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ABOUT DAVID MANUELL

Founder & Director

I've done one job for thirty years, in different rooms. The job is: sit with someone, listen properly, draw or write down what they tell me, and work out together what to do with it. The settings have changed — play schemes in South Wales, Scottish outdoor centres, a Steiner community, FE colleges, NHS team leaders, postgraduates on Access to Work, residents at Ditchburn Place. The method hasn't.

Play work and outdoor instruction (1991–2001)

The earliest version was play. Through the 1990s I coordinated ESOL volunteer projects and ran immersive summer play environments for children aged five to ten — two weeks of open play with shared decision-making and a budget to manage. Bridges was an EU-funded project that brought a carousel of play activities to deprived areas across South Wales, working out of sports halls and working men's clubs for four weeks at a time. I was organising international volunteers, planning cooking and activities, and learning that if you let people set the direction, the work gets better.

After Goldsmiths, with limited options in London, I completed a Diploma in Outdoor Studies and worked as an instructor at Scottish Centres — leading activities for everyone from primary school groups to shipbuilders, and contributing murals and signage between sessions. The outdoor work taught me to read the person in front of me before deciding what we'd do together. What they can do, what they need to feel safe, what will stretch them without breaking the trust.

Garvald West Linton (2001–2006)

Six years at Garvald West Linton, a Steiner-based community supporting adults with profound learning difficulties, including non-verbal residents. I lived and worked alongside the people I was supporting. That's where I learnt that conversation isn't just talking — it's posture, attention, time, and not filling silence.

While I was there, I made the Garvald Globe — an eight-page magazine produced with residents and staff for two years. It was the editorial meeting and the conversation that came with it — a group coming up with celebrations, images, comments for us to capture. It was the first version of what I now do at Ditchburn. Putting someone's words on paper changes what those words mean. Once they're printed, they're official. They mattered enough to print.

Diagnosis and the gap

I was diagnosed with dyslexia during my PGCE in Art and Design at Goldsmiths. There was no follow-up, no information, no strategies — just the diagnosis. I was left to figure it out. Years later I came to understand my ADHD and autism, and how they sit alongside the dyslexia. The challenges don't go away. You learn the shape of them.

This is why I work the way I do. I know what it feels like when someone gives you a tool without context, or talks at you instead of with you. I've been on the wrong end of training that wasn't designed for how I think.

The 2010 Access to Work session

In 2010, Access to Work provided me with assistive technology training. The trainer politely lectured at me, discouraged questions, and ran through equipment with no reference to my actual work or life. I knew within five minutes that nothing from that session would leave the room. The kit was real. The strategy was absent.

That session became the template for how not to do this work. Everything I've done since is in response to it.

Further education, SEN, and 1:1 teaching (2007–2018)

After Garvald I trained in literacy teaching — City & Guilds Level 4, Orpington College — and spent the next decade in classrooms. Lecturer in Functional Skills English at Swindon, Cambridge Regional, and Hertford Regional colleges. Key Skills and Employment Club at Adult Education Cambridgeshire from September 2016 to November 2017, running sessions at the central library. SEN maternity cover at Ivel Valley School. 1:1 home tutoring for NTA in Wilmslow.

The students I worked with had been labelled failures. The tools that got them back into the room were familiar materials — job applications, song lyrics, sports reports. Things they already cared about. Once the reading felt relevant, the writing followed. The method was always the same: start where the person already is, not where the curriculum says they should be.

What I couldn't resolve was the exam. The GCSE promoted functional skills and independent thinking, but the questions themselves were built on crafted language that suited a particular kind of learner. My students could do the thinking. They couldn't do the phrasing. I kept questioning the context — whether the test was measuring what it claimed to measure, or just selecting for people who write a certain way.

Cambridge Regional College ended through compulsory redundancy in 2011. The pattern across this decade was short-term contracts, maternity cover, agency work, restructures. No role lasted long enough to build from. The skill underneath kept developing — reading the person, adapting the material, working with what they bring — but it was developing inside structures that didn't see it.

Assistive technology trainer (2018–present)

For seven years I've worked as an associate AT trainer — first with Diversity and Ability in Brighton, then with Neurobox in Cambridge, supporting people on Disabled Students' Allowance and Access to Work. The clients have included postgraduates, NHS team leaders, sole traders, theatre workers, foremen, technicians.

I didn't become fully confident in this work until about five years in. That's when I recognised how my ADHD and autism sat alongside the dyslexia and shaped my daily decisions. During Mountain Leader training I remember thinking about how people get lost with maps — they know the landscape is in front of them, but they can't connect the symbols on the page to the ground under their feet. Training without a visible map feels the same. So I build time between sessions, work with people's strengths, and make the map visible.

A few examples that explain the method better than any description:

The boatyard foreman. He'd been awarded technology to read documents aloud. We started there. As the session progressed it became clear his bigger struggle was writing — not just at work but at home, responding to letters from his son's school. We explored voice-to-text. The tool he ended up using helped him at work, and helped him write to the school. Technology should solve problems in the whole person's life, not just the workplace problem the assessor noticed.

The NHS team leader. She was exploring technology for her own neurodiversity, but also wanted to improve the resources her team used with outpatients with learning disabilities. We worked with mind maps and PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System). What started as her personal toolbox became materials she shared with colleagues — communicating routines and timetables in formats that worked for the people they supported. One conversation, several beneficiaries.

The zine as editing tool. Some clients struggle to engage with a flat screen — staring at a website draft and trying to find words. I use an eight-page folded magazine instead. The same content, but in a form you can hold, write on, fold, re-order. It gets people writing who couldn't write before. The form matters.

The Library Model (2024–25)

I stepped back from the assistive technology contracting market in 2024–25. The bidding system was structured in ways that prevented this kind of work. Sessions were timed, prescribed, and measured against criteria that didn't reflect what people actually needed. I wrote up what should replace it.

Writing the Library Model was the first time I'd produced sustained structured work entirely on my own terms — no employer, no deadline, no framework but my own. And that's when I finally noticed my own strategies. Mark-making with a pen to start ideas. Voice transcription to get thoughts down. Drawing away from the screen. Working in chunks. Printing things out so I could see them. Seven years of teaching other people to find their process, and I hadn't recognised mine until the external pressure was removed.

The Library Model proposes assistive technology provision as a library service — borrowable, returnable, supported by knowledgeable staff who help people choose what fits, rather than rationed allocations dictated by funding category. It's a policy document, not a business plan. It sits on this site because it's part of the same observation that drives the rest of the work: people learn best in conversation, with options to try, and time to reflect.

You can read the full Library Model document [here].

For The Record CIC (2025–present)

For The Record was registered as a Community Interest Company in August 2025. It moves the same method into a community setting — older adults, people whose experiences don't make it into the official record, people who haven't been asked.

The first sessions started at Ditchburn Place sheltered housing in Cambridge in October 2025, in collaboration with Teresa Hurrell and Cambridge City Council. It sometimes took a month before a resident chose to join in. I'd be there drawing, present in the room, not asking questions. The act of drawing beside someone creates the space for them to decide, on their own terms, that they want to talk.

The first completed zines are on this site. Three residents have given feedback that's also on this site. Cambridge City Council's Sheltered Housing Herald featured the project in their Winter 2025 edition.

Different rooms. Same method. Conversation first, technology second, and a document at the end that says: this happened, this mattered, and it's on the record.