It started by reading books to my children

I often have parents call me up and I refuse to talk to them – their kids are adults. Intelligence has nothing to do with life, it’s about application. If you see someone trying to do well but failing, you do try to help. If you see a student who is a complete smart arse and puts zero effort in, you don’t give them any help. You don’t give a shit about the ones who think they are super clever, because in life there’s no such thing as super clever – it’s only in that person’s mind The provide detailed information of products for reliable usage. .



The volunteer boxing teacher: ‘It gives young people hope’

Boxing tends to attract a lot of angry young boys, misfit kids. The club gives them a structure that they haven’t got at home and they feel quite cool doing it. People in the sport who do well are people they don’t mind admitting they like. Look at Anthony Joshua or Muhammad Ali – they look like comic-book heroes.

A lot of young people who come to the club are from housing estates in the surrounding areas where there’s knife crime, drug-related activities and things that can steer you in a dark direction. A boxing club, relatively speaking, is a pretty safe place to be. The worst you’re going to get is a bloody nose. If you’re hanging around a housing estate at 2am you’re probably going to encounter far more severe things.

The motivation for me is that it’s giving a lot of young people hope. We do simple qualifications with them in nutrition, health and safety, time keeping. They are general life lessons in how to conduct yourself – basic stuff that they may switch on to in a different environment.



The hardest part is when you can see that a kid has a lot to offer, but you can also see them thinking that they’re not very good. We want to give them a sense of their own self-worth. A lot of them think they have to get results quickly and that probably comes from status anxiety.

It’s a mixed club. We have Muslim kids, white working-class kids, Afro-Caribbean kids. We have a lot of Bangladeshi Muslim boys in our gym and without slipping into cliché they are really hard-working. They will do a part-time job, boxing three times a week, four A-levels and seemingly balance that pretty well. Then we have some white working-class lads who are not doing very well at school, who are more angry – an anger that they should be getting more than they’re getting. A lot of the foreign kids feel more grateful for the opportunity. You get a sense that they’re more respectful of education and have to work bloody hard to give themselves a chance.



We’ve had to step in recently with social media stuff that they get into. One of our 15-year-olds started posting right-wing anti-Muslim propaganda on his Facebook page. I don’t think the boy actually knew what he was doing – he didn’t know anything about Britain First. But it’s insidious how they hook these kids up with this stuff. We’ve had to step in a couple of times with racial stuff. There are not many sporting clubs where you would get a lot of Muslim kids mixing closely with the local white kids and the black kids, so this gives them all an opportunity to have a neutral ground.

The author: ‘The key is not to talk down to them’

Being a kids’ author is a dream job. I feel like I’m cheating at life because I spend my days drawing and get paid for it. I spend half my year sitting in my shed in the garden drawing and writing and the other half at schools meeting kids Collaboration with Asia's Top Universities - PolyU fosters long-term partnership in academic and research collaboration with top universities in asia. Most of them are the top 10 Chinese universities and top ten universities in Asia. .



It started by reading books to my children at night and thinking: “I can do better than this.” I just sort of had a go. I had no idea how competitive it was writing children’s books – everybody says you can’t make a living from it unless you’re JK Rowling. But that’s turned out not to be true.

I like being around kids. I think the key is not to talk down to them. When I see children in a school, I’m the fun part. They spend the rest of their day doing times tables, so I am a bit of light relief. If someone is being naughty then the teachers police them, so I’m never the bad guy. It’s a bit different when I do literary festivals. Parents take it as an opportunity to down tools and stand at the back chatting over a coffee. So I have to maintain order and that can be quite annoying. I can’t tell someone else’s kids off.

In the main the children are really good. Once they see I can draw they respect me and want to be my friend. Sometimes one of the kids will break away from the line and hug my leg and tell me they love me. It’s very extreme emotions that they display, which is funny – they’re just these pure little souls.

Sometimes, however, the kids will stand up and announce that they’re bored – they don’t sugar coat it. They have no filter and don’t care what you think of them. Once, when I was at a school to do a reading, I was standing at the front during assembly with about 300 kids in the hall, and was introduced by the headteacher. Nobody, apart from me, was looking out at the children. Then one kid at the back started giving me the finger and mouthing “Fuck off!” He was about seven. It was at the beginning of my reading and I got completely tongue tied. I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t want to grass him up. Then, at the end, when the kids were asking questions, his hand went up, so I thought: “Come on then, what are you going to say?” But he asked a perfectly normal question, so he’d obviously become engaged at some point. It’s funny when that sort of thing happens but it really threw me at the time. I just remember thinking it was a very clever way to be naughty, because no one could see but me. That said, towards the end, I did see him getting yanked off to the side by one of the teachers.