Built by someone the system almost missed.

I knew where I was going. It just was not anywhere school had planned for me.

I dropped out of high school at 14. I am dyslexic. My time management was poor. At college I would regularly fall asleep in class because I was working long hours in a hotel. Not because I had to. Because I was good at it, I loved making my own money, and I was travelling.

On paper, I was not going anywhere they recognised.

But I had three tutors, Laurence, Dennis and Dave, who did not see what was on paper. They saw something else. They sat beside me and helped me fill out a university application and write a personal statement when I could not see the point. They believed I should be there long before I believed it myself.

And then Laurence said something that changed everything.

You would be good at teaching.

So I went with it.

There is one more thing I have never said clearly enough.

I wrote my dissertation in nine days.

I had everything in my head. I just could not get it onto the page. My mind was jumbled. I did not know where to start. I did not know how to write in the way that was needed, but the thinking was all there, fully formed, going nowhere.

My friend Rachel sat with me and scribed everything I said out loud. She organised what was in my head into something I could not have produced alone. Without her, I would not have finished. Without finishing, I would not have qualified.

In my final year, I failed my dyslexia assessment. They told me that if I had been identified earlier, I would have received support throughout. I had spent years struggling to organise myself, not understanding why, while the support I needed existed, just out of reach.

But I had Rachel. And she was enough.

There are a small number of people you meet in a life who make the next thing possible. Rachel was one of mine. Laurence was one. Jen was one. Mike was one. Rebecca was one.

I got lucky. Repeatedly. And I know that most people do not.

At university, I met Jen Gillies.

Jen was a tutor who did not just teach me. She understood how I thought. She supported me as a person, not just as a student. She showed me that with the right skills, the real ones, you can adapt and apply them to absolutely anything in life.

I did not finish that masters. An opportunity came to teach in England and I took it. But what Jen gave me went with me. It still does.

In the classroom, I met children who reminded me of myself.

I also met Mike Rees-Lee, a headteacher who hired staff by asking what they were passionate about. He believed in practical skills and real world learning. When things got hard, he rolled up his sleeves and asked, what do you need?

He showed me what it looks like when someone leads with genuine belief in the people around them. Every day I tried to take that into my classroom.

It was an alternative school where children were encouraged, supported and listened to. I saw what happened when young people were given time, belief and practical ways to develop as whole people.

Zonuko is not a reaction against that place. It is an attempt to carry some of that spirit further, so more children can have a taste of that kind of development, no matter their postcode.

We built something different, and the children rose to meet it.

One of the things I loved most was a learning centre I ran with a woman called Rebecca, an art teacher with a wealth of knowledge I found endlessly fascinating. Caerphilly Council gave us genuine flexibility to design our own courses. We did not teach in the standard way. We built something different.

Thirteen children came through that centre. Every single one of them went on to do well for themselves. One child I tutored in a non traditional setup, suffered terrible bullying, every reason not to and they went on to study law.

What I kept seeing, over and over, was this, the children that had fallen through the cracks had something. Grit. Curiosity. The ability to figure things out when given half a chance. They did not need saving. They needed someone to actually see them and give them a real problem and get out of the way.

There came a point where something in me changed.

My last year in teaching, I started a role at an alternative provision in September. On the day I came back after six weeks off, I was told they needed me to wait another six weeks before my contract could start. No warning. No acknowledgement of what that meant for someone trying to pay rent and eat. Just - we need more time.

There was no human care in it. And something shifted.

I had skills. I had resilience. I had spent years building both, many times in schools nobody else wanted to work in, with children who were extremely challenging.

What I did not have was confidence. And without it, I kept accepting things I should not have accepted. I let people talk to me without respect. I did not go for the better jobs because I was not sure I deserved them.

And I thought about the children. The ones who went on to do well. The difference between them and the ones who did not was not ability. It was confidence. Not the showy kind, the quiet internal kind that comes from finishing something real. From trying, failing, and discovering you can try again.

That is what school had never given me. And that is what I had watched it fail to give to hundreds of children, not through lack of compassion, but lack of time and resources.

Zonuko is my answer to everything those people gave me, scaled up.

Made available to every child, not just the ones lucky enough to find their Laurence or their Jen.

I have dyslexia. I have an autoimmune disease. I built this through seizures and setbacks and days when it would have been easier to stop. I built it because I believe labels can explain part of a person's story, but they should never become the whole story.

What defines us is what we do when it is hard. That is what I want every child who uses Zonuko to discover about themselves.

Not through a test. Not through a grade. Through making something real, failing at it, figuring out why, and trying again.