8 min read

Why place matters in education

Trauma can be a powerful motivator, and it transformed Dr Alex Blower into a man with a mission.

“My anxiety has always felt like a fire at risk of becoming a burning house,” Alex said. “I try to use it as my rocket fuel to make sure nobody else gets burnt by it.”

Alex grew up in Burntwood, in the West Midlands, and did not consider the impact the town in which he was raised had on his life until he was a young man. As a child, his concerns were closer to home.

“I was a son to a dad who had issues with addiction and mental health struggles, and when I was at primary school, a significant event at home led to me developing acute separation anxiety. I missed about three years of formal schooling because I couldn’t be anywhere that felt unsafe.

“Through a lot of hard work with social workers and family, I eventually got back into education in high school.”

Having missed the important transition from primary to secondary education, Alex attended a school where being “cool” meant misbehaviour and rebellion, leading to him fighting, drinking, smoking, and engaging in criminal activity. Rather than finding himself surrounded by new friends, Alex was expelled.

Forced to move to a school in Lichfield, Alex discovered that it was a stark contrast to the rougher place he’d been expelled from.

Alex speaking at the House of Commons.

“In this new environment,” he said, “the boys and young men could put up their hand and answer a question, and it wouldn’t hold consequences, whether that be psychologically, emotionally, socially, or even physically. It afforded me the opportunity to engage with learning and education.”

Following this change, Alex unexpectedly achieved the grades he needed to enter sixth form, then applied to study a drama degree at the University of Wolverhampton.

Alex said: “My predicted grades were awful. My reference wasn’t very good at all, and while I was pretty much rejected wholesale from the other places I applied to, Wolverhampton was the university that rolled the dice on me.

“Drama felt like an escape: to not be me for a bit and explore another character. I was in a fortunate position where my parents told me to study whatever I’d most enjoy, which let me go to a university that allowed me to engage with the students’ union and learn about politics and my place in the world.”

After his degree, Alex remained at the University of Wolverhampton as a sabbatical officer, before starting work at a hostel for homeless people aged 16-25. This was a tough job, he said, but one he got a lot of value from, as it gave him experience with a wider societal demographic than he’d previously known, and contributed to his desire to improve the lives of young, struggling men.

When he joined the outreach team of a West Midlands university, he discovered POLAR data – participation of local areas – which revealed how many young people in a postcode area went on to higher education. Alex learned a distressing fact: while only 18% of young people in his hometown ever moved on to higher education, that figure grew to a whopping 64% for children taught in Lichfield, where he attended secondary school.

Alex said: “It made me really angry that the postcode area, an accident of birth and location, meant that I had mates with more talent in their little finger than I had in my whole body, who simply had all these opportunities restricted.

“Wolverhampton was the university that rolled the dice on me.”

Alex speaking at the East Anglia Boys’ Impact Conference 2024.

While some people from Burntwood got into trades, many had significant challenges with mental health, were addicted to drugs, and were engaged in criminal activity. I just thought, what would have happened if they were given the resources and opportunities that I, through the ‘luck’ of being expelled from school, had access to?”

Working for several years in widening participation for universities, Alex returned to the University of Wolverhampton and studied a PhD focused on education and inequality. He investigated how boys raised in the Black Country developed their career prospects, uncovering how they drew on cultural and social resources through their schools and intergenerationally through their families.

“That PhD at Wolverhampton opened up a whole world for me,” Alex said. “Before that, there were so many things that I didn’t feel confident saying, but having access to that research while reading and critically engaging gave me the means to articulate those issues.

“I gained evidence-based, research-based, conceptual and theoretical tools to describe the problems I had found, and I wanted to put that into the hands of practitioners.”

When he completed his PhD in 2020, Alex’s new job saw him leading the access and participation team at Arts University Bournemouth, which gave him his first opportunity to design strategic outreach interventions. Having learned that 8 out of 10 boys and young men in the surrounding area were failing to achieve a grade 9 to 5 (previously A to C) in GCSE Maths and English, Alex’s team launched the Being a Boy campaign in 2022.

Being a Boy represented a series of workshops designed to enable boys and young men to reflect on the parts of their lives they enjoyed and valued, alongside those parts they found most challenging.

Alex explained: “We recruited half of the cohort from alternative education provision, meaning boys and young men that had been excluded from mainstream education, and half who were still in school but at risk of experiencing similar difficulties. The workshops we produced were largely incredible – the sense of safety, vulnerability, the things they shared, performed, and photographed.

“Afterwards, we held a celebration event where we took it all to their families. A lot of them said it was the first time they’d ever been celebrated in education.”

Following this success, Alex and the team reached out to as many head teachers around the county they could and laid the groundwork for what became the Dorset Boys Impact Hub. This local partnership of key stakeholders, including school leaders, local authorities, universities and more, took an aligned approach to the project, assuming a shared understanding of masculinity and inequality, the challenges that boys face, and how the country’s patriarchal structure negatively impacts their demographic.

“We’ve gone from one Boys Impact Hub to 16 of them across the UK.”

“We had our first national conference at Arts University Bournemouth in 2022, and it’s just developed from there,” Alex explained. “In 2025 we were at Manchester Metropolitan University for a conference that was two days long, had 350 delegates, and 80 active contributors for the sessions. We’ve gone from one Boys Impact Hub to 16 of them across the UK.

“I’m working with the government at the moment to advise on issues related to working class men and boys, and all this has come from an organisation that was only formalised as a charitable organisation in September 2025.”

Alex’s work now involves designing programmes that are flexible enough to deal with specific school leaders’ challenges, alongside research and piecing together recommendations from the results. He launches publications showing findings and providing insights, has written a book called Lost Boys – How Education is Failing Working-Class Men, and often finds himself in the House of Commons, speaking to decision-makers including David Lammy and influencing policy to counteract what he sees as a crisis faced by young men.

Alex signing copies of his book
Lost Boys: How Education is Failing Working-Class Men.

Alex speaking at a
PiXL leadership event.

“50 years ago, the most legitimate form of masculinity was the breadwinner kind,” Alex said. “Since then, societally, we’ve seen massive socioeconomic changes, including important steps forwards in women’s rights, gender-based inequalities, and a repositioning of the workforce that means that women can and should have access to all these opportunities.

“This has led to a vacuum, and in more contemporary post-COVID times we’ve seen the rise of social media and the manosphere.”

The manosphere is a collection of online spaces and content creators who promote masculinity, which often feature alongside misogyny, anti-feminism, and antagonism towards women.

“As a wider society,” Alex said, “we haven’t offered a counterargument. We haven’t got any answers that are held up as aspirational or hopeful about masculinity like being a great dad, a great romantic partner, being in fulfilling employment, and having an amazing group of mates that 100% have your back.

“A lot of the work that Boys Impact is trying to do is to create exactly that.”

Looking forward, Alex has hope for the future of young men, women, and society in general.

“I would like to see hundreds, thousands of educational institutions adopting an approach that we have developed that works, that values and promotes value-based aspirations around manhood and what it means,” Alex said. “In an ideal world, it wouldn’t just be in the UK, but global. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

“I have an immense level of gratitude that the University of Wolverhampton rolled the dice on me, because if it didn’t, none of this would be happening.”