Anna Maxwell Martin says she would love to retrain as a teaching assistant one day, a practical turn that follows her increasingly public campaigning on children’s needs in school. The 49-year-old said she also wants exclusion banned from schools in the UK, arguing that the children it hits hardest are often the most vulnerable.
She made the comments in a new conversation with Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs, which is why her name is drawing fresh attention now. Maxwell Martin said she has become a vocal advocate for children, families and special educational needs systems in schools after finding it exceptionally difficult to get the needs of her two children met.
The actor did not soften the account. She said the process after Roger Michell was “head-banging, mental-making, exhausting, soul-destroying”, and that the struggle was especially hard for her younger daughter. One meeting her daughter attended, she said, was “heartbreaking and humiliating”.
That is part of what gives her remarks their weight. Maxwell Martin said the school setting did include wonderful caregivers, but that the experience for her younger daughter was different, and she has turned that pain into a wider argument about how schools should respond. For her, the issue is not confined to special educational needs in the narrow sense. “For me, it’s not about Send – which is special educational needs – it is about meeting all children’s needs at the point of need,” she said.
She was equally blunt about exclusion. Maxwell Martin said it is something she will “battle against forever” and that it should be banned because it affects the most vulnerable children “in the worst ways”. That view sits alongside a more complicated admission: she said the problem is not anyone’s fault, and that she came across wonderful caregivers in the school setting. Even so, she said exclusion is a line schools should not cross.
Her admiration for teaching assistants ran through the interview as well. Maxwell Martin said they are “the most difficult jobs”, and called them undervalued and underpaid. She said she wishes there were more of them, described them as exceptional, and said she would love to mentor young people and do something “much more practical”.
Whether that becomes a real career change is the open question. She said, “They probably wouldn’t want me, but if they did, I’d love to do something much more practical.” She also said the path she took as an actor has always depended on being willing to say no to repeated offers and to choose ambition over comfort. For now, the clearest answer is that the wish is genuine. The retraining is not yet confirmed.
