Ciaran Clinton, headteacher at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School in Birmingham, has led multiple Challenges Abroad expeditions with his students, taking cohorts to Nepal, Cambodia, and Peru. With a Thailand trip in the pipeline and a brand new global citizenship club, here’s his story of why these experiences matter far more than anything four walls can offer.

When Ciaran Clinton first spotted an email from Lizzie George, Head of Further Education Programmes, in what seemed like a mass mailshot to schools, most people would have scrolled past it. But for a teacher who had spent time in Japan and had long believed in the transformative power of international experience, something made him stop. “I spotted Lizzie’s email and it stood out,” he recalls. He was already thinking about how to make it happen. He replied immediately.

That instinct has since shaped the lives of dozens of young people from one of Birmingham’s most under-resourced communities. Around 50% of students at Archbishop Ilsley receive free school meals. Many have never travelled abroad. For Ciaran, that makes what Challenges Abroad offers not just valuable, but essential.

“To have opportunities like that, if you are from a deprived background, to go abroad, sometimes funded, sometimes not, it’s totally life changing.”

Breaking the limits students place on themselves

Ciaran knows firsthand what it feels like to grow up without global horizons. “When I was at school, I had opportunities and came from a really loving family, but because times were hard, I had three brothers, we didn’t really go abroad.” It was a stint in Japan in his twenties that changed everything. He saw his own world expand almost overnight, and he has spent the last twenty years trying to create that same moment for his students.

What strikes him most is not the logistics of international travel, but the invisible ceiling many young people carry with them. The idea that certain experiences, certain futures, simply are not meant for them.

“There’s the idea of entitlement,” he says. “You think, of course a student from a well-resourced school would do that. But that’s not me.” His role, as he sees it, is to dismantle that assumption before it takes hold. To look a student in the eye and say: it is you.

The trips deliver on that promise in ways no assembly or careers lesson can replicate. “If you go to Peru for two weeks on your own, without your mum and dad, you come back different,” he says. “When I say to them, how do you feel about going to university a couple of hours away, you can be there in two hours, it suddenly seems not so intimidating. Nothing’s insurmountable if you can go abroad.”