Our Story
Our enlightening moments…
Hello. I’m Sian - the founder of Unravelled.
I’m passionate about helping young people to unlock their innate learning capacity and to achieve their educational goals - whatever that may mean to them.
I’m an experienced teacher, coach and owner of several businesses. I live in the beautiful Devon countryside with my husband, Alistair (my co-director) and our two daughters who have been home-educated for much of their lives.
I’ve been working and training in the educational field since I qualified as a teacher in 1996 and, during that time, I’ve developed a deeper understanding of how children learn and what, as educators and parents, we can do to best support their learning.
For the first half of my career, I taught across the primary age range (four to eleven) in a diverse mix of UK schools.
I love teaching and will never tire of seeing that ‘lightbulb’ moment when a student suddenly ‘gets it’!
I am fascinated by what makes humans ‘tick’ - why we think, feel and behave as we do - and I’m on a continuous journey of personal and professional development.
I have trained as a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), undertaken extensive training in Non-violent Communication (NVC) and I’m an Empowering Learning Practitioner. I’ve also recently completed a Level 3 diploma in Counselling.
From 2010-2024, I owned and ran a successful tutoring business - Flying Start Tuition, that supported children with maths, English and exam preparation.
During our heyday, we operated out of five tuition centres and had a team of around twenty tutors, teaching assistants and administrators.
We were also the sole providers of the charitable Tuition Plus Project, funded by the housing trust, Fairhive Homes, that provides free tuition for their resident children. This is a project we are proud to still be delivering today, through Unravelled, - and it’s now in its fifteenth year.
Sadly, a combination of the pressures of lockdowns, rising costs and some incorrect professional tax advice meant that we were forced to close Flying Start Tuition in March 2023.
It was a painful time, letting go of a business that had been my passion for the previous fourteen years. I needed some time to mourn the loss and to come to terms with a future I hadn’t anticipated. But I’m a firm believer that pain can be a tremendous source of learning and growth and I’m now able to look back on the Flying Start years with gratitude and pride.
Flying Start was not like any other tuition company. We had a unique approach that taught our students how to become more effective learners, alongside the curriculum or exam content.
At the heart of our approach was the core belief I’ve held throughout my career: that children (and adults) learn best when they’re interested in what they’re learning, enjoying the process and feeling emotionally, psychologically and physically well.
This may seem obvious but it never ceases to shock me just how much this seems to be consistently ignored throughout much of our education system.
Read more on this in my blog: Is School Fit for Purpose?
Our unique approach was born out of the challenges our Flying Start students were facing in their droves.
Many of them were anxious, unhappy and lacked self-belief. Some of them were fed-up and disengaged with learning. Others were keeping up in class but were feeling stressed-out and overwhelmed by the pressures of testing, assessments and homework. Many of them had been labelled as ‘failures’ or ‘disruptive’ and perceived themselves as ‘not good enough’ in some way.
It was clear to me that there was nothing ‘wrong’ with these students. But they did have challenges that were preventing them from learning effectively - or even at all. And, far from helping them, the school system was often amplifying (or even creating) their problems.
Even worse, these challenges were not only affecting their learning - they were impacting their whole lives - and their families too.
I wanted to do something to help.
Inspired by my training in NLP and NVC, I developed teaching and learning programmes designed to address these challenges and help our students to reignite their innate learning power.
Essentially, as well as teaching our students what to learn, we taught them how to learn more effectively - and how to overcome barriers to learning, such as anxiety, poor focus and self-doubt.
We also taught them a series of techniques: Learning Superpowers, that helped them to overcome learning barriers and reignite their passion for learning.
The results were remarkable.
Not only did our students make greater academic progress, they were also happier at school and home…
…And we won awards for our unique approach.
'I've discovered I can do things I didn't think I could do.'
11+ student
Unravelled was born from the culmination of what I’ve learned over the twenty-eight years I’ve worked in education.
It’s my way of contributing to the changes that I believe we need to see throughout educational institutions - both here in the UK, and indeed, all over the world.
Whilst acknowledging that the system is not how we would like it to be, there is much we can do to support children in order that they may thrive during their time in school.
For some, this may be helping them to achieve their academic potential; for others this may be more like damage limitation - helping them to survive the system in a way that leaves them relatively unscathed as they enter their adult life.
Interested in learning more about my vision for education?
Read my chapter in our best selling book: A New Paradigm of Education Rising. And if you like what you read, please leave us a review. :-)