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There is a teacher out there that has contributed a giant amount to the teaching of PE. This person influences thousands of PE students and teachers every day of every year. This teacher is a creator, a quality checker, a team player and none of you will ever find this teacher on Twitter or on social spaces. Her name is Marta Soteras Munt and she is the driving force behind TheEverLearner.com, a platform that teaches over 5,000 PE students per day.
So who is Marta and what does she do? Marta has never taught a PE lesson in a classroom or in a practical space, yet she is directly influencing (currently) over 200k PE students as well as an estimated 9,000 PE teachers with her resources. Marta creates all visual assets for The EverLearner. These include individual items such as the exam infographics (a resource that reached over half of all revising PE students in 2022), revision notes pages, mock exam papers as well as every image used for quizzing within TheEverLearner.com. She also manages all budgets, leads all teams and ensures that every resource that we publish is top drawer.
In other words, Marta is directly involved with raising standards in PE learning and I wanted to write this post because, honestly, I couldn’t do this without her.
As this blog lands with teachers, my partner, Marta, and I will be ending a short break in Cumbria, where we have celebrated 20 years of being together. Therefore, I am writing this post early, without Marta’s knowledge and asking my colleagues Mark and Elle to process the post in secret before sharing it with you all on Wednesday 11th October.
Marta and I are inextricably linked. In addition to our 20 years together, we share two teenage daughters, a home (including a worrying mortgage at this moment) and we are both 50% shareholders of The EverLearner Ltd, the business in which we both work full time.
We spend a vast amount of time in one another’s company. We live together, work together, go to the gym together, sleep together (I mean in the same space), parent together, shop together, travel together and so on. We are entirely comfortable in one another’s company and I felt that I wanted to write about this and share our journey with you all.
Many of you, especially PE teachers, know my work online. I write blogs, I make websites, I provide live revision, etc. I’m the face (worryingly) of The EverLearner Ltd. But the reality is that I am able to do this work because of Marta. She is my ever-present and I want to tell you about her from start to finish.
Marta is Marta Soteras Munt. She is a Catalan Spanish woman who grew up in Barcelona. She was born in 1980 to Neus and Jordi. She grew up in the same flat where Neus and Jordi still live in, on the very edge of Barcelona on the south of the city and, for many years, shared a bedroom with her elder sister Gisela, as the third bedroom was occupied by their paternal grandmother, who gradually became less and less mobile and died at home when Marta was 21. Marta’s father Jordi, now retired, was a local policeman in L’Hospitalet, a city right next to Barcelona. Marta’s mother Neus, now also retired, worked in the district council supporting market holders and traders manage their trading licences.
Marta spent a lot of time with her grandmother as a child, as both of her parents worked full time. She attended a city convent school and was taught by nuns who, according to Marta, “were a bit sadistic”. Their teaching style was, apparently, beyond didactic and Marta was taught to enjoy classics, the history of art and English. Whilst this might seem like quite a traditional schooling, it is worth noting that Marta’s year group was one of the very first to be educated in the post-Franco system which, by the early 80s, had been scrapped and replaced.
Marta excelled in writing and was an excellent linguist. As she progressed from school to college and then to university, she specialised in languages and moved towards a career in translation and interpreting.
In 2002, as a young woman, she moved to the Midlands to take up a position as teaching assistant at Stourport-on-Severn High School. Simultaneously, I had applied for a post at the same school as a PE teacher. I had recently returned to the UK and I needed work. I was living at my parents’ home in Worcestershire and the Stourport job came up. As a result, Marta and I became acquaintances across the Stourport staff room and, eventually, friends. Marta and I had a very steady start. We often worked next to one another on the staffroom computers. I think we were both trying to let on that we liked each other but neither of us were particularly confident at that point.
Eventually, a staff night out ensued and I remember walking down a back street in Worcester with Marta and we chatted about all kinds of things. That night we had a dance together, totally platonically, and we became closer.
More nights out followed and, bit by bit, Marta and I spent more and more time together. On three consecutive weekends we ended up staying up late into the night talking and listening to one another until, eventually, on a very “romantic” occasion when Marta and I went into Stourport after work to buy me some ointment for my cold sore, I plucked up the courage to tell Marta that I liked her and we shared a (potentially infectious) kiss.
Marta left the next day to go back to Barcelona for the Christmas break. I flew off to New York for some very silly pre-Christmas fun with my younger brother and neither of us knew where things stood. We decided to give things a go and I asked Marta if I could visit her in Barcelona on the 27th December for a few days. She agreed to it, thinking I wasn’t going to do it.
It was then in Barcelona that we spent some proper time together and we emerged as a couple despite Neus’s (Marta’s mum) apparently deep suspicion of this Englishman that had suddenly turned up.
