Author: jameshempsall

I am a business leader, psychotherapist and equalities and social policy consultant. An enthusiastic advocate of working and living well, I believe in supporting everyone to have positive, safe, and equal chances within a modern environment. I've worked in the field of early years learning, childcare, anti-discrimination and equalities for over 30 years. For 25 of those I have managed my own consultancy and training business www.hempsalls.com working nationally and internationally for a range of government, charitable and private organisations. Throughout that time I have loved shaping and delivering policy, and working to useful, impactful, and outcome focused solutions. And with a nod to my original passion for design, I am also a co-director of www.harrimanandco.com an independent furniture and home-ware design store.

When did childhood become a project?

August 25, 2026August 18, 2026 jameshempsall

I sometimes wonder when childhood stopped being a journey and became a project. A project to be managed, measured, optimised and improved. A project with targets, milestones and outcomes.

The thought struck me recently while watching young families navigate the summer holidays. Children’s calendars can be as crowded as those of senior executives: swimming lessons on Monday, football on Tuesday, coding club on Wednesday, music tuition on Thursday and (another) birthday party on Saturday. Alongside it all sits the invisible administration of childhood, with developmental assessments, school readiness indicators, attendance monitoring, online tracking apps and endless conversations about attainment. Many children today are busier than ever before, yet I am not convinced they are any freer. And as we start another school year, things will only get busier.

Of course, every generation worries about the next, and it is easy to romanticise the past. The childhood of my generation was hardly perfect. We grew up with less awareness of safeguarding, fewer protections and often lower expectations. Many children who struggled were simply overlooked. Yet there was also something else: time. Time to be bored, time to wander, time to make up games that had no educational purpose whatsoever. There was time to climb trees, build dens, ride bicycles and spend entire afternoons seemingly achieving absolutely nothing. We did though, that was called play.

Increasingly, childhood seems to be viewed through the lens of future adulthood. We ask not whether an activity brings joy, wonder or connection, but whether it develops resilience, improves literacy, enhances social skills or contributes in some way to a future success that may be years away. Even play frequently needs justification. We have become uncomfortable with experiences that are valuable simply because they are experiences.

As adults, our intentions are usually good. We want children to succeed. We want them to be happy. We want them to have opportunities that we may not have had ourselves. Yet somewhere along the way, childhood risks becoming a preparation for life rather than a stage of life in its own right.

I am reminded of how often we ask young children what they want to be when they grow up. It sounds like an innocent question, but it carries an important assumption. Imagine asking adults the equivalent question: what do you want to be in twenty years’ time? Most of us would struggle to answer. Children, meanwhile, absorb a powerful message that who they are now matters less than who they might become later. The destination starts to eclipse the journey.

Perhaps this reflects a broader cultural shift. Adults increasingly live in a world dominated by targets, performance indicators, productivity measures and endless self-improvement. We count our steps, monitor our sleep, track our finances and optimise our calendars. Why would childhood escape the same forces? The danger is that children begin to experience themselves as projects too: a collection of strengths and weaknesses to be developed, a set of data points moving towards predetermined outcomes, a work in progress rather than a person.

Yet some of the most important parts of childhood cannot be measured. Curiosity cannot be easily quantified. Wonder resists assessment. Friendship cannot be reduced to a score and kindness rarely appears in a league table. The memories that shape us most profoundly often emerge from moments that looked entirely unproductive at the time: an afternoon spent fishing with a grandparent, hours lost reading under the duvet, a conversation while walking home from school or the freedom to invent a game, change the rules and abandon it twenty minutes later. These experiences do not always produce immediate outcomes. They produce something more valuable: a sense of self.

Perhaps that is what childhood is really for. Not simply preparing children for the future, but allowing them to inhabit the present. Not relentlessly shaping them into successful adults, but enabling them to experience what it means to be a child.

I am not arguing for fewer opportunities, lower aspirations or diminished expectations. Children deserve all of those things. But perhaps they also deserve something increasingly rare: space. Space to dream, space to fail and space to explore who they are without every moment being assessed for its developmental value.

