Summary
Tier Blundell was never a bad kid, he was bright and curious but also disruptive. He grew up sandwiched between two cultures and felt excluded from society. Those feelings were amplified when aged 11 Tier was informed by his school that he wouldn’t be welcome back following the summer holidays and was instead sent to a Pupil Referral Unit. He left there with no qualifications and a sense of shame, until the day he puts on a suit, turns up for an unscheduled meeting and demands another go at education — and the results are staggering.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting. |
| 0:04.7 | Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon, and I make podcasts for the BBC. |
| 0:08.4 | I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book. |
| 0:11.4 | But when I started commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts. |
| 0:15.4 | I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right mixture of sounds could take you into |
| 0:19.2 | a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to |
| 0:25.2 | give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole |
| 0:30.0 | new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories |
| 0:34.2 | that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.7 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:45.0 | Hello and welcome to the series about moments that shift and transform everything. |
| 0:50.7 | For our guest today, it was a meeting, a judgment and a rejection at primary school that set his life on a different course. And it wasn't until many years later that Tia Blundell made a decision to turn things around himself. He's here. Hello, Tia. Hi, Sean. How are you? Yeah, I'm good. Very good. Very well. |
| 1:12.4 | Good, good. Nice to see you. Let's start right at the beginning. You grew up in Northampton. Tell me a bit |
| 1:17.8 | about that. Yeah, so I grew up in the Spring Gardens area, which was quite a difficult area. We lived in a high |
| 1:24.2 | rise and my father was Pakistani and my mother was white English but they weren't |
| 1:29.6 | together there was some cultural issues so as I grew up it was challenging you know my mum had |
| 1:35.0 | difficult partners and I had some issues at home and then I started to kind of exhibit ADHD and |
| 1:41.8 | hyperactivity as it was called then you You didn't know it then, presumably. |
| 1:45.5 | No, I didn't know. |
| 1:46.6 | And I think my mum thought that it was e-numbers would sort of send me up the wall. |
| 1:51.1 | I remember there was lots of things I wasn't allowed to eat, orange things, baked beans, I think was on the list. |
| 1:55.9 | I don't know why. |
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