Perhaps a career in education was always on the cards for Gavin Grift, the highly respected founder of Grift Education. After all, his mother sent him off to school at the tender age of four, hoping it might keep her lively boy occupied.
But inside the classroom, shyness took over. Eventually, struggling to find meaning in what he was learning, a young Gavin became almost completely disengaged – until two pivotal teachers recognised he was struggling.
Those caring teachers not only transformed his interest in learning but altered the course of his future. By Grade 6, his mind was made up: he would also become a teacher and help other students in the same way he had been helped.
While Gavin has now worked in the educational sector for more than three decades, none of that early passion to make a difference has faded.
In the beginning, he worked as a classroom teacher, and later as a school leader, before realising he could make an even bigger impact by teaching the educators themselves. Since then he’s worked as a behaviour management consultant at troubled schools in the UK, presented at conferences in the US and Sweden, and spent four years teaching cognitive coaching methods to educators at Singapore’s largest international school.