Matt's Story

My teachers just thought I was thick

Born in Oxford but having lived “all over the place”, Matt spent much of his young life growing up in London. The son of a social worker and a school teacher and chaplain, Matt went to school in Hackney in East London.

“My teachers just thought I was thick but, looking back, I’m pretty sure I had dyslexic tendencies. I certainly had trouble with my reading and writing as well as handling numbers but I was never assessed for this and didn’t get any kind of learning support at all.”

This was in the mid Eighties and Matt used to get told to read passages out loud in class which he found incredibly frustrating and he got bullied too. Things got so bad that, at age 14, “I just walked out of school and swore to myself that I’d be back and prove them wrong!” Of course Matt leaving school, where his dad was one of the teachers, with no qualifications caused a rift with his parents with whom he’s pretty well lost touch.

“I got a Saturday job at Dixons and when I was 15 or 16, this became full time. I worked for them for about three years altogether and then moved from job to job, mainly in retail where you didn’t need any qualifications.”

Then one day in a pub Matt met Paul (a friend of a friend).

“He must have seen something in me and he got me a job as a funeral arranger. I actually shone at it and so I trained to become a fully qualified undertaker, entirely through training ‘on the job’ with no college or formal courses, which, with my  experiences at school, suited me.”

And so Matt at last got his first, but certainly not last, nationally recognised qualification.

Illness and Recovery

By this time Matt was living on his own in a Housing Association flat in East London and, by his own admission, “I partied extremely hard and didn’t care about anything!” The lifestyle took its toll eventually and he collapsed at work, which marked the onset of a lengthy period of serious illness. “I lost an incredible amount of weight and went down to seven and a half stone in six months.”  He was in and out of hospital with Crohn’s disease, severe IBS, ulcerative colitis, several stomach ulcers and stress! What made things worse was that, unknown to the hospital staff, who were giving him 2 pints of milk a day, Matt was later found out to be lactose intolerant!

So, the road to recovery began with Matt being told by the medical staff at the hospital that he was going to need to change his life to survive or the stress would literally kill him. Going onto a very strict diet was the first step, both back to health but also to getting control over his life back. As his health improved Matt started to think about working again but what to do? All he had known was retail, where he could still get work without qualifications, and the funeral business where he did, at least, have a qualification, but both of these were stressful and quite likely to set his health back again.

The answer came out of Matt’s childhood love for animals and conservation. Knowing that, for example, there were only 200 monkeys of a particular species left in the world really made a mark on Matt so he started to browse the internet to see if he could find something he could do which could make use of his passion for animals. He was actually looking for jobs working with animals but all the ones he found wanted either previous experience or a relevant qualification. So, he had to turn to looking at training and managed to get advice from Aimhigher in London, who pointed him in the direction of Bicton College, all the way to the South West, and on the ‘net, he found the course he wanted there, accredited by the University of Plymouth.

Bicton College and the University of Plymouth

The course he found was a Foundation Degree in Animal Science, Management and Welfare. It sounded right up Matt’s street but, with all the negative experiences of school, it was a pretty terrifying thought – to apply for a university course with no qualifications apart from undertaking and with all the difficulties Matt knew he had with reading, writing and maths. He says himself that, “I was petrified. It just conjured up visions of school.”

Still, with a lot of support and pushing from his partner, he took a deep breath and went for it! He applied direct to Bicton College and, to his surprise, was invited to an interview where he  so impressed the staff with his enthusiasm for the course that they offered him a place on the spot! Matt’s passion for the subject and his life experience as an adult applying for a higher education course had proved enough.

“When I went for the interview at Bicton I ended up talking with the HE Co-ordinator for about four hours over coffee and even though the University of Plymouth had originally said I’d need to do an Access to HE course in science first, he was happy to take me on without this.”

Because of the move out of London, Matt had to start the course a month late and had to live in temporary B&B accommodation for a year. That year was really hard, especially being on his own and coping with the workload. Being surrounded by much younger students who wanted to party was tough too but Matt had done his partying and made himself stay in every weekend studying. “What made a real difference was how helpful and supportive the staff at Bicton were to me.” It was also at Bicton that Matt’s Dyslexia finally got spotted and he did start to get help occasionally, “But, even then, I preferred not to ask”.

Matt completed his Foundation degree in 2006 after two years’ full time study and now had the confidence to decide to go on to the University of Plymouth itself to convert his Foundation Degree into an Honours Degree with another year of full time study. He and his partner moved to a village three miles outside Exeter and Matt commutes in from there by bus to Plymouth, a two hour journey three times a week but well worth it for the prize at the end of it.

Working with Aimhigher

During his second year at Bicton, Matt met Helen Evans at an Open Day which he was helping out with. Helen is one of the staff who works on the Aimhigher Peninsula programme’s ‘Workhigher’ initiative, which is all about promoting vocational routes into and through higher education.

“Helen and I got talking and she told me how important the Student Ambassadors that Aimhigher uses were. They are great at  encouraging youngsters, and adults too, who might be uncertain or nervous about university, to realise that there are other ways into uni than the standard ones and that they could give it a go! My experiences showed what could be done and that there were courses you could do which could help make an interest into a job, even if you did leave school without any qualification. I ended up training to be one of the Ambassadors working for Aimhigher and have been ever since!”

Matt goes into local schools, mainly working with students in Years 9 to 11, but also does visits to Further Education Colleges and is now involved in training other Ambassadors too. His plans for his own life are developing and, once his Honours Degree is finished – and his partner is aiming for university as well now – they hope to head abroad, probably to Asia for work on animal welfare and conservation. That’s a pretty amazing change from Matt’s time as a young man in East London, with limited qualifications and with not much going for him! His determination to get his life together after being so ill, combined with being prepared to face his fears about returning to education because he could see it as the way he could at last do something her really wanted to do, have opened up so many possibilities that he couldn’t have imagined twenty years earlier. Thanks in many ways to his work as a Student Ambassador and the confidence which this gave him, Matt is now doing some teaching at Bicton too.

Possibilities

Talking of possibilities, Matt offers a fascinating footnote to this amazing story.

“I’ve been working on my dissertation for the degree at Dartmoor Zoological Park. There’s a tiger there with behavioural problems and it’s me they’ve asked to try and sort him out – there might even be a job possibility out of it!”

You really do never know where higher education can take you if you’re prepared to give it a go – even if you though your education days were over!

Matt wins a regional LSC award 2008