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It didn't begin in a casino or at a racetrack. It began with fantasy baseball — statistics, sport, friendship, and the desire to belong.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Saul Malek, a former compulsive gambler who has turned his lived experience into work helping schools, parents and young people understand one of the fastest-growing and most overlooked risks they face. What looked completely innocent became sports betting, secrecy, isolation and addiction.

Together, they explore a question many schools are only beginning to confront: if we routinely educate young people about vaping, alcohol, drugs and online safety, why are we still talking so little about gambling?

In this conversation, we cover:

• The moment it crossed a line: Saul told his mother he had stopped, and instead learned how to hide the money and the behaviour from her
• Why the first warning signs may have nothing to do with losing money, and what teachers and parents should actually look for
• The shift from gambling as a social activity to preferring to watch games alone, because other people interfered with the intensity
• Why gambling hides in plain sight in schools while vaping, smoking and alcohol get far more attention
• The uncomfortable reason some schools are reluctant to acknowledge it at all, and what admitting a problem means for reputation and parents
• Why a single assembly isn't enough, and Saul's argument that gambling education is like planting a tree — cultivated consistently over time
• What schools can do now, from mathematics and financial education to phone policies, staff awareness and clearer safeguarding structures

A conversation about a risk that may be far closer to young people than many of us realise.

A huge thank you to Saul for speaking so openly about his own experience, including the parts that are uncomfortable to revisit, and for turning it into work that helps young people recognise the warning signs early.

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The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

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An uncle's blunt question in Carmarthenshire — A levels or work? — sent John Gwyn Jones to a Midland Bank counter. Fifty years later he runs a federation of 110 schools.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with John Gwyn Jones MBE, a proud Welshman whose journey from that bank counter to CEO of FOBISIA has spanned five decades and reshaped British international education across Asia.

What pulled him away from the bank, a job he genuinely enjoyed, was his brother's stories from a Leicester staffroom. Three years of teacher training, a first post in a Welsh primary school, and a career that has since taken in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos and Thailand.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What his brother said that changed his mind about banking
• The contrast between job security in a UK school and the two- and three-year contract cycle of international leadership
• Stepping out of the classroom into a non-teaching deputy headship, and why he pushed to go back
• The hardest year of his career: teaching Year 1 by choice, just to understand how young children learn
• Leading FOBISIA today — nearly 110 schools across 20 countries — and what that vantage point reveals that a single head of school never sees
• How FOBISIA intervenes when member schools hit regulatory walls, from exam boards during COVID to visa restrictions affecting students from Myanmar
• Why diversity among teaching staff still lags far behind diversity among students, and what he says to parents who push back
• The MBE, the leadership award from Julia Gillard, and why neither was ever the point
• His honest advice to his twenty-two-year-old self

A huge thank you to John for his time, his honesty, and for a conversation that — fifty years in — he says he'd do all again.

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The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

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Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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Classrooms of sixty to seventy children, one teacher, under a tree. Lea chewed food to feed her infant daughter the way the local mothers did, and raised her children inside a compound behind razor wire.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Lea — a thirty-year international educator whose family has lived and taught across the Chatham Islands, Papua New Guinea and China — for one of the show's most honest conversations yet about what it takes to raise a family overseas.

Together, they trace the moves that shaped that family: leaving a principal's role on the remote Chatham Islands for four years in Papua New Guinea, and then China eight years ago, where her husband stepped back from a senior management career to become a trailing spouse.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What Papua New Guinea reshaped in her, as a parent and as an educator
• Her husband's move from senior management to trailing spouse, and the identity loss that came with it
• Surviving COVID-era border closures that meant missing her son's wedding and her granddaughter's heart surgery
• Her daughter's experience of racism at school, navigated as both a parent and a member of the leadership team
• What she wishes every school understood about third culture kids: that they should be celebrated, not tolerated
• Trailing spouses, blended families, and what holds a family together across four countries
• Why, after five children, she has come to believe home was never really a place at all

A genuinely candid conversation about the parts of international life that rarely get spoken about openly.

A huge thank you to Lea for her openness, and for a conversation that asks a harder question than it first appears: what actually makes somewhere home.

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The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

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Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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If you have a problem in your own country, going international probably isn't the solution. Jasmine read that on LinkedIn and nodded — because too many people are running from something that will simply follow them.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Jasmine, an educator entering her twelfth year in international education, with teaching and leadership experience across Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Malaysia. She began as an English teacher in Hong Kong, became Head of English and joined the senior leadership team, then moved to the UK before continuing to Malaysia, where she has recently stepped into the role of Assistant Head of Primary. She navigates this path as half of a teaching couple.

