This is the first issue of The Monthly Edge, my monthly newsletter. One email a month, the stuff I actually use. If you’d rather get it straight to your inbox, you can subscribe here.

And I want to start with the one thing that runs through everything I do.

Busy is not the same as good.

Five jobs, four hours

People ask how I juggle it. Consultancy, keynotes, lecturing at UA92, the platform work, all of it. The honest answer surprises them, because it’s the opposite of what they expect.

I don’t grind harder. I protect four hours.

Four hours a day, booked in my calendar like a meeting I can’t move, for the work that actually matters. No phone. No inbox. No “quick chats.” Just the deep, hard thinking that moves something forward. The rest of the day, the calls and admin and the bits everyone else thinks is the job, gets squeezed into what’s left. And funny enough, it all still gets done.

Because here’s what I learned the hard way, back when I had the business and the family and the money and the semi-pro football and a head that was quietly falling apart. Busyness is a disease. We wear it like a badge. “I’m so busy” really means “I’m scared to stop and look at whether any of this is working.”

Four protected hours beats twelve scattered ones. Every time.

So my one ask for you this week. Open your calendar. Book two hours tomorrow for the work that actually matters, and guard it like it’s a meeting with your most important client. Because it is.

The tool I’ve finally learned

I’ll be straight with you. For years I used AI like most people do. Bashed in a quick prompt, got back some beige corporate mush, and either binned it or, worse, sent it out in my name. It never sounded like me. It made me a bit lazy.

That’s changed, and it’s changed how much I get done.

I now treat AI like a proper assistant, not a vending machine. I dictate my thinking, the messy, Northern, half-formed version, and let it do the structuring and the donkey work while I keep the judgement. I’ve built little agents that do jobs for me. I’m learning skills I’d have paid a consultant for two years ago.

I’m betting on this. Not because AI replaces people. It won’t. But the people who learn to actually use it are going to walk past the people who won’t. That’s not hype, it’s just where this is going.

So each month I’ll share a proper step-by-step guide in the newsletter. The real “do this, then this” version, not the theory.

Safe enough to be challenged

Quick one, but it might be the most important thing here.

Psychological safety is the most misunderstood phrase in leadership right now. People think it means being nice. Soft. No conflict. It doesn’t.

Psychological safety means people are safe enough to be challenged. Safe enough to say “I think that’s wrong,” safe enough to admit they’re stuck, safe enough to be a whole human at work instead of a polished performance of one.

The command-and-control stuff, demand it, drive it through, “because I said so,” doesn’t get you their best work. It gets you their quietest. People go quiet, they stop telling you the truth, and you find out about the problem when it’s far too late.

Try this. In your next one-to-one, ask one question and then actually shut up and listen. “What’s something you think I’m getting wrong?” It’ll be awkward. Sit in the awkward. That’s where the trust gets built.

Now the big one. They scrapped the Sport Premium.

If you work anywhere near schools or children’s sport, you’ll have seen the word. Scrapped.

On 21 May, the government binned the PE and Sport Premium, the £320 million a year that’s gone to primary schools since 2013, and replaced it with a new Partnerships Network from 2027. Cue the panic. “The money’s gone.” “Coaches are finished.” All of it.

Take a breath. That’s not the real story.

The money for kids’ sport hasn’t gone. There’s over a billion pounds going in over three years. But here’s the honest bit, because you deserve honest. The pot schools controlled directly is going, the like-for-like funding is smaller, and from 2027 it’ll be routed through a network instead of landing in a school’s account. So it’s not “nothing’s changed” either.

The route is changing. And one word in that announcement changes everything for anyone who coaches in schools.

The new funding names “expert and quality assured coaches.” Quality assured. And nobody has yet defined what that actually means or how you prove it.

Now, you might know this about me or you might not. Before all this, I was Head of Quality and Education at a national franchise, and I built and ran a quality system across more than two thousand coaches. So this one’s personal.

Because here’s the same truth again, just wearing different clothes. A child being busy, active and happy in a PE lesson is not the same as a child learning. Busy isn’t good. And for years, “we think our coaching’s decent” was good enough. It isn’t any more.

So I’ve built CQI. Continuous Quality Improvement. It’s a system that observes a real lesson, scores it against the same reference points schools are judged by, sets the coach proper targets, supports them, then comes back and checks they’ve improved. It turns “we think we’re good” into “here’s exactly how we know.” It’s built on the Ofsted toolkit, the CIMSPA standards and physical literacy, so it bends as the goalposts move.

The providers who can already prove their quality will walk into the new conversation. The ones who can’t will be left outside it, explaining why they never measured it.

If that’s you, or it’s a school wondering how on earth you check the people delivering on your field, this is exactly the kind of quality assurance and governance work I do, day in, day out. You can see the full CQI framework here, or book a free chat and let’s talk it through.

Before you go

That’s the thread, then. For you and your four hours. For your team and their safety to speak. For a child on a wet field on a Tuesday. Busy is not the same as good. Doing more is not the same as doing what matters.

So take two minutes right now. Breathe. Feel your feet on the floor. You are here. You are here. You’re leading, you’re learning, and your leadership is rooted in who you are, not how busy you look.

As one I keep coming back to puts it: hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. But only when that hard work is pointed at the right thing.

Andy