Koby is a postgraduate researcher at the GCCS and holds a First Class Honours degree in Youth Work and Communities from Birmingham City University. His research examines systemic failures in the leaving-care system through the lens of Contextual Safeguarding, with a particular interest in how young people draw on social and cultural capital as forms of protection when formal systems fall short. His work is driven by a commitment to ethical and meaningful participatory research that centres the voices of those with the most at stake.
Koby grew up in Leicester and, as a young teenager navigating complex state systems, found himself in precarious situations, struggling to survive as he transitioned out of care. Many of the peers he grew up alongside have since become entrenched in serious youth violence and cycles of poverty. What separated his path was not luck alone. It was access, however fragile, to informal mentors and community figures who believed in something different for him. Those relationships helped him recognise and draw on his own networks of social and cultural capital, networks that opened the door to university, eventually to London, and to a life beyond the destructive cycles and intergenerational trauma that claimed so many of those around him.
Koby began his career as a leaving-care adviser and a youth justice case manager at Leicestershire County Council, and gained experience in children's residential care. These roles gave him an intimate understanding of the pressures facing frontline workers and the young people they support. Through subsequent roles across central and local government, including in the Department of Health and Social Care and in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Koby saw first-hand how policy is too often disconnected from the lives it is meant to improve, and he is committed to bridging that gap.
Koby works as a consultant across central and local government, children's social care, youth justice and education, and speaks nationally and internationally to senior leaders on social mobility, lived experience and the ethics of public service.
Koby's own lived experience runs through everything he does, shaping how he reads policy, how he listens to practitioners, and why he has always been drawn to the places where systems and young people's lives meet most consequentially.