Together, they flip the question most conversations about international education never ask: not why you should go, but whether you should at all — and what separates those who thrive from those who simply relocate their problems to a new postcode.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Walking into a UK staff room after seven years in Hong Kong, and why the sound of people actually talking to each other felt strange
• Why "read with the children" means something completely different depending on where you learned to teach, and what that moment with her TA revealed
• Gordon Ramsay in a dim sum kitchen, and why his skills weren't wrong, just not what that environment demanded
• The prep school offer she turned down because her husband didn't get a position, and what making one decision for two careers actually takes
• "The school gives you a job. The city gives you a life." — the question she wishes someone had told her to ask before signing
• Why cultural awareness isn't something you learn in a training session, and the Pride and Prejudice problem behind most misunderstandings in international schools

A huge thank you to Jasmine for her honesty, her warmth, and for reminding us that running towards something is always more powerful than running away from it.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

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Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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A random school inspection revealed that Gavin McCormack had been running a Montessori classroom without knowing it.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Gavin — Montessori Australia Ambassador, founder of nine schools and three teacher training centres in Nepal, and bestselling author of The Potential in Every Child — for the show's widest-reach conversation yet.

Together, they trace the moment that changed his career: teaching refugee children in Sydney who had fled Libya, Afghanistan and Syria, and what that classroom taught him before anyone gave it a name.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What parents actually want from a school — safety, intelligence, happiness, in that exact order — and why schools chasing rankings get the order backwards
• The contagion principle, and why children can sense an unprepared teacher before a word is said
• The neuroscience of why your brain deletes almost everything you learn in a day, unless it involved emotion, risk, choice, or something you physically touched
• Building nine schools and three teacher training centres in Nepal, and what that took
• Authenticity, trust and resilience — and why the first two can't be trained into a teacher who doesn't have them
• What Gavin would throw out first if he built a school from scratch tomorrow

A huge thank you to Gavin for his time, and for a conversation that makes an uncomfortably good case that most of what we do in a school day doesn't survive the night.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

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Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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Nine conversations in, none of the guests had heard of Culturally Mediated Leadership. All of them were doing it.

In this solo episode of The Common Room, Joshua steps away from the interview format to reflect on the show's first nine conversations — what he's learned, what's changed since launch, and what comes next.

He revisits the moments that stayed with him: Matt Allio on cultural difference in business, Dr Howard Stribbell on transparency versus clarity, a trailing spouse on identity and sacrifice, Izyan on holding trust between staff and school, and Chris Hoare on adapting the same leadership instinct across three continents.

In this episode:

• Each conversation read back through Culturally Mediated Leadership, the framework Joshua is developing through his doctoral research at the University of Bath
• Cultural reflexivity, symbolic sensitivity, stakeholder interpretation, strategic mediation and adaptive bridging, quietly present in every conversation
• What the guests were doing without a name for it, and why a framework only earns its keep if it describes something already happening
• An honest update on the first month: over 350 downloads and more than 5,000 direct interactions in four weeks, with zero paid promotion
• The move to a weekly release, every Tuesday, 5pm Malaysia time

Next episode: Gavin McCormack — Montessori Australia Ambassador, founder of nine schools and three teacher training centres in Nepal, and bestselling author of The Potential in Every Child — on what actually makes a lesson, or a life, stick.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

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Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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Nine o'clock at night, alone in his office, and a mouse for company. That was the night Howard Stribbell first felt the full weight of what he now calls the loneliest seat.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Dr Howard Stribbell — a school leader with over twenty-eight years in international education, from classroom teacher to head of school to strategic advisor to the owners and boards who shape the sector from the top. He grew the International School of Macau from 300 to 1,400 students over twelve years, and is now founder of Hive School International and the Canadian Overseas Schools Association. He holds a PhD in educational leadership from Assumption University and is the author of The Loneliest Seat.