Because childhood is not a project to complete. It is a season of life to experience. And I sometimes wonder whether, in our determination to give children the very best start, we have forgotten to let them simply start.

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

When violence becomes the language of childhood.

August 18, 2026 jameshempsall

I was travelling on a train recently when I found myself sitting close to a young boy, perhaps five years old. For about 30 minutes he talked almost continuously, not about school, friends, football, dinosaurs, superheroes or adventuring in the woods, but about destroying things.

He described blowing things up, exploding buildings, wrecking vehicles, smashing and killing. There was no context, no story, no apparent game, just a stream of imagined destruction that seemed to fascinate him. His parents barely responded and other passengers hardly noticed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Today, the Children’s Commissioner has published a report examining children referred to the Prevent programme. One of its most striking findings is that around seven in 10 children referred do not fit traditional definitions of extremist ideology. Instead, many display a worrying fixation with violence, weapons, mass casualty attacks and harmful online content. The report argues that our systems struggle to respond to these children because they do not fit neatly into existing categories of radicalisation.

As I read the report, my mind returned to that little boy on the train, not because I believe he was a clear and present danger, he was five years old, but because I found myself wondering when it was that violence became such a normal language of childhood.

Of course, this is not entirely new. I grew up watching cowboys and Indians films. We played war games. Toy guns appeared every Christmas. Many of us pointed plastic revolvers at our friends before we were old enough to understand what a real gun could do.

It would be easy, and wrong, to pretend that previous generations were somehow innocent. Children have always explored power, risk and conflict through play. Stories have always contained villains. Boys in particular have often been encouraged to test boundaries through rough-and-tumble play, competition and confrontation.

Yet something feels different. The violence of my childhood was usually embedded within a story. However simplistic and problematic those narratives may have been, there was at least a framework.

Today’s children inhabit a digital world where violence is often detached from meaning. Online platforms can serve up an endless stream of fights, humiliation, cruelty, real-world killings, extreme pornography and videos designed purely to shock. The Children’s Commissioner describes children becoming “fixated on violence” after exposure to harmful online content. Violence is no longer a scene in a film; it is content, and content never ends. That should force us to ask difficult questions about the messages children receive.

Too often, boys are still encouraged to destroy while girls are encouraged to create. A boy knocking down a tower of bricks is laughed at; a girl building one is praised. Boys are given weapons while girls are given crafts. Boys are expected to conquer while girls are expected to nurture. These are caricatures, of course, and modern parenting and education is more nuanced than this. Yet the underlying messages remain surprisingly powerful. We continue to socialise boys towards domination, aggression and risk, even as we express concern about male violence later in life.

Then we seem surprised when some boys become fascinated by power expressed through destruction. The uncomfortable truth is that violence is not a fringe interest in our culture; it sits at the centre of much of our entertainment, media and public discourse. We celebrate military victories. We cheer cinematic revenge. We consume true-crime documentaries at extraordinary rates. We replay footage of attacks and atrocities across rolling news channels. We talk constantly about conflict, threat and enemies. The blame does not solely lie at the feet of social media.

Children are not separate from this culture; they absorb it. The Children’s Commissioner’s report should not simply prompt a discussion about Prevent. It should prompt a discussion about childhood itself.

What stories are children hearing? What images are they seeing? What behaviours are being rewarded? What alternatives are we offering? Because if we want children to create, collaborate, empathise and care, we have to build a culture that values those things as highly as it values competition, conquest and destruction.

The little boy on the train was not the problem. He may simply have been reflecting the world around him. That is what children do. They absorb our values, our anxieties, our obsessions and our dreams. They hold a mirror up to the culture we have created.

And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable question raised by today’s report: not simply what is happening to children, but what are children are learning from us?

It’s so funny, how we don’t call anymore.

August 12, 2026 jameshempsall

It was my birthday recently. There were cards on the window sill, thoughtful texts arriving throughout the day, WhatsApp messages from friends I haven’t seen for years, LinkedIn notifications from professional contacts and the familiar stream of digital kindness that reminds us we are remembered. I was genuinely grateful for every one of them.

