Sandro Sandri

After yesterday's bad news, we are due some local good news. 

Guardian

Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor

One of the people who changed Arday’s life as a young person was a man named Sandro Sandri. Arday met Sandri after having been taken by his mum to a careers office where they were told that the best he could hope for was some volunteer work. She took him away, telling the worker that they would regret their actions, and instead reached out to Merton College in Morden, south London, which had a space on its BTec course in sport and development. Arday went to the college and met Sandri, a sports lecturer, who decided to take a chance on him and would stay late almost every night of the week working with Arday on his literacy skills, then take him home.

“Up until a year ago, he would text me every day and say: ‘You’re great. You’re going to do some great things.’ He really believed in repetition,” says Arday. “The only promise he ever made me make was that whatever he did for me, I’d do the same for someone else.”

Lets give it up for Sandro Sandri and Merton College in Morden; two and a half miles away from Merton Abbey Mills.