My guest this week is writer Caro Giles who talks to me about work, motherhood and sustaining creativity amid care responsibilities. Caro reflects on her parents’ contrasting models of work, her determination to train as an actor, and how class dynamics and financial insecurity in London pushed her toward teaching. She describes becoming a mother of four, then ending her marriage, and raising two autistic daughters, including 12 years of home educating largely because school and support systems failed her family. Writing began as connection and selfhood during isolation, leading to an online master’s, a BBC Countryfile New Nature Writer award, and memoirs Twelve Moons and Unschooled, the latter shaped by tribunals and advocacy. Caro discusses stigma around home education and benefits, precarious creative income, what structural changes she’d make, and hopes for an agent, further books, and blended teaching/retreat work.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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