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All authors are indebted to others who have contributed to their work—colleagues, coauthors, students, editors, research participants, and more besides. A memoir, though, also has its own distinctive set of acknowledgments of people who have been part of the life that it records, and I would like to recognize them here.

I benefitted from sharing drafts of this book with others who have had lives like mine, or who, at least, can empathize with that kind of life. At the time of my writing this, three good friends were also writing autobiographies of one kind or another, and I am grateful for interchanges with Michael Fullan, Howard Gardner, and Steve Munby. My secondary school classmate and fellow Burnley Football Club fanatic Dave Edmundson helped me fill out my recollections of my days in secondary school. Ges Hartley, my former housemate and bandmate, brought back things from university life that I had completely forgotten. The governors of Spring Hill Community Primary School in Accrington, Lancashire, and the school’s extraordinary former head teacher Stephanie Grimshaw shared old school records, class lists, and inspection reports that helped this memoir become more than a collection of memories in my own head. My great friend and colleague Dennis Shirley enabled me to see which aspects of this peculiarly British autobiography might require further explanation to a U.S. readership. My larger-than-life brother Peter not only put me straight on some aspects of family history but also gave me excellent intellectual feedback on various parts of the manuscript. Lucy Hargreaves, my daughter, undertook essential genealogical research on our family’s history. My wife, Pauline, validated my efforts, corrected some of my writing errors, and wisely persuaded me to omit two sex scenes!

Mel Ainscow’s invitation to me to write a foreword for his 2015 book, Towards Self-Improving School Systems: Lessons From a City Challenge, gave me a first opportunity to draw on and explore my own idiomatic connection back to our shared cultural background in northern England, and to do this within a scholarly context. Some of my expressions from that foreword reappear in this book.¹ The Lancashire Telegraph has kindly given me permission to draw on material I supplied for an extended feature that celebrated my mum and her life.² Additional text on the interaction between distinction and disgust in social-class relationships was first set out in my peer-reviewed article for the International Journal of Leadership in Education.³ All other content appears in this book for the first time.

Ironically, in a café around the corner from Buckingham Palace, Lee Elliot Major was kind enough to engage me in conversation about the relationship between my memoir, his own upwardly mobile life, and his impressive body of research and writing on social mobility. By accident, Douglas Rife, publisher and president of Solution Tree International, and I discovered we were both writing family histories, and after we exchanged many comments back and forth, he unexpectedly offered to publish my book, thereby cementing my gratitude forever.

Publishing memoirs is a departure for Solution Tree as well as for me. It has required both of us to review editorial guidelines, and I truly appreciate the constructive turn our discussions took about content and style to take my contribution to this genre to the best standard we could achieve together. In particular, I would like to thank Rita Carlberg, production editor at Solution Tree, who worked closely with me and carefully through the manuscript at every point, helping me avoid weak arguments, ambiguous interpretations, and unsupported claims. She has undoubtedly played a significant role in making this a better, more fluent book than it might have been, and I am grateful to her and all her team for that. Kelly Rockhill, Solution Tree’s assistant marketing program manager, gave valuable creative input on the design of the cover.