I was born in 1950, growing up with what would today be diagnosed with autism, dyspraxia and ADHD. Long before there was any understanding of the concept of neurodiversity, I was physically and emotionally abused by my father at home and bullied at school.

But I was accepted within the world of chess and have always known that chess saved my life. Which is why I’ve spent the past 50+ years helping children play chess.

I spent 30 years running the country’s most successful children’s chess club, but eventually realised that chess was now being promoted for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reasons. Neither the low level primary school chess clubs nor the increasingly professionalised world of competitive chess for young children would have helped me.

I wanted to promote children’s chess clubs based on community and friendship rather than producing prodigies and champions, which were accessible to all children, whatever their background. I wanted to write books of the kind that would have helped me back in the 1960s. And so the Chess Heroes project was born.

By the late 1990s I realised that, specifically within primary school chess clubs:

• the WRONG teachers (including me) were teaching chess
• the WRONG children were learning chess
• children were learning chess at the WRONG age
• children were learning chess in the WRONG place
• children were being taught chess using the WRONG methods
• children were being taught chess for the WRONG reasons.

Decisions were being made by a combination of chess players who understood little about children and teachers who understood little about chess.

Sure, most of the children were having a good time, but it was hard to envisage that playing at a low level once a week was going to boost their academic performance. There was also very little continuity after primary school, with very close to a 100% dropout rate.

I wrote a book for parents, but few parents bought it and many of them didn’t like it.

It gradually occurred to me that, although primary school chess clubs served little purpose beyond short-term fun, they were exactly what parents wanted, exactly what schools wanted and exactly what most chess teachers wanted. They also seemed to be what children (thought they) wanted.

I’ve now written a book for schools, with a similar response, although it has been well received by some elements of the chess community.

I believe that the problem is societal rather than just to do with chess, and is international rather than local or national, although manifesting itself in different ways in different cultures. I’m hoping to set up another website to consider this more deeply at some point.