Dr Tony Meehan

Tony has 29 years experience as a teacher and leader in mainstream secondary and special schools, including over eight years as head of a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) in inner London, working with vulnerable pupils excluded from mainstream school and their families. He retired in 2017. It was during this latter period of his career that he became convinced of the need to explore alternative approaches to managing challenging behaviour in schools to stem the flow of exclusions from mainstream schools. 

He is now a practitioner of Nonviolent Resistance (NVR) with Partnership Projects and sees NVR as a powerful alternative to traditional behaviourist models in operation in almost all mainstream schools; he believes that NVR, rooted as it is in authentic relationship-building, is particularly apt for supporting adults in schools in managing themselves effectively when faced with challenging behaviour from a young person. 

NVR’s reconceptualising of authority - New Authority - allows for greater clarity around our understanding of relational leadership at a time when schools are faced with greater numbers of pupils with increasingly complex needs.

In 2024, Tony was awarded a Doctorate of Professional Studies (Education) for research on how school exclusion affects parents and carers.