Fleur Sexton, chief executive, PET-Xi

For 30 years Fleur Sexton has led training provider PET-Xi, with its staff of largely neurodiverse leaders and can-do attitude to learners. She tells Jessica Hill how a crisis-induced pivot from adult education is bringing a fresh opportunity to help young people

It’s a special day today at PET-Xi, a small training provider that specialises in getting the hardest-to-reach young people back into education and work.

Staff and learners are gathered around a big pink cake at their open-plan office in Coventry, singing ‘happy birthday’ to commemorate 30 years since their vivacious CEO, Fleur Sexton, started the company.

The atmosphere is joyful, if slightly chaotic; the head of IT is dancing, while some teenagers giggle as they push each other about in office chairs.

They may have been ticked off for such behaviour at other education providers, but Fleur sees their breaktime antics as “time to let off steam”.

“It’s really important for them to see that business isn’t somewhere you’ve got to go into and be boring. Business is somewhere they’re accepted,” she says.

Today is a day for celebration, but it has been a tough year for PET-Xi.

In May, the number of full-time permanent staff was halved from 62 to 30 as it pivoted from being an adult education-focused provider towards supporting more children and young people.

PET-Xi’s on-site provision now consists of a Path2Apprenticeships programme for 19 to 29-year-olds and a youth guarantee trailblazer for 18 to 21-year-old NEETs, both funded via West Midlands Combined Authority. PET-Xi is also local-authority funded to provide alternative provision for school-age learners, and subcontracted by SCL Education Group for a 16-to-19 NEET study programme.

PET-Xi is a unique place to work. Like many of its learners, almost all its staff are neurodiverse.

Fleur and her 24-year-old son and chief operating officer, Jake Sexton, have ADHD, as have almost all her senior team. In a reversal of industry norms, during a recent diversity, equity and inclusion audit the pair were challenged on how they make “neurotypical” people “feel comfortable and fit in”, says Jake.

Teacher’s PET

It’s hard to mistake the staff since they all wear black with a top or necktie of cherry pink – a colour that perfectly reflects Fleur’s vibrant personality.

Fleur says she “never really planned to set up a company”, but after starting her career as a French teacher at a Catholic school in Kenilworth, at age 23 she began offering extra support to pupils struggling with languages and gained a reputation for being “good with the naughty kids”.

PET-Xi got its name from Teacher’s PET (progressive educational tools), which teachers would shorten to pet. ‘Xi’ stands for ‘explosive inspiration’, which was coined by learners but could just as well refer to Fleur’s thought processes as she bounces from one topic to the next.

Family affair

In the office that Fleur shares with Jake, he refers to her as ‘Fleur’; she reverts to being ‘mum’ when they’re back home.

Jake had occasionally accompanied his mum to work since age seven, but his training really began at 16 when he began an apprenticeship at PET-Xi.

Fleur’s husband, sister, mother and father have also worked for her.

Fleur sees PET-Xi as a second family to those it supports, with many former learners progressing to become mentors.

She says the provider has never excluded anyone, nor has a member of staff ever been attacked, which she puts down to its adoption of trauma-informed practice.

Bad behaviour is generally interpreted as unmet need, and staff “operate rules based on equity”, with a “shared power balance” between learners and staff.

“If somebody’s got an incredibly volatile, hostile home life and they’re turning up late, then social equity would tell you they’ve turned up on time,” says Fleur. “For them, they’ve turned up as soon as they can.”

The modus operandi doesn’t suit everyone; staff “tend to stay forever or not at all”.

Fleur only wants employees for whom the work is “a vocation”, and who believe that “if they’ve got learners phoning them on a Saturday, that’s just how it pans out”.

PET-Xi’s interview process includes placing a young person in its lobby when the candidate enters; “If the candidate ignores them, we know they’re not going to last five minutes here”.

Recruiter Kirstie Price entered PET-Xi aged 14 as a learner when she lived in a children’s home. She says Fleur became a “second mum”, dropping her off at counselling sessions, putting her up in a hotel when she had nowhere to stay and advocating for her when she was excluded from college.

Life moves quickly at PET-Xi. As Fleur introduces me to her curriculum and quality lead, Chris Haresign, she casually informs him that he is being promoted to managing director.

Haresign ran a web development firm, then worked in senior management in schools for 10 years before joining PET-Xi. Today, he is advising a school on its alternative provision unit which he explains it’s “spending a fortune on”, but which is “not working”. 

His lead trainer in schools, Ma’asoom Mahmood, joined PET-Xi over a decade ago after studying accounting and finance at university. He could have got a higher-paid role in the city, but chose this job for the “dopamine” hit of helping others. “It’s so important to society that companies offer this profit-for-purpose service,” he says.

Personalised provision

Meanwhile, peer mentor Teddy Kendrick, 15, is not in a talkative mood, having recently broken up with his girlfriend and stayed up all last night playing games. But Fleur lavishes praise on him for showing up for work.

“That shows incredible resilience – six weeks ago he wouldn’t have turned up.”

