Emma Leeson

Emma’s background is as a primary teacher and deputy headteacher, facilitating philosophical enquiries for over 20 years in her own classrooms, schools and local community (including in the pub). She creates P4C resources for teachers and parents and wrote a monthly philosophy section for a children’s magazine for 5 years. Emma now writes blogs for Thoughtful and is a guest author for Tooled Up Education.

She has been a Thoughtful Trainer since 2017, delivering courses online and in-person and collaborating with P4C Leads, class teachers and leadership teams to introduce and embed P4C through modelling, co-facilitating and weaving P4C pedagogy and practice through the curriculum. As a Deputy Headteacher, she introduced P4C at whole school level, using enquiry to develop school values and a concept led curriculum, culminating in the SAPERE Silver Award. She has worked with secondary teachers, facilitating the application of P4C pedagogy within subjects such as English, PSHE and Art; also working as a secondary English Intervention Tutor, exploring philosophically rich concepts through a range of texts and creative writing stimuli, when teaching 1:1 and small groups from Year 7 to 11. Emma has written an article for the English Association’s ‘Use of English’ Journal on being a Philosophical Reader and blogs for NATE (National Association for the Teaching of English) as well.

Emma is a workshop facilitator for The Body Happy Organisation too.

Emma lives in Hampshire with her husband and two children and often finds it hard to get a word in at the dinner table when conversations range from food, to school, to politics and the philosophical.