Yet among all those messages, there was just one telephone call. Something that caused me to paraphrase Cliff Richard.

This isn’t a complaint. I didn’t feel unloved or overlooked. Quite the opposite. The messages were warm, generous and heartfelt. But the imbalance struck me as an observation worth pondering.

Once upon a time, birthdays involved sitting near the telephone, as it would ring continuously. The call itself was never simply about saying “Happy Birthday”. It was the opening line of a much longer conversation. The birthday greeting soon drifted into other territory. How are things really? Have you heard from so-and-so lately? What happened with that project you were worried about? How are the children? Before long, twenty or thirty minutes had passed. Sometimes longer. The conversation wandered and meandered, discovering things neither person had intended to discuss. There was no agenda and no objective other than human connection. The unexpected happened.

Today, the message arrives instead. A quick “Happy Birthday, James”, perhaps accompanied by an emoji or a thumbs-up, and the exchange is complete. The sentiment is still sincere and the affection is still real, but the experience feels different. Less expansive. More transactional. A thoughtful gesture, certainly, but often a completed task rather than the beginning of a conversation.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that we have never been more connected to our phones. We carry them everywhere, rarely letting them out of our sight. We sleep beside them, check them before getting out of bed and glance at them hundreds of times every day. Yet we seem increasingly reluctant to use them for the very purpose they were originally designed for: talking to another human being.

I notice this phenomenon everywhere. People frequently send a message asking whether they can call. I’ve often wondered what response they are expecting. Increasingly, asking permission to make a phone call has become a social ritual, almost an acknowledgement that an unsolicited conversation feels intrusive in a way it never used to.

I see it in the workplace too. Some younger colleagues visibly tense when the office phone rings. The ringing itself appears to create anxiety. Who could it be? What do they want? Why didn’t they send a message first? To many people, a ringing telephone is no longer an invitation but an interruption, a risk rather than an opportunity.

Then there are the callers who politely ask whether I can talk after I have answered the phone – another ritual I feel. I always find myself smiling at that moment. Well, yes, that’s why I chose to pick up, I have that sort of agency. Yet the question reveals something about the way our culture has changed. We have become accustomed to scheduling and managing communication so carefully that even a spontaneous conversation can feel unusual.

This is not intended as criticism. Every generation develops its own communication norms. Text messaging solves genuine problems. It is efficient, convenient, fast-paced, and respectful of people’s time. It allows us to respond when we are ready rather than forcing an immediate interaction. For busy lives, that flexibility matters.

But I do wonder what we lose when conversation becomes increasingly filtered, managed and controlled. A text message delivers information, but a phone call reveals mood. A WhatsApp message conveys words, while a conversation communicates hesitation, laughter, uncertainty, excitement and emotion. We hear the pause before somebody answers. We notice when their voice sounds tired. We recognise enthusiasm that would never fit inside an emoji. We discover things we didn’t know to ask.

Perhaps this is one reason why loneliness continues to feature so prominently in public conversations despite our endless digital connectedness. We have become remarkably effective at communication, but have we weakened conversation? The distinction matters. Communication is the exchange of information. Conversation is the exchange of humanity.

In Find Joy in the Middle, I explore the importance of living in the spaces between life’s milestones. The middle is where relationships deepen, where understanding grows and where meaning often emerges unexpectedly. It struck me on my birthday that phone conversations inhabit a similar kind of middle. A text message takes us directly to the destination, whereas a conversation allows us to wander through the landscape. Often it is in that wandering that joy is found.

I don’t know whether the decline of voice calls is a temporary cultural shift or a permanent change in how we relate to one another. Perhaps future generations will find our nostalgia for telephone conversations as quaint as handwritten letters. Maybe we can ask AI bots to talk to our friends whilst we are busy doing something (I don’t know what) that’s a better use of our time. But I do know this: the one person who called me on my birthday didn’t simply wish me a happy birthday. We talked, laughed and caught up. We discovered things neither of us knew when the call began. Long after many of the messages had disappeared beneath newer notifications, that conversation stayed with me.

