Send us Fan Mail

Twenty-four Year 11 boys named themselves the U Gang after their Christmas mocks came back. Ed Kirwan heard them chanting it up three flights of stairs to his lab, and his heart sank.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Ed — a former North London science teacher whose route out of the classroom ran through Uganda, Mexico and central India, and ended in a non-profit that has now reached 1.8 million students.

What followed the U Gang was, in Ed's words, a real exercise in humility: standing in the doorway every day so they could only come in one abreast, keeping the emergency gas cut-off within reach, and working out that no amount of science would land without the human connection first. Every one of them came out without a U — including a boy who sat 0% in chemistry because he was in a police cell on the day of the exam.

Then he left, at twenty-five, without a plan. Eighteen months he calls tasting: a £500 grant spent entirely on a camera, and three and a half months in Nagpur at 40 degrees with no air conditioning, building a leadership programme for a football charity.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What Ed got wrong with the U Gang, as well as right
• The basketball lesson he never asked permission for, and the four-mark GCSE answer his class still remembered afterwards
• The finding he didn't expect: students building empathy for each other, not just for the person on screen
• What's lost when the black man is only ever asked to talk about racism
• The bottle of wine he gave a Muslim colleague at Christmas, and the gap it exposed between kindness and empathy
• Why sympathy and empathy shouldn't sit on the same scale
• The single anonymous question you can put to your staff tomorrow, and what to do with the answers

A working definition of empathy as a skill rather than a feeling — and one thing you can do with it on Monday morning.

A huge thank you to Ed for his time, his honesty, and for a conversation that genuinely changed how I use a word I thought I already understood.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

We hold credentials in how to teach our subjects, and none at all in how to talk to each other. Everyone under eighteen, we were trained for. Everyone over eighteen — the colleague, the line manager, the person we supervise — we were not.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Jennifer Abrams: author of five books, a former high school English teacher who now works with schools across six continents, and someone who calls herself not a consultant but a voice coach.

Her move out of the classroom wasn't planned. A job offer in Kathmandu turned down for a boyfriend, a relationship that ended anyway, and a multiple sclerosis diagnosis that arrived at the same time. What her district offered instead was the chance to build a new-teacher coaching programme with no secondary lead in post. That accident became a career.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Why "voice coach" and not "consultant", and what her own coach warned people would assume
• Growing up in Minnesota where hard conversations simply weren't had — and why she wrote the book because she couldn't do it, not because she could
• The questions she asks before speaking up: is this educationally unsound, does it go against what we said we were, am I the person to say it
• John Lewis's "good trouble, necessary trouble" as a test for whether a conversation is worth the discomfort
• Why "it's above my pay grade" makes her bristle
• What speaking up looks like in Southeast Asia, and why a concern raised sideways and in passing may be the whole conversation
• Mission statements everyone signs and nobody interprets the same way — and the "view from your window" question she uses to surface it
• What success looks like to her now: not a drafted script, but someone still in the room at three o'clock, sitting with their discomfort a little longer
• Why twenty years of teaching entitles nobody to a coaching career

A practical and unusually honest account of the work that has to happen inside you before the conversation can happen at all.

A huge thank you to Jennifer for her time, her candour, and for a conversation that made a strong case for suspending our certainty a little more often than we do.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

It didn't begin in a casino or at a racetrack. It began with fantasy baseball — statistics, sport, friendship, and the desire to belong.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Saul Malek, a former compulsive gambler who has turned his lived experience into work helping schools, parents and young people understand one of the fastest-growing and most overlooked risks they face. What looked completely innocent became sports betting, secrecy, isolation and addiction.

Together, they explore a question many schools are only beginning to confront: if we routinely educate young people about vaping, alcohol, drugs and online safety, why are we still talking so little about gambling?

In this conversation, we cover:

• The moment it crossed a line: Saul told his mother he had stopped, and instead learned how to hide the money and the behaviour from her
• Why the first warning signs may have nothing to do with losing money, and what teachers and parents should actually look for
• The shift from gambling as a social activity to preferring to watch games alone, because other people interfered with the intensity
• Why gambling hides in plain sight in schools while vaping, smoking and alcohol get far more attention
• The uncomfortable reason some schools are reluctant to acknowledge it at all, and what admitting a problem means for reputation and parents
• Why a single assembly isn't enough, and Saul's argument that gambling education is like planting a tree — cultivated consistently over time
• What schools can do now, from mathematics and financial education to phone policies, staff awareness and clearer safeguarding structures

A conversation about a risk that may be far closer to young people than many of us realise.

A huge thank you to Saul for speaking so openly about his own experience, including the parts that are uncomfortable to revisit, and for turning it into work that helps young people recognise the warning signs early.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

Two successful people in Bristol, both quietly unhappy. He in a career that wasn't working, she running companies she loved so much she couldn't get off the treadmill. The childcare was outsourced, the days were long, and neither of them recognised the life they were supposedly building.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Ruth Shipley-Palmer — business owner, property investor, and the accompanying partner whose family relocation to Malaysia took two years to plan. Two years of executing it: selling one company, restructuring another to run entirely online, and telling nobody until the job was signed.

Together, they trace what that took — the loss of control that came with depending on someone else's visa and contract, the guilt of taking the only grandchild away from grandparents whose lives revolved around him, and the strange freedom of arriving somewhere with no title, no induction pack and no built-in staffroom.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Why the move began not with a job advert but with a question: is this really it?
• The two-year planning process behind what looks, from the outside, like a leap
• What it takes to run a UK business from Southeast Asia, and why the time difference turned out to be an advantage
• Working three hours a day between drop-off and pick-up, and refusing to open a laptop after that
• Being dependent on a partner for the visa, the admin and the paperwork, and what that does to someone used to being in control
• Why Ruth enjoys telling people she's the housewife, and what that gets wrong about what she actually does
• The isolation risk for accompanying partners, and the deliberate work of building a life outside the house

A perspective international schools depend on and rarely hear from: the person who rebuilt everything, without a contract to arrive into.