The following six months flew by and Marta and I became close. Our relationship was serious but there were major challenges. The biggest of those was Marta’s desire to study her Masters the following year. There were two courses she was interested in and both were a long way from the Midlands. So, in April of 2003, Marta applied for her Masters in Edinburgh and I began applying for jobs near London. Our thinking was that Marta, after her studies, would likely be working in or around London and that I was going to head south to set up home in preparation for that. I found a job as a PE teacher at Farnborough Sixth Form College, just outside London and, come September, I was in southern England and Marta was in Scotland.
We kept our relationship going but it was tough. On occasion, I would make the drive all the way from Farnborough to Edinburgh just for the weekend and Marta would often come down on the train too. Somehow, we kept things going for the next twelve months and by July 2004, Marta was moving in with me in Farnborough in a small but lovely flat we rented.
A month or so later we found out that Marta was pregnant. We were stunned. Our plans for an exciting life with us both earning and with relative freedom were up in smoke. Nine months later, our first daughter Anna was born and life progressed as so many families’ lives do, trying to balance work and parenting. Two and half years after Anna, our second daughter, Georgina, arrived and we felt our family was complete.
The four of us lived in the south with no family around us: my parents in the Midlands and Marta’s in Spain. Once Georgina was six, Marta retrained to be a teacher and began excelling as an educator of Spanish and French.
My own career progressed well and I was promoted on numerous occasions until, by 2013, I was working on SLT. It’s hard to stress how busy we were for a while. Both of us pushed incredibly hard at work whilst we tried to remain balanced at home. Marta was better at this than I was, not least because I was continuously involved in out-of-work-projects, making videos and building websites.
We discussed marriage at times but we never made it happen. I’m not totally sure why, as both of us were keen to do so. I think we just never found the moment and our parenting was more important to us than planning a “do”.
By 2014, change was necessary in our lives and I remember a conversation that Marta and I had. I told her that I wasn’t happy at work and that I had an idea of what I could do outside of teaching. I told her about a website I had envisioned and that I believed in it but that there would be no money. Marta, to her credit, told me to go for it. We then spent the next year with me sitting at the dining table in-between school drop-off and pick-up slots and Marta working full-time as a Spanish and French teacher. Money was tight but we made it work.
During the course of that year, I repeatedly applied for PE teacher jobs in the local area. I always wanted to go back but I had no success in my applications. By late May, Marta and I took a decision to take my new website “MyPEExam” and commercialise it so that we had a trickle of money coming in during September to Christmas. MyPEExam was commercially successful from day one and, suddenly, we had cash flow. Once again, Marta and I talked. Do we pocket this money and spend it on ourselves, our home or our lives or do we invest it? Marta was insistent on the latter and we squirrelled the money away temporarily whilst I drew plans for the building of TheEverLearner.com, a site that, in the end, we spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on.
TheEverLearner.com was launched in 2017 and is now a very successful SME. But, like many business owners in the early days, Marta (who was at this point also working three days a week in the business) and I earned no money whatsoever between 2017 and 2021, other than the income Marta had as now Head of Spanish but only for two days a week. Times were tough but the business was growing.
Marta left her teaching role permanently in 2018. We now had no income whatsoever. Yet she and I kept going. I would like readers to reflect on the stress that this applies to a family. We were working relentlessly and things at home were tight. Very tight! We believed so we kept going. We loved our children so we kept going. We believed in one another so we kept going.
Marta never once expressed frustration at our lack of money. She never once told me she didn’t think it would work. Instead, she got her head down and refined every single system within the business.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, it was Marta who suggested that we provide the website for free to everyone. It was a massive risk, not least because we barely had a penny to spend but by doing so over 50% of all UK schools registered with us and many of those stayed post-Covid as customers helping us to grow and flourish.
Now in 2022, as I write this post, we are 20 years together and our business is thriving. Whilst I don’t want to write about our financial circumstances, I can say that things are different now and our business supports as much as we support it. Marta and I are almost one entity. Next to each other, literally, every step of the way. For a couple that spends this much time together, the arguments and frustrations are very few.
Marta is a special person. She is special because of who she is intrinsically. She is special because of where and when she has come from. She is special to me because she believed in me, no matter what. She is special because I have learned from her for 20 years non-stop. You see? At the heart of things, Marta and I are incredibly different, me being moodier and more erratic with a strong theme of spontaneity and Marta being utterly consistent and even-tempered. Our personalities complement one another. She needs me and I need her.
So, readers: next time you get an email from Marta, I want you to remember this post. That person who appears to be doing the admin, the billing, etc is the backbone of our business. The person who, ultimately, has caused all of this to happen.
Postscript
The reason that Marta and I are visiting Cumbria for this short trip is that I grew up in Carlisle. I left as a teenager and, since then, I have always dreamed of going back to live there. As our children approach adulthood, both Marta and I have considered what our lives might look like in the coming years. We are not tied to Farnborough, where we live, other than via our current home and the girls’ schooling. Once again, Marta comes to my support to consider moving to Cumbria with me. The person that has lived in the UK rather than her home country and raised her family “abroad” is once again supporting my needs. It means so much to me.
Thank you for reading. Please, be encouraged to make a comment below.
