Cat Cornthwaite
Transactional Analysis Consultant
For more than 15 years, I have worked as an educator across a wide range of learning environments, supporting individuals and groups in their personal and professional development. My work is grounded in self-reflection, self-awareness, and a deep respect for education.
With empathy, curiosity, professionalism, and warmth, I support people in exploring their relationship with education - how they learn, teach, grow, and make meaning of their experiences.
As a trainer and supervisor in Transactional Analysis, I work alongside educators, practitioners, and learners to deepen understanding of themselves and their work with others.
I am particularly interested in the stories people carry about education. Through reflective and relational practice, I invite people to explore the narratives that have shaped their experiences of learning, creating space for old assumptions to be challenged, expanded, and reimagined, so that new possibilities, and new narratives, can emerge.
Upcoming Events
My Story
I grew up believing in the promise of education: work hard, achieve more, climb the ladder, build a better life. Like many, I accepted that story without question - until I began asking harder ones.
If success means climbing higher, how high is high enough? What happens to the children who never find the ladder? And even if my own children inherit more opportunity than I did, they will still have to play the same game starting a rung or two higher up.
My journey through education - as a student, teacher, and parent - was shaped by fear, anger, and a deep sense of injustice. Fear of being left behind. Anger at systems that reward conformity while overlooking the histories, identities, and lived realities people carry with them.
For a long time, I believed my role as an educator was to help children succeed within that system and my understanding of success was tied to high achievement. But everything began to shift through my engagement with Transactional Analysis. It offered a way of seeing education beyond roles, scripts, and hidden patterns of compliance and reproduction. It helped me recognise how easily we can unconsciously participate in systems that we do not fully believe in.
That insight changed my understanding completely.
I came to see education not as a ladder to be climbed, but as an encounter - one that can either reproduce limitation or open up possibility. It helped me recognise my own participation in the reproduction of social structures, even when my intentions were to do the opposite.
Today, my work is grounded in a different vision of education - one shaped by Transactional Analysis and the belief that people are not simply products of systems, but are capable of existing differently within and alongside them. Education, for me, is about creating spaces where individuals can understand themselves, question inherited narratives, and move towards greater autonomy and awareness.
My aim is no longer to help people fit the system. It is to help them see it clearly and decide who they want to be within or beyond it.