A huge thank you to Ruth for her honesty, and for a conversation that puts the accompanying partner exactly where they belong — at the centre of the story.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

An uncle's blunt question in Carmarthenshire — A levels or work? — sent John Gwyn Jones to a Midland Bank counter. Fifty years later he runs a federation of 110 schools.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with John Gwyn Jones MBE, a proud Welshman whose journey from that bank counter to CEO of FOBISIA has spanned five decades and reshaped British international education across Asia.

What pulled him away from the bank, a job he genuinely enjoyed, was his brother's stories from a Leicester staffroom. Three years of teacher training, a first post in a Welsh primary school, and a career that has since taken in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos and Thailand.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What his brother said that changed his mind about banking
• The contrast between job security in a UK school and the two- and three-year contract cycle of international leadership
• Stepping out of the classroom into a non-teaching deputy headship, and why he pushed to go back
• The hardest year of his career: teaching Year 1 by choice, just to understand how young children learn
• Leading FOBISIA today — nearly 110 schools across 20 countries — and what that vantage point reveals that a single head of school never sees
• How FOBISIA intervenes when member schools hit regulatory walls, from exam boards during COVID to visa restrictions affecting students from Myanmar
• Why diversity among teaching staff still lags far behind diversity among students, and what he says to parents who push back
• The MBE, the leadership award from Julia Gillard, and why neither was ever the point
• His honest advice to his twenty-two-year-old self

A huge thank you to John for his time, his honesty, and for a conversation that — fifty years in — he says he'd do all again.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

Classrooms of sixty to seventy children, one teacher, under a tree. Lea chewed food to feed her infant daughter the way the local mothers did, and raised her children inside a compound behind razor wire.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Lea — a thirty-year international educator whose family has lived and taught across the Chatham Islands, Papua New Guinea and China — for one of the show's most honest conversations yet about what it takes to raise a family overseas.

Together, they trace the moves that shaped that family: leaving a principal's role on the remote Chatham Islands for four years in Papua New Guinea, and then China eight years ago, where her husband stepped back from a senior management career to become a trailing spouse.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What Papua New Guinea reshaped in her, as a parent and as an educator
• Her husband's move from senior management to trailing spouse, and the identity loss that came with it
• Surviving COVID-era border closures that meant missing her son's wedding and her granddaughter's heart surgery
• Her daughter's experience of racism at school, navigated as both a parent and a member of the leadership team
• What she wishes every school understood about third culture kids: that they should be celebrated, not tolerated
• Trailing spouses, blended families, and what holds a family together across four countries
• Why, after five children, she has come to believe home was never really a place at all

A genuinely candid conversation about the parts of international life that rarely get spoken about openly.

A huge thank you to Lea for her openness, and for a conversation that asks a harder question than it first appears: what actually makes somewhere home.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

If you have a problem in your own country, going international probably isn't the solution. Jasmine read that on LinkedIn and nodded — because too many people are running from something that will simply follow them.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Jasmine, an educator entering her twelfth year in international education, with teaching and leadership experience across Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Malaysia. She began as an English teacher in Hong Kong, became Head of English and joined the senior leadership team, then moved to the UK before continuing to Malaysia, where she has recently stepped into the role of Assistant Head of Primary. She navigates this path as half of a teaching couple.

Together, they flip the question most conversations about international education never ask: not why you should go, but whether you should at all — and what separates those who thrive from those who simply relocate their problems to a new postcode.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Walking into a UK staff room after seven years in Hong Kong, and why the sound of people actually talking to each other felt strange
• Why "read with the children" means something completely different depending on where you learned to teach, and what that moment with her TA revealed
• Gordon Ramsay in a dim sum kitchen, and why his skills weren't wrong, just not what that environment demanded
• The prep school offer she turned down because her husband didn't get a position, and what making one decision for two careers actually takes
• "The school gives you a job. The city gives you a life." — the question she wishes someone had told her to ask before signing
• Why cultural awareness isn't something you learn in a training session, and the Pride and Prejudice problem behind most misunderstandings in international schools

A huge thank you to Jasmine for her honesty, her warmth, and for reminding us that running towards something is always more powerful than running away from it.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

Send us Fan Mail

A random school inspection revealed that Gavin McCormack had been running a Montessori classroom without knowing it.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Gavin — Montessori Australia Ambassador, founder of nine schools and three teacher training centres in Nepal, and bestselling author of The Potential in Every Child — for the show's widest-reach conversation yet.

Together, they trace the moment that changed his career: teaching refugee children in Sydney who had fled Libya, Afghanistan and Syria, and what that classroom taught him before anyone gave it a name.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What parents actually want from a school — safety, intelligence, happiness, in that exact order — and why schools chasing rankings get the order backwards
• The contagion principle, and why children can sense an unprepared teacher before a word is said
• The neuroscience of why your brain deletes almost everything you learn in a day, unless it involved emotion, risk, choice, or something you physically touched
• Building nine schools and three teacher training centres in Nepal, and what that took
• Authenticity, trust and resilience — and why the first two can't be trained into a teacher who doesn't have them
• What Gavin would throw out first if he built a school from scratch tomorrow

A huge thank you to Gavin for his time, and for a conversation that makes an uncomfortably good case that most of what we do in a school day doesn't survive the night.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.