Maybe that’s what all this means.

Not that messaging is wrong. Not that technology has failed us. Not that we should abandon convenience for nostalgia. Rather, that amidst all the pings, alerts, notifications and unread messages, there remains something uniquely powerful about hearing another human voice unexpectedly reach across the distance and ask, “How are you?”

And perhaps, every now and then, that question deserves more than a text.

Are we all Northern now?

August 3, 2026 jameshempsall

I can still remember the day Margaret Thatcher stood at the Conservative Party Conference and declared, “We are a grandmother now.” It was one of those political moments that became bigger than the words themselves. It spoke to an age, a set of values and a particular view of Britain. Whether you agreed with it or not, it captured a mood and the moment.

Forty years on, another phrase has been rattling around in my head. Andy Burnham has not actually said it, but as I watch the early days of his premiership, I find myself wondering whether the message coming from Downing Street is something like: we’re all Northern now. That thought makes me smile.

As someone who is a northerner to some and a southerner to others, having grown up in the Midlands and been educated in a comprehensive school, I have spent most of my life inhabiting a place somewhere between the two. The Midlands has always been a geographical and cultural borderland. We understand the north and the south because we are neither entirely one nor the other. We borrow a bit from both. We are comfortable in the middle. That might have been an advantage sometimes, but not always.

Regular readers will know that the idea of the middle has occupied much of my thinking over recent years. It became the central theme of my book, Find Joy in the Middle. The book is not really about geography. It is about recognising that life is often lived in the spaces between extremes. Between success and failure. Between youth and old age. Between certainty and doubt. Between arrival and aspiration. The middle, I argued, is not something to endure. It is somewhere to embrace. Perhaps that is why I find this moment politically fascinating. After all, the fifth of my main chapters was about the ‘middle ground’ and politics appeared throughout some of the others.

For decades, British politics seemed dominated by a southern gravitational pull. Power, influence, media attention, investment and ambition were drawn towards London and the South East. Even when the north voted the government in, it had a distinct metropolitan and elitist bent. Regional identities survived, of course, but often as colourful footnotes rather than defining features of national life. Think Blair and Prescott.

Burnham represents something different. His political story, whilst formed in Westminster, was built in a city region. His reputation was built through his advocacy for Greater Manchester and through a belief that power works best when it is closer to people and places. We all know that of course. As Prime Minister, he has already signalled an intention to continue that devolutionary journey.

What interests me most is not whether more government departments move north or whether Treasury spending patterns change. Important as those things are, there is another shift taking place. The cultural centre of gravity appears to be moving too. I have noticed it in myself.

Lately, I find myself dusting off my flatter vowels and leaning more readily into some of the rustic vernacular that has always been there. Not that I ever deliberately concealed it. But like many people who have navigated professional environments over several decades, I became adept at smoothing the rough edges. Softening certain words. Modifying an accent here and there. Adapting to the expectations of national institutions that often felt culturally southern.

Now, for the first time in a while, I sense a subtle reversal. The things that once felt like disadvantages increasingly look like advantages. Regional accents sound less like obstacles and more like authenticity. Local identity feels less like something that needs explaining and more like something worth celebrating. Being rooted somewhere is becoming fashionable again.

Perhaps age has something to do with it. One of the freedoms that comes with getting older is caring a little less about other people’s assumptions. But I suspect it is bigger than that. The country itself seems to be reconsidering what leadership looks and sounds like. For those of us working in the world of children, families, education and early years, that matters.

Because some of the most important innovations in public service have emerged not from the centre but from places. They emerge when local leaders understand local communities, when solutions are designed with people rather than for them and when power is distributed rather than concentrated. In that sense, “we’re all Northern now” is not really about the North at all. It is about valuing place. It is about challenging the assumption that wisdom only resides in central institutions. It is about recognising that thriving communities do not need to be identical to be successful. And perhaps it is also about becoming more comfortable with who we are.

