I came to think about education. Of course, academic results matter but education is about so much more than attainment. It is also about confidence, resilience and having the skills to keep going when life doesn’t follow the path you expected.
I didn’t know then that any of this would eventually shape a business. I just knew how much difference the right support, at the right moment, could make.
Tutoring happened almost by accident
After university, the spinal accidents meant a conventional job wasn’t really an option. I couldn’t sit down properly and there was a lot of rehabilitation.
So, I started tutoring. One of my early jobs took me to Mustique, where I lived with a family and quickly found myself taking on something closer to a big-sister role. There was the academic work, of course, but there was everything around it too. In London, helping students after school. Listening. Encouraging. Creating a safe place.
I loved being useful. I loved the closeness of working with a young person and their family, and the fact that education could become something deeply personal rather than transactional.
Around the same time, I tutored a boy at home who had been through an incredibly difficult period after not getting into Westminster Under School. His confidence had unravelled and he had become agoraphobic. I remember wondering: how had it come to this? It wasn’t simply a question of tutoring him harder. The bigger question was whether the right educational decisions had been made for him in the first place.
Those experiences really stayed with me.
I realised there were two things I wanted to help families do: make excellent decisions about education and help young people become the very best version of themselves.
That was the beginning of Enjoy.
