Tonight, a conversation about scraps from a table took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Someone sent me a poem.

It talked about tables. Being invited in. Being expected to be grateful for a place that was never really ours. About refusing scraps and building something different.

It reminded me of something I wrote last year, Scraps From the Table, about the way Gypsy and Traveller people are repeatedly invited into rooms to provide our knowledge, our experience and sometimes our pain, while the power often stays exactly where it was.

We exchanged a few messages about how little some things seem to change.

Then he said:

“How long can we keep fighting for the same things? It gets old. I’m getting tired now.”

And suddenly I understood my mam.

Not intellectually.

I understood her in my bones.

“I’ve done my job. It’s your turn now.”

I have been doing this work in one form or another since I was about sixteen.

I’m 47 now.

More than twenty years ago, I took a report to my mam.

I think now it was Aiming High: Raising the Achievement of Gypsy Traveller Pupils, published in 2003. It may be that Every Child Matters has become tangled up with it in my memory because so much was happening around that time.

But I remember the important bit.

I had worked on it.

And I was proud.

I wasn’t taking my mam another government report to complain about.

I was taking her something I thought showed we had changed something.

Look, Mam.

They’ve listened.

We’re getting somewhere.

I can’t remember my exact words, but I remember that feeling.

Pride.

Hope.

The feeling you have when you are still young enough in this work to believe that getting the right words onto the right pages might mean the problem has finally shifted.

My mam listened.

Then she told me to read the Swann Report.

And her words weighed heavily.

I understand something about those dates now that I didn’t understand then.

The Committee that eventually produced the Swann Report was established in 1979.

The year I was born.

Its final report, Education for All, was published in 1985.

I would have been around the age of starting school.

Maybe that is one of the reasons those dates stayed so close to my mam.

While I was being born, people were beginning another national inquiry into inequality in education.

While I was beginning my own education, that inquiry was publishing its conclusions — including a whole section about Traveller children.

My mam had watched that.

She remembered it.

Then, nearly twenty years later, her daughter came through the door, proud of a report she had helped work on, believing that this time perhaps we had shifted something.

And Mam effectively said:

Read what they said when you were a child.

So I did.

What hit me wasn’t only that many of the problems felt the same.

The answers did too.

Understanding communities. Building relationships with families. Recognising culture. Challenging racism and low expectations. Making schools more inclusive. Listening. Trust. Belonging.

Different decade.

Different cover.

Different language.

But not only were we still describing many of the same wounds.

We were still prescribing many of the same treatments.

I think that was what my mam understood that I didn’t.

She wasn’t trying to take the shine off something I had worked hard on.

She wasn’t saying it didn’t matter.

She was asking a much harder question:

If we already knew this, why are we having to say it again?

How many reports?

How many consultations?

How many working groups?

How many strategies?

How many generations of Gypsy and Traveller people explaining racism, exclusion, poor access, mistrust and the need for our children to see themselves reflected in education?

At some point, years later, my mam simply said:

“I’m done. I’m tired. I’ve done my job. It’s your turn now.”

At the time, I thought she was passing me the mantle.

And she was.

But what I did not understand was the weight of the thing she was handing over.

Now I do.

Two steps forward. Three steps back.

Tonight I replied that sometimes this work feels like two steps forward and three steps back.

And lately, if I’m truthful, some of it has felt almost impossible.

We have more evidence than ever.

More reports.

More research.

More language around co-production, lived experience, inclusion and equality.

There are more meetings.

More strategies.

More invitations to the table.

Yet I can still sit in a room in 2026 and hear a question that somebody in our communities was answering forty years ago.

That is the exhausting bit.

It isn’t simply fighting.

It is fighting the same fight in slightly different clothes.

Sometimes even carrying the same answers back into the room.

And when you come from the community yourself, there is another layer to it.

You don’t get to leave the subject in the office.

Just keep swimming

The conversation tonight ended, half jokingly, with Dory:

Just keep swimming.

And I started thinking about what that actually means for those of us who work in this sector and belong to the communities we are fighting for.

There are brilliant advocates and allies who come into this work from outside our communities.

I value many of them enormously.

