I have done a lot of things in my career and have worked with people from many different educational and cultural backgrounds. I love learning new things and I have been in some form of training or education myself throughout my career. I hold 2 BA (Hons) degrees (English and Italian 1994 - 2:2 and Community Justice 2014 - first Class) and 1 FDSc degree (Addictions Counselling - not graded). My last DBS is dated 2016 and I have recently applied for a new one. I have worked in the public and private sectors which has required me to develop my own written and spoken skills, to be able to communicate with a wide range of professionals, clients and students. For the last 20 years I have worked for the criminal justice system and as well as providing written and oral reports to support courts and other functions, I have also participated in teaching and training a range of life skills. At the end of 2019 I started looking for ways to reduce my formal working hours and provide me with some geographical flexibility. I considered that my life experiences had perfectly placed me to teach the English language to others and I enrolled on The CELTA course offered by Canterbury University. I specifically choose this certificate because if offered assessed teacher training which I felt would be essential to ensure I could offer the best possible service to my future students. I successfully completed the certificate in the autumn of 2020; a little later than planned due to the disruption caused across the globe by COVID. Disruptions aside, the changes forced on colleges by COVID worked, I believe, to my benefit as I was able to gain experience working on an online platform during this period; something that may well not have happened otherwise. As such, I am now able to say that I am confident working on an online platform.