Gary has taught in state schools in disadvantaged communities since 2011, having trained to teach via TeachFirst after graduating from Oxford University with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Having seen the lives of families - and thus the job of teaching - grow harder with austerity politics, he became increasingly involved in local politics. He founded and chaired a branch of the Fabians Society in Hartlepool, and served as an officer for the Hartlepool Constituency Labour Party.
His interests lie chiefly in challenging and shaping the practice of the private sector, rather than threatening its existence. Different models of ownership - getting working people into positions of power - and ensuring that all public money works as hard as possible in the public interest - chiefly through progressive procurement practices, and the pursuit and fiscal encouragement of social value - are his main areas of interest.
As someone working in education he has also written about the need to move beyond the fragmentation resultant from academisation, the need for an inclusive but traditionalist approach to education, and the problems of underfunding - both for schools directly, and for the wider arena of children’s services where proper wrap-around care and early intervention is no longer financially possible.
