Sean Oakley

Qualified early years practitioner, also fundraising with the Wildlife Trusts and training as a Forest School leader on the side!

After some journalism training with the Press Association in 2014, I blogged for the Times of Israel and as a news/politics contributor for the Daily Confidential (TDC) magazine. Having dipped my toe in the water, I got more serious and tried to bring a post-Zionist perspective to the Slough & East Berkshire branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign first as its press officer then as freelance media consultant. The stepdown was a trade off for more editorial independence, which I used to set up the London to Palestine podcast as an unofficial outlet for some of the activists I knew with the London & youth branches of the national PSC.

During my podcaster experiment I landed guests such as spoken word artist and activist Mizanur Rahman, and ARAB founder Osama Filali Naji. The podcast was built on a more casual, face-to-face approach, which was undermined totally by the pandemic, so I collaborated with ARAB’s Filali Naji in his goal to produce hours of interview and debate footage (for his organisation’s YouTube channel and website) over Ramadan 2020.

The ARAB discussions were a high point for me as a journo or commentator, but perhaps my highest in writing was after working with Red Card Israeli Racism’s (RCIR) Geoff Lee. Geoff and I researched and published an article in 2016 for international online magazine Mondoweiss about the Israeli football club Beitar Jerusalem's problems with far-right fans.

I have three children, the youngest of them by birth (in 2019), though his half-brother and half-sister were raised by me from quite a young age. It was the meaning I found in becoming a family man in my early 20s that led to me down a different path to journalism (which can be very insecure as a career): education.

I completed my level 3 early years training in 2017 and took up a role with Childbase (the best early years organisation in the UK according to the Times), which I left in July 2018 to try agency cover work, through which I found the company All About Children who employed me for 3 years until I once again joined various agencies and moved to another part of the country.

In 2019 ran successfully as a Labour councillor for Colnbrook with Poyle Parish Council (CwPPC), and before my term concluded in 2023 spent two years as its Vice Chair and two years as its Services Committee Vice Chair.