Introduction

At around half past six one August morning, seventeen-year-old Emmanuel Awoyelu's phone rang. A friend was on the other end, asking if he'd heard. Three of his closest friends, all footballers, all under twenty, had died in a car crash a few streets from where they lived. Awoyelu had been due to be in that car with them. He wasn't, only because his mother had refused, point blank, to let him leave the house that night.

Today Awoyelu is an assistant head teacher, a SENCO (special educational needs coordinator), and the director of a youth project called Reach Out. He is also, by his own account, one of a tiny number of Black men in senior school leadership in England. None of that was mapped out for him. He was excluded from two schools before he turned sixteen, left with far fewer qualifications than he needed, and spent his first year after university jobless and directionless. On the Everyday Leadership Podcast, he talks to Sope Agbelusi about how a childhood shaped by racism and exclusion, and a tragedy that could easily have taken his own life too, became the raw material for a career built on legacy, purpose and an unapologetic definition of what it means to lead.

A childhood spent proving he belonged

Awoyelu's parents came to the UK from Nigeria in the 1980s. Neither had received a formal education themselves, which is part of why they were relentless about his. He grew up in an area of south-east London that he describes as notoriously racist at the time, and he says the school he attended reflected the community around it. By the age of seven or eight, in Year 4, he had already decided in his own mind that education wasn't a place built for him.

He watched staff treat his parents as second-class citizens and absorbed how his parents, in turn, spoke about the school at home. In Year 5 he was excluded from that first primary school. His parents made the difficult decision to move him to a new primary in East London, where he had, by his own telling, the best year of his primary education: a warm teacher, a looser and more inclusive culture, a state comprehensive that felt worlds away from where he'd come from.

Secondary school undid some of that. By Year 10, after years of his father hearing the same message at every parents' evening (bright, full of potential, not engaged), Awoyelu was excluded a second time, after a scuffle with a teacher over coursework that both he and his friend insisted was misrepresented. The school moved them into an internal exclusion for most of their final year and a half, taught in a separate room by an academic mentor, cut off from most of their normal lessons. He left school with far fewer GCSEs than he should have, a year behind his peers, still unable to explain, in his own words, why he wasn't doing better.

The night that changed everything

Awoyelu started college a year later than his friends because of the ground he'd lost to exclusion. Weeks into that first term, on the night of 25 August, his best friend and two other close friends, all aspiring footballers, one of them a professional player who had been on the books at a football league club and was reportedly on the verge of a trial elsewhere, were killed in a car crash. Two more friends survived; one of them, Awoyelu says, is still recovering and relearning how to walk and talk.

He hadn't been able to sleep that night, for reasons he still can't explain, and remembers hearing sirens in the distance without any idea they were connected to him. The next morning brought the phone call, then a second call confirming it, then running to his best friend's house to be told by a young child, plainly and without emotion, that his friend was dead. Driving to the hospital, his family passed the crash site without knowing it was the same accident. He describes walking into the hospital room and not recognising his friend's face.

He doesn't dwell often on the fact that he was supposed to be in that car. What stays with him more is what came after: the community it revealed. Rival groups who had fought for years turned up at the site where the boys died to pay their respects, and Awoyelu says that moment effectively ended years of local tension. Grief brought his friendship group closer than it had ever been. He is honest that some of what followed, in the weeks the group spent together at the crash site each night, wasn't healthy. But he also credits it with cementing friendships that have lasted since.

Grief, depression and getting through

The first part of his A-levels barely happened. Awoyelu describes going into what he now recognises as depression, though it was never formally diagnosed. He stopped attending classes and had angry outbursts, including one that ended with a college certificate marking him as the only student who ever smashed a window there. He had no formal support in place, no college counsellor, just one English teacher he could confide in informally, and his friends, who were grieving the same loss.

He scraped through, got into university through clearing, and studied criminology, a subject he chose because he loved Criminal Minds and CSI rather than any career plan. He says plainly that up to that point he had failed at education. Graduating with a 2:1 was the first taste of academic success he'd ever had, and, for his parents, who had never received a formal education themselves, it mattered enormously.

