Introduction
Kevin Davis does not call himself a teacher, and he does not call himself a builder. And yet he has facilitated the education of thousands of young people and the construction of multi-million-pound facilities that now form part of a nine-school group turning over tens of millions of pounds a year. None of it started with a plan. It started with a derelict pub, a volunteer shift, and a decision to take a year out that his own family thought was reckless.
That is the shape of this conversation with Kevin Davis, social entrepreneur, founder and chair of the Mercian Trust, and recently appointed Deputy Lieutenant of the West Midlands. It is a story about what happens when you keep saying yes to opportunities you cannot fully see the shape of yet, and what it costs to keep going after the doors close in your face.
A skinny kid from a council estate, not a straight-line student
Kevin describes his younger self plainly: not remarkable, not particularly academic, a "skinny kid" raised by a single mother who was, in his words, feisty and zealous about getting her sons somewhere better. She moved him between schools when she felt the system was steering him toward outcomes she did not want for her Black sons. He became head boy, the first Black head boy at his school, not because he was top of the class but because he could talk to people, make teachers laugh, and hold his own in debates.
There was no career advisor pointing him toward social entrepreneurship. It was not a path on the careers wall. He studied politics and management at university, not because he had a burning academic drive but because it was, in his words, "a natural next step" while he worked out what he actually wanted to do. Alongside his studies he was already volunteering, fundraising, and getting involved in community campaigns, without expecting any of it to become a career.
Taking over the worst pub in town
The real turning point came when Kevin took over a struggling community charity project built around a derelict pub that had been shut down by police and was known locally for drugs and prostitution. An older woman in the community had the idea to turn the old pub into a non-alcoholic community facility. Kevin volunteered there as a teenager, then started raising money for it, then, after finishing his degree and doing a stint at British Telecom in process design, took what he calls "a year out" to help properly.
His family thought it was crazy. He thought he would go back to a proper salary once he had given it a go. That year out became close to three decades of work.
From a pub to a school: learning that goodwill is not enough
What Kevin saw at the pub was young people without jobs, difficult home lives, and a school system that was not working for them. He realised quickly that goodwill and a good facility were not enough to change outcomes. What was needed were real relationships with the people who could make a material difference: schools, housing providers, and private sector employers.
He used the facility to host work experience placements, secured EU funding, ran taster programmes with a local college, and started taking young people on trips outside their immediate area, some for the first time in their lives. When the law changed to allow colleges to take on fourteen-year-olds who were heading toward alternative provision, Kevin's programme grew from four weeks to twelve weeks to twenty-five hours a week, until it tipped over into needing to formally register as an independent school. That registration became his first school, Second Chances, an independent pupil referral unit.
Closing a school he built, because the numbers and the quality did not hold
Second Chances grew, but Kevin eventually made the call to shut it down. It was not financially viable, relying on the "crumbs off the table" from local colleges and schools, and it was struggling to maintain the quality of education he wanted to stand behind. As the proprietor, he made the decision himself: the reputation risk was not good for the organisation, and it was not good for the students.
He is direct about what this cost him. Shutting down something he had built from nothing is not a small thing. But he had not given up on the underlying mission, alternative provision that actually worked, and that conviction is what carried him into his next, much bigger project.
Finding the studio school model and raising the capital nobody wanted to give him
While looking for a way to scale up a work-experience initiative he had built with a major retail partner, Kevin approached a foundation for investment and stumbled onto the studio school model, a way for young people to learn on real workplace projects created with private sector partners. It matched exactly what he had been trying to build informally for years.
Raising the roughly three million pounds needed for a physical home away from the pub took ten years. Mainstream banks would not lend against the risk. He had to go to social investment institutions who were willing to back the social mission even without the certainty a conventional lender wanted. He calls that period a sharpening of his commercial instincts: these were repayable investments, not grants, and he had to find ways to generate income because the school itself was not permitted to turn a profit.
The Ikea years: turning reject furniture into a decade-long partnership
One of the clearest illustrations of Kevin's approach to opportunity came through an unplanned relationship with Ikea. What began as running a staff canteen during a store extension turned into a call asking if his young people could take reject furniture off Ikea's hands. He found storage, organised a small team, and the young people learned real commercial skills while some of the furniture was resold and some given away.
That single favour grew into a formal, paid commercial partnership that ran for around ten years and expanded across multiple Ikea stores in the UK and beyond, from flat-pack assembly to trolley collection, depending on what each store actually needed. Kevin describes the guiding insight simply: if you put time and belief back into young people written off by the system, they go back into the marketplace. That partnership record later gave him real credibility with government departments who wanted to see he understood employers, not just education.
Tenacity has a shadow side
Kevin does not romanticise persistence. Asked directly about when to walk away from something rather than push through, he is honest that sunk cost has kept him in situations longer than it should have. He points to a chain of restaurants his organisation ran to employ young people, restaurants he eventually closed because, despite the social mission behind them, they were not commercially productive. It was the disruption of lockdown that forced the final decision.
His framing is useful for any founder: knowing when to persist and knowing when to stop are both forms of the same discipline. Tenacity that refuses to recognise a genuinely failed approach is not strength, it is stubbornness dressed up as commitment.
Faith, service, and the moment that mattered most
Kevin is open about his Christian faith as a long-standing foundation, not a marketing line. He references a verse he returns to often: though the vision tarries, wait for it, it will surely come to pass. That patience has been tested repeatedly, including the ten years it took to raise the first three million pounds and the further years it took to secure funding for the school's expansion.
When asked what he is most proud of, he does not point to an award or a headline. He points to the day a new education centre, part of the growing Mercian Trust, was named after him, and he used the opening to dedicate it to his grandparents, who left rural Jamaica for the UK in the early 1960s. He had recently taken his own children back to see the house his family left behind, a moment he describes as quietly spiritual. That thread, from his grandparents' tenacity to his own, runs through everything he has built.
