My day starts with a quick rattle through my inbox before sitting down with Jess (Franklin Scholars CEO) to catch each other up – on a new partnership she’s developing with a group in west London, on the visits to schools I’ve been doing the last few weeks, on the logistics of our upcoming Awards Ceremony, on how we continue to think about measuring skills from our ABCD Shield. It starts as quick bullets, before becoming a more in-depth discussion on how we need to approach some of the weightier challenges. Meaty.

I remember where this whole thing started - sat in a small coffee shop in East London. Officially, Jess and I were both scouting each other out; gauging if I would be a good fit for the job that was being advertised. What it became was an enveloping discussion involving our conviction that students had a unique power to support others in their school, that the development of social emotional skills is all-important, and that by creating a network of skilled and engaged Franklin Scholars we could produce … well, endless beneficial outcomes. I told Jess at the end of that meeting that I would most definitely be applying.

That’s what I love about my job; that I get to work with someone that I share a vision with and get to work, on a daily basis, to make it happen.

In the afternoon, I’m off to one of our partner schools to run a booster training session with our Y10 Franklin Scholars. Today we’re breaking down and planning out long-term goals to make them a little less daunting. It’s introducing tools that the older students can use with their younger mentees, but it inevitably is also training for how they could use them themselves. As a worked example, one of the Franklin Scholars starts to tackle world peace!

I put myself in a café and open up my laptop. I spend the rest of the afternoon handling emails to and from our teachers and senior leaders, creating the slide deck for the workshop I’m doing later in the week, phoning potential venues for the awards ceremony, evaluating an event we hosted in Bolton the previous week.

Sometimes my day will end with an event, where you get to share a free drink with people doing related things – there are a lot of passionate people out there. But today I’m winding down with a home cooked dinner and catch-up TV before starting a different day tomorrow.