About Sue Johns
Sue grew up in Orpington, Kent. She attended Bullers Wood School before going on to study English and History at Birmingham University which is where she met her husband, Rick.
She later went on to get a number of teaching qualifications including a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), a Diploma in Teaching English to Adults (DELTA) and a Certificate in Teaching English for Business (CTEB).
Sue and Rick married in 1984 and spent the next three years living and working in Indonesia and South Africa. In 1988 they returned to the UK, moving to Ombersley, Worcestershire, which is where they brought up their three children and have lived ever since.
Learning
Sue loves learning in general and language in particular. She is currently studying 2 languages with Duolingo: Spanish and French, and has become a bit obsessive about keeping her streak with Spanish which she started from scratch in 2021. The streak probably needs to be 5 years before she’ll feel able to have a reasonable conversation in Spanish.
Every day she does Wordle and Connections on the New York Times games app. and she plays on the Scrabble app whilst watching TV or whenever there is a spare moment. It’s either multi-tasking or inability to focus, depending on your viewpoint.
Politics
She likes to read a proper hard copy newspaper at weekends and has been a regular reader of The Observer for about 30 years and The Times on a Saturday for nearly as long. That has quite a detrimental effect on doing anything else as it takes most of the day to read them thoroughly.
At night she sleeps badly and partly this is due to listening to podcasts. Instead of dozing gently off she stimulates her brain listening to The Rest is Politics, The Rest is History, Newscast or Americast.
Following the Brexit referendum she went on her first ever demonstration, a march in Birmingham in support of remaining in the EU. She then went on 4 more pro-EU marches: 3 in London and 1 in Stratford-on-Avon. As you might guess, she is an ardent European.
Kingsway English Centre
Sue had the contacts in Ukraine and Russia due to the business which she started with Rick in 1990, Kingsway English Centre. This was a school for adults who wanted a short, intensive English course in England.
Students came from all over the world but most were from Europe and Japan. Russian speakers were always in the top 3 nationalities in terms of numbers but Kingsway always had a good mix of different language speakers.
Most students chose to stay with local host families and it was this experience that led Sue to setting up her own system of matching refugees to sponsors.
