Around 4.5 million children in the UK are living in poverty. Yet poverty is not always immediately visible. It is not necessarily a child without shoes or food. It can be the child who cannot go to the birthday party, have the right school shoes, join the school trip or take part in the ordinary experiences that allow children to feel that they belong.

In this episode, I sit down with Baroness Ruth Lister, one of Britain's leading voices on poverty and social policy, to explore what relative poverty really means, why children's own experiences and voices should shape policy, and why tackling poverty is about more than income.

Because ultimately the test is not simply whether the statistics improve. It is whether childhood improves.

Is giving a young child unrestricted access to digital technology like handing them a vape?

In my latest podcast, I sat down with digital safety expert Katy Potts to confront what many of us are reluctant to say out loud. There is no app to replace your lap.

Listen to the podcast. This matters more than we think!

This is the first hour I’d spent with Professors Chris Pascal OBE and Dr Tony Bertram since they stopped supervising my PhD, and the conversation was every bit as energising and engaging as ever. Affectionately dubbed our “National Treasures” by the study group, Chris and Tony are as generous as they are sharp. We set out to talk about ‘quality’, but it quicky widened into pedagogy, community inequality and the digitally-saturated world children now inhabit. What emerged was a deeply human, deeply practical account of what quality really looks and feels like for children, families and educators.