Nick qualified as a teacher of Drama from Goldsmiths College in 1976 and gained Qualified Teacher Status in 1977 whilst teaching drama at Holloway School in north London. He then spent 3 years as a VSO teaching English in Nigeria. He returned to the UK in 1980 and taught drama and English in Philip Magnus School near Kings Cross, studying part-time for a B.Ed at the Polytechnic of north London (which he gained in 1983). He took a term out to do the RSA Diploma course Teaching ESL Students in Mainstream Classes at the Inner London education authority's Centre for Urban Educational Studies, before starting as an ESL teacher at Daneford School in Bethnal Green (now Bethnal Green Technology College) in 1982. After three years there he left to teach English in a rural secondary school in Zimbabwe.
In 1990 he returned to the UK. After a term teaching ESL in Stepney Green School in Tower Hamlets, he began teaching 16-19 year-old new arrivals at Kingsway College in Camden in 1991. Three years later he took the post of Regional Adviser for English Language Teaching in the Caprivi region of Namibia with the English Language Teacher Development Project. This involved working with Namibian teacher educators developing the ELT methodology course for the pre-service Basic Education Teacher Diploma and writing distance education materials for the in-service equivalent. He returned to the UK in 2000 and soon after was appointed the teacher trainer for EAL at Villiers high School in Southall. In 2004 he became the Ethnic Minority Achievement Consultant for secondary schools in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