One of the central messages of Find Joy in the Middle is that fulfilment often comes when we stop striving to become someone else and start appreciating where we actually stand. The same may be true for nations as well as individuals. Britain has spent many years searching for grand ideological answers. Maybe what we need is a little more confidence in our towns, our cities, our regions and our communities. Maybe we need to trust the wisdom that exists outside the centre. As a Midlander, I am not about to start claiming full northern status. I know better than that. There are people in Yorkshire who would never permit it.

I admit I am enjoying this moment. I am enjoying hearing different voices at the centre of national debate. I am enjoying the growing confidence of places that have often felt overlooked. And I am enjoying the possibility that the characteristics once dismissed as provincial may turn out to be exactly what modern Britain needs. If that means flattening my vowels a little more and allowing the occasional piece of rustic Midlands vernacular to slip into conversation, then so be it. After all, perhaps the middle has finally become the centre.

Photo by Alexandre Loureiro on Pexels.com

The disappearing middle ground?

July 13, 2026July 13, 2026 jameshempsall

The shocking death of Ann Widdecombe, former MP, government minister and Strictly Come Dancing alumnus, has prompted a great deal of reflection. As I watched the news unfold, I found myself thinking back to the first time our paths crossed in the mid-1990s, when she was Childcare Minister and I was beginning to engage with government on issues affecting children and families. We didn’t agree, and had a little public battle, in front of my new boss as it happened – who I am sure started to wonder who she had recently recruited.

Ann Widdecombe was many things: formidable, intelligent, uncompromising and deeply committed to her beliefs. Even those who disagreed with her would rarely accuse her of lacking conviction. Throughout her political career, she remained steadfast in views that were rooted in her faith and worldview, often attracting admiration from supporters and criticism from opponents in equal measure. There has been no shortage of people saying that in the media this week.

Many of Ann’s positions did not align with my own values, particularly where inclusion, diversity and the changing nature of modern society were concerned. There were times when her views felt rigid, and there were occasions when I felt they failed to recognise the experiences and realities of people whose lives differed from her own. Yet politics is not, or should not be, about surrounding ourselves only with people who think exactly as we do.

What strikes me most today is not so much the politics of Ann Widdecombe herself, but the nature of politics more broadly. We seem to be living through an era where disagreement increasingly becomes hostility, and where opponents are too often viewed as enemies rather than fellow citizens with different perspectives. And it all plays out in the media.

Politics has always been robust. It should be. Ideas matter. Values matter. Outcomes matter. But somewhere along the way, we appear to have lost some of our tolerance for the messy middle ground where compromise, understanding and mutual respect can flourish. These aren’t headline grabbing places.

The circumstances surrounding Ann Widdecombe’s death have added another layer to that reflection. Police investigations continue, with authorities examining the events that led to her death and exploring possible motives. Regardless of where anyone stood politically, the loss of a public figure in such circumstances is profoundly unsettling. We feel we know them, whether they have connected with us on screen or in real life.

There is something almost surreal about the story. A prominent political figure, living alone in the English countryside, found dead in a quiet corner of Dartmoor. It has the atmosphere of a Middle England murder mystery, the kind of plot that might emerge from a Midsomer Murders script. But this is not fiction. It is a reminder that behind every political persona sits a real person, with family, friends, colleagues and a life that extends far beyond the headlines. It reminds us there are other people out there who wish others harm, and some of them follow through with their hateful thoughts with actions not words.

In death, as in life, Ann Widdecombe remains a figure who provokes strong reactions. Some will remember her as a principled campaigner who stood firm in her beliefs. Others will remember the controversies, the arguments and the positions she took that now sit uncomfortably with contemporary values. Both assessments can be true. The challenge for all of us is whether we can hold those truths together. Can we acknowledge someone’s contribution while disagreeing profoundly with their views? Can we debate fiercely without dehumanising? Can we rediscover the art of respectful disagreement?

As our politics becomes ever more polarised, these questions feel increasingly important. Ann Widdecombe never occupied the middle ground. That was not her style. Some suggest she was more middle later in life than we thought, I am not too sure about that. But perhaps her passing serves as a reminder of why the rest of us should value it more highly. The future of our democracy may depend on our ability to find it again.