Together, they explore the side of leadership that rarely gets spoken about: the weight of accountability without a genuine peer to carry it with, and the quiet cost of trying to lead authentically inside an institution that often asks you to do something else.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Why he wore a mask of confidence early on, and the moment it started to feel more real than who he actually was underneath
• The difference between authenticity and oversharing, and why what your team wants from you isn't transparency, it's clarity
• Responsibility, accountability and liability — the framework Howard uses to explain why teachers, heads and owners each carry a different kind of pressure
• "It's not what you intend, it's the consequence" — on owning impact instead of hiding behind good intentions
• What it takes to build other leaders, rather than holding onto the work yourself
• Why a school's culture shouldn't depend on the personality of the person at the top, and what happens when it does

A huge thank you to Howard for his candour, and for reminding us that the mask we wear to appear capable often costs us more than we realise.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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Matt Allio's first entry into Chinese education wasn't really about education at all.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Matt — an American educator who spent over two decades as a classroom teacher and head of school in California before becoming senior advisor to schools across China on leadership training, teacher coaching and Western pedagogical practice. He holds a fellowship from Columbia University and a master's in elementary education from California State University, Northridge. Over the past two years he has visited schools ranging from elite urban campuses to government experimental schools, building a rare ground-level view of how two very different systems actually work.

Together, they explore what changes and what stubbornly stays the same when you stop applying one country's template to another's classroom — and why genuine cross-cultural leadership starts with observation, not expertise.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What his first entry into Chinese education taught him about doing business across cultures
• Why fluency shapes far more than communication, affecting cadence, trust, and the ability to read a room
• "Bob" — a brilliant, overlooked student in a Chinese classroom, and what he reveals about who a system is really built to reach
• What each system could genuinely learn from the other, without romanticising either
• The "don't boil the ocean" principle, and why leading with curiosity opens more doors than leading with answers
• Why "no problem" doesn't always mean what it says, and how to navigate diplomacy, face and trust across cultures
• How Matt measures success in a role where he doesn't own the outcome, only the suggestion

A huge thank you to Matt for his candour, his curiosity, and for reminding us that the best cross-cultural leaders are the ones who spend more time listening than talking.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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"What do you think?" empowers a team in one culture and signals incompetence in another. Chris Hoare has led in both.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Chris — an international school leader with experience across the UK, the Middle East and Latin America. He is currently Head of Upper School at Colegio Peruano Británico, a Nord Anglia school in Lima, having previously been part of a founding leadership team in Dubai. He teaches on NPQ programmes for international school cohorts and is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Chartered College of Teaching.

Together, they explore what leading across cultures actually demands, and why the approaches that earn credibility in one place land completely differently in another.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What the "what do you think?" problem reveals about the assumptions leaders carry without knowing it
• The behaviour management example that shows how the same policy can mean something entirely different to parents depending on where in the world you are
• The VAC framework — Visible, Accessible, Credible — and why Chris's father, a police training officer, gave him the best leadership advice he has received
• Psychological safety in schools, and why kindness and authority are not the opposites they are often taken to be
• Authenticity as the one thing that holds constant across every culture, and the parent who came back a month later to say he respected a decision he disagreed with
• Why nobody teaches you how to make decisions, and what's missing for ambitious younger leaders in international education

A huge thank you to Chris for his openness, his energy, and for reminding us that admitting what you don't know is one of the greatest strengths a leader can have.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.

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Culture shock rarely hits when you arrive. It waits until about six months in, when everyone assumes you've settled.

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Dean Wall — an international educator with over a decade of experience living and teaching across Egypt, Ireland, Alaska and Vietnam. He has taught ESL, Global Perspectives and Sociology, and is currently completing an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King's College London.

That dual lens — lived international experience alongside current academic study — makes for an unusually reflective account of what repeated relocation does to identity, belonging and the mind, and why the effects rarely show up when you expect them.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What the six-month mark actually feels like
• How resilience can quietly tip into exhaustion, and why "pushing through" isn't the full picture
• The revolving door of the expat community, and why friendships built fast can dissolve just as fast
• How loneliness sits as a hidden layer beneath an outwardly full and adventurous life
• What sobriety taught Dean about identity, socialising, and rebuilding friendships without alcohol as the glue
• Why therapy, journaling and boundary-setting became essential across multiple moves

A huge thank you to Dean for his time, his openness, and his reminder that vulnerability — not just resilience — is often what actually builds community.

Support the show

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Darryl Sussex — it is an independent project, produced in a personal capacity and outside of any professional or institutional role. Views expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not represent any employer, university, or organisation. No guest, organisation, or product featured has paid for or provided any consideration for their appearance.

Follow along and get in touch:

LinkedIn: linkedin/joshuadarrylsussex

Instagram: instagram/the_common_room_podcast/

Website: joshuadarrylsussex.com 

New episodes released regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next conversation.