Teddy’s mum, Emma, says PET-Xi has been “life-changing” for her son. His autism and ADHD meant he struggled in mainstream school, then experienced challenges in his £54,000-a-year placement at an independent special school.

Emma had to lobby her council hard to get Teddy moved to PET-Xi, despite its fees being more than 50 per cent lower.

PET-Xi provides Teddy with accelerated GCSE learning, pastoral support and gym membership, and today Fleur has given him responsibility for taking PET-Xi’s promotional photographs.

Fleur explains how PET-Xi can write courses on a week-to-week basis, creating “individualised plans” for learners with specific needs, which “colleges can’t do”.

Emma says Teddy’s previous school “labelled him as not wanting to engage”, but she believes “it should be the other way around – you’ve got to find the right provision to engage with the child”. She adds: “PET-Xi had more resources available. If Teddy didn’t work with one maths teacher, they’d try another personality.

“He can still be a bloody nightmare behaviourally at home, but he’s thriving academically.”

PET angels

PET-Xi’s alternative provision now even extends to primary school-aged children. One of its incoming learners is seven years old; he had “nowhere else to go” after being rejected from 40 schools, Fleur explains. His EHCP requires him to have a padded room, which she has promised to provide.

“It’s not hard, is it? You just get a load of carpets. There’s no, ‘we’ll have to see if we can meet need’ – we will meet need.”

Fleur always makes a point of meeting the young person and their parent(s) before reading their EHCP.

She admits PET-Xi’s culture of making decisions based on “what’s right for the learner”, means some decisions “make no commercial sense whatsoever”.

“I think angels look after us at PET,” she adds.

Trailblazer NEETs

PET-Xi has just clinched £144,000 through a youth guarantee trailblazer to support 18 to 21-year-old NEETs, which Fleur considers an ideal-sized contract as it’s “small enough to have time to put the individual effort in”.

Operating this and Path2Apprenticeships gives PET-Xi a “buffet of provision” that “means you can really get young people what they need”.  

PET-Xi starts both courses with a ‘Find My Why’ welcome session.

At today’s, author Megan Jayne Crabbe is talking to two young female NEETs about her book We Don’t Make Ourselves Smaller Here, about the importance of “being yourself”.

Nearby is a music room with donations on the way from Coventry Music to link guitars up to computers for recording. It’s where head of music therapy Jamie Sheerman, a musical theatre director who also leads three choirs, gets learners to write songs to help them release their trauma, “rather than just talking about it”. 

Independent life skills are taught next door in a brightly coloured, homely ‘studio apartment’ room, where guests are invited in to talk to learners about debt and dealing with landlords.

While much of PET-Xi’s learning is done on screens, little of it is remote. Fleur professes to “hate remote teaching with a passion,” seeing it as a “desire for efficiency that puts everybody in their bedrooms”.

Changing times

PET-Xi therefore tried to deliver its adult provision (which extended from Hull to Brighton and Bournemouth) face-to-face, and Fleur admits they “almost went bust in the process”.

A three-month delay in issuing adult education contracts was the last straw for Fleur. “It’s a hell of a long time when it costs £180,000 a month to keep this place just break even. I don’t think government understands the reality of business, because they’ve not been in it.”

PET-Xi has had to stop running its adult courses in counselling, cybersecurity and health, and its remaining freelance adult education staff are focused instead on “employability” and “community stability”.

Fleur lavishes praise on one of her remaining, longstanding adult skills trainers, Ruth Lowbridge, for staying on as a freelancer. But Lowbridge admits that at the time, she was tempted to leave the ITP sector, given its “instability” due to reliance on short-term, unpredictable funding streams. “How many quality people are being lost from this industry?” she asks.

Ready for college

PET-Xi has also just started working with Coventry College on a programme to get ex-AP learners college-ready, which Fleur says will teach them “resilience, self-regulation and knowing their own triggers”.

Its upstairs space will soon be transformed into a “college for kids from AP” to do mainly level 2 courses and English and maths GCSEs.

There is a growing national market of unregistered AP, and Fleur is critical that much of it is “diversional”, such as farm and football-based provision. She believes it is becoming harder for young people coming from AP to access apprenticeships, because of their limited qualifications.

“Football is great, but it’s not what they can build a life on. Our job as educators is not to babysit young people, it’s to give them a place in the community. We’ve got to be really careful of the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Joy first, skills second

Fleur still loves teaching and is added to the teaching rota when there’s a gap. She hopes to pass the strategy side of the business over to Jake. Meanwhile, she will help run a school Coventry Council has asked PET-Xi to set up. “I want to be working with children again – as I get older, I think that’s where I’m best,” she says.

Fleur has no ambitions to become a large provider, as this might limit her ability to put her learners’ needs first. She has had “a lot of requests” from private equity interests seeking to buy her out, but is determined not to succumb.

As I leave, she sums up the key to what makes PET-Xi different; it is “all about joy” rather than skills.

“The skills are secondary,” Fleur says. “It’s about that moment when a young person realises they can make friends, that they have got something to offer the world.”