But sometimes I resent them too.

Not personally.

I resent something they have that I don’t.

They can go underwater with us.

They can hold their breath. Some have snorkels. Some have the very best diving equipment.

They can spend years under there doing incredible work.

But eventually they can climb back onto the boat.

They can breathe the cool air.

They can change jobs.

They can retire.

They can decide that a particular fight has taken enough from them.

And it isn’t waiting for them around the dinner table.

It isn’t in their child’s classroom.

It isn’t attached to their surname.

It isn’t their grandparents’ story.

It isn’t something somebody can shout at their child in a playground.

For those of us from Ethnic Gypsy and Traveller communities, once you have put your head beneath the water and really understood what is down there, it feels different.

Somewhere along the way you grow gills.

You learn how to live submerged.

And eventually you don’t know how to stop swimming.

Because stopping does not mean resting on the shore.

Stopping means allowing something that can hurt your family, your community or the generation coming behind you to carry on without challenge.

So you swim.

When you’re tired, you swim.

When you’re angry, you swim.

When the funding disappears, you swim.

When another report says what the last report said, you swim.

When somebody discovers the evidence you already knew existed, you swim.

When progress is made, you swim.

And when the tide turns backwards, you swim harder.

Not because we are endlessly resilient.

I sometimes think

resilience is another word people use when they have become comfortable watching somebody survive things they should never have had to survive.

We swim because too often the alternative feels impossible.

Maybe my mam knew that

At 47, I finally understand something I couldn’t understand when my mam said she was tired.

She wasn’t surrendering.

She had simply been underwater a very long time.

She had watched inquiries begin.

She had read the reports.

She had watched governments rediscover things she already knew.

She had watched the same answers come back around.

And perhaps those dates had stayed with her precisely because they were also the dates of our lives.

1979. Her daughter was born. An inquiry began.

1985. Her daughter was starting school. The report arrived.

2003. That daughter came home as a young woman involved in the work herself, carrying another report and believing, with some pride, that perhaps we had finally changed something.

No wonder she remembered.

Those weren’t just policy dates to her.

They were markers in a life.

Mine.

Hers.

Ours.

She had pushed against systems that moved just enough to make you believe change was coming and then somehow managed to leave too much of the foundations untouched.

And eventually she looked at me and said:

Your turn.

There was love in that.

There was faith in me.

But there was exhaustion too.

I couldn’t see that then.

I can now.

The table hasn’t changed enough

Last year I wrote:

We do not want a seat at your table. We are building our own.

I still believe that.

Because perhaps the problem was never simply getting Gypsy and Traveller people around somebody else’s table.

Perhaps it was believing that proximity to power was the same thing as possessing it.

We have sat at tables.

We have given evidence.

We have told our stories.

We have helped write strategies.

We have explained the same inequalities repeatedly.

And there has been change. I won’t pretend there hasn’t.

There are people working inside institutions today who genuinely understand more, challenge more and listen better than those who came before them.

But when a man can say to me in 2026, “How long can we keep fighting for the same things? I’m getting tired now,” and I can hear my mam’s words from more than twenty years ago, we have to be brave enough to ask whether the change has been deep enough.

Not whether there are more seats.

Whether the table itself has changed.

I don’t want my daughter to inherit my gills

Maybe that is the thing I understand most clearly tonight.

My mam passed the mantle to me.

I will carry it.

But I don’t want to hand it to my daughter with the same words.

I don’t want her, twenty or thirty years from now, reading some beautifully designed government strategy and discovering that underneath the new terminology are the same problems and the same proposed answers I was reading in 2003.

Or that my mam was reading about when I was beginning school.

I don’t want resilience to be her inheritance.

I don’t want fighting to be the family trade.

I want her generation to know what it feels like to come up for air.

Perhaps that is why we keep swimming.

Not because we were born for the water.

Not because being exhausted makes us heroic.

And not because our communities should be expected to fight forever.

We keep swimming because somebody has to reach the shore.

And this time, I don’t want the next generation to be told:

I’ve done my job. It’s your turn now.

I want us to have done the job properly enough that their turn can finally be something else.