Teaching by accident, then on purpose

Awoyelu left university with no plan beyond music. He was writing and performing as a semi-known local rapper, working two hours a day coaching school sports clubs, when a head teacher offered him informal work experience covering for a teaching assistant on paternity leave. Two weeks turned into five months, and somewhere in that placement he realised education, not music, was where his actual skill lay.

He became a full-time teaching assistant, and it was his head teacher who first suggested he train as a teacher. He resisted. It wasn't financial insecurity that changed his mind so much as a direct question from his girlfriend, now his wife, about what he actually wanted to do with his life. He worked out that he was already doing the job of a teacher, on a teaching assistant's salary of around eighteen to nineteen thousand pounds, while qualified teachers doing the same work were earning twenty-eight to forty-five thousand. That gap, and the responsibility of wanting to provide for his partner, pushed him into training.

He hated almost every part of the training year. Chronic insomnia, a stomach ulcer, internal bleeding, and a genuine attempt to quit halfway through, headed off only because his union representative told him bluntly to finish the qualification even if he never used it. He took her advice, qualified, and immediately turned down the mainstream teaching post his placement school offered him. Mainstream primary teaching, with its politics and its culture, wasn't what he wanted. He emailed every pupil referral unit, special school and alternative provision he could find, offering to start the following September. Only one replied.

Building the plan that got him there

That one school, a special school for children with social, emotional and mental health needs, many of them in care, many of them previously excluded from mainstream education, became the place Awoyelu built his career. He became the school's first newly qualified teacher in twenty-five years, in a setting most new teachers would avoid. For him it made complete sense: he understood exactly the kind of child he wanted to teach, because he had been that child.

In his first year, a leadership course changed his trajectory. It was the first time he had seen Black head teachers, and it made a previously invisible outcome feel achievable. On that course he wrote a five-year plan mapping exactly how he would reach a senior leadership team. He still has the notepad. Every course, every conversation, every deliberate ask after that fed the same goal. He became a SENCO within three years, persuading his school to fund a postgraduate SENCO qualification even though the role didn't strictly exist at the school yet, because he already knew that route was how he'd reach senior leadership.

When a job in Woolwich offered him a SENCO role across two schools, his own school moved to keep him by creating a version of that role instead. It didn't fully deliver on what he'd been promised, but the timing mattered in other ways: his wife became pregnant shortly afterwards, and the flexibility he had at that school let him be present for her in a way a more demanding role elsewhere might not have allowed.

Eventually, having decided he was done applying for jobs and ready to focus on his charity work full time, he applied for one last role almost as an afterthought. It was the only one that called him back, and it was his first senior leadership interview. He got the job.

Becoming one of the few

Awoyelu is candid about what that appointment meant beyond his own career. Black senior leaders make up a small percentage of school leadership in England, and he is conscious every time someone reacts with surprise on learning what he does. He doesn't experience that as pressure. He describes it as pride: pride in the representation it offers to the children he supports, the staff he now leads, and a community that includes people who, like him, were once excluded.

It also mattered inside his own family. His father, who had never seen teaching as a respected profession and told him repeatedly that he was "bigger than this," finally told him he was proud, something no earlier milestone in education had produced.

What a year of leadership taught him

Awoyelu defines leadership as leading by example and leading people toward a goal unapologetically. Leading by example, to him, is non-negotiable: he doesn't think you can credibly lead teaching if you aren't yourself one of the strongest teachers in the building. Being unapologetic is the harder half. Most people, he says, will never see your vision the way you see it, and leadership means convincing them it's worth pursuing anyway, then actually getting them there. You cannot be everyone's friend and still hold that line.

He is equally clear that his own style, compassionate, empathetic, big on integrity and communication, isn't the only version of good leadership. He describes colleagues on his team who are far more direct and pragmatic, and says both approaches are necessary. A team needs people who listen patiently and people who simply ask whether the work got done. Respect, in his experience, comes not from being liked but from being proven right about where you were trying to take people.

The person who saw him with nothing

Awoyelu closes by crediting his wife as the most important person in the journey, after his faith. They met at university when he had, in his words, no plan, no purpose and no money to offer her. She stayed through his depression, through a suicide attempt she witnessed and helped him through, through years of financial uncertainty, and through the process of him working out what he actually wanted from his life and from their relationship. They have been married four years, together twelve, and now have a two-year-old daughter. He says none of what he has built would have been possible without her.