Kate Markland Tom Hirst BCB Radio Bradford

Live on BCB Radio with Tom Hirst

May 23, 2025•2 min read

Last week Kate joined Peg Alexander live on BCB Radio alongside Tom Hirst, Year 6 teacher at Dixon's Manningham Primary, to talk about The Adventures of Bradford, a storytelling project that began with one question to a ten-year-old boy and is now moving through classrooms across the city.

The Adventures of Gabriel began one evening after reading Treasure Island. Gabriel had a moment of creative clarity. Kate asked if he'd like to be the hero of his own story, and he began narrating: phoenixes, sea monsters, a wise owl, and a platypus sidekick. Kate wrote down everything he said, week after week. With a little help from Grandad and some illustrations, it became a book. It was never meant to be published. But when Kate shared the PDF with teachers and psychologists, they were clear: get this out now. What made it special was simple. It was a child telling a story to other children.That is rarer than it should be.

Tom Hirst was one of the first teachers to recognise what the project offered. As he said on air: "It was about breaking barriers to education. It gave our children the chance to see themselves as real writers." At Dixon's Manningham, children worked in pairs: one narrating, one scribing, exactly as Kate had done with Gabriel. No blank pages. No pressure. Just imagination.

Tom described watching his students become fully absorbed in their own worlds. Dragons. Superheroes. Zombie apocalypses. The boys in particular were captivated. But every child found something in it, including those with special educational needs and those carrying emotional challenges. "We didn't see any shyness," Tom said. "They were lifting each other's stories. That's not just literacy. That's emotional intelligence."

What struck Peg Alexander listening was the same thing teachers see in every session: these children were not competing. They were building each other up. Asking things like "What colour were the dragon's eyes?" and "What else do we need to know about the zombie backstory?" Storytelling as genuine connection, not performance.

The conversation touched on the bigger picture too. Boys being steered away from creative expression. The fear children feel in front of a blank page. The pressure schools are under to deliver results while somehow also attending to the whole child. StoryQuest creates space for curiosity, identity, and vulnerability in ways that serve every learner, and the data across 465 children in 9 schools confirms what teachers like Tom already knew from watching it happen in their classrooms.

"They were lifting each other's stories. That's not just literacy—that's emotional intelligence."— Tom Hirst, Year 6 Teacher, Dixon's Manningham Primary

Kate

Kate Markland is a former award-winning physiotherapist with twenty years of clinical experience, the founder of StoryQuest Global, and the co-author of the international bestselling Adventures of Gabriel children's book series. She developed the StoryQuest methodology from clinical listening principles built across two decades of practice. Taken into schools across the UK, it achieved 100% engagement across 465 children in nine schools with zero behavioural incidents, including children with SEND, EAL learners, and reluctant writers. The research was conducted using Classic Grounded Theory across 318 children, identifying seven self-leadership transformations. It has been presented to the British Psychological Society, accepted by UK Parliament, and submitted to UNICEF. The methodology was built during the hardest period of Kate's life. One hour a week on FaceTime with her son. No desk. No classroom. No permission. What came out of that constraint became an Amazon number one bestseller, a validated research framework, and a movement now reaching schools and families across the UK, India, Pakistan, Canada, the United States, Nigeria, and Australia. Kate has been featured on BBC News, Times Radio, and in international publications across multiple countries. She has submitted evidence to the Justice Committee, the Independent Review of Social Work Regulation, and the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. She was awarded the PhysioTimes Women in Leadership Award. She was told she was the danger. She built the proof that she was the answer.

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