It has been a busy few weeks for the London rapper Giggs. Two weeks ago, he was in New Jersey with his fiancee Valerie as she gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Noa. The next day, he flew home and went straight to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to guest on stage with Jay-Z. “Yeah, it’s been crazy,” he smiles.
Remarkably, as soon as Noa was delivered, he also found time to livestream from the US hospital to the launch event for his latest project: not an album, but a specialist school and assessment centre for neurodivergent children.
Giggs, 45, has teamed up with education charity the OMG Foundation, to launch St James House, a secondary school for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) and those in alternative provision, in Gravesend, Kent. It’s a project with extremely personal origins.
“I’ve been fighting for my seven-year-old son, Israel,” Giggs says when we meet at the school on his return to the UK. “He’s autistic but the system was failing him. We couldn’t get him diagnosed and he wasn’t getting the support and assessments he needed. It was a mess. I thought, well, I’ve got to do something.”
If Giggs is tired, you can’t tell from the way he bounds around the former business offices now being converted into a 75-pupil school.
The Peckham-born musician has four children including his newborn; all three older kids are autistic. His eldest son, the rapper ML, was diagnosed more than a decade ago, in his early teens. Last year, the father-and-son duo made a joint track about living with autism, Own Motion. “When I was young, I was ashamed, now I just own it,” ML raps.
“At the time, I read ML’s diagnosis and thought, this is me as well,” recalls Giggs. “So, I went to get assessed. It was just a man and woman in a room with a notepad and I thought, this is bullshit. How the fuck are they going to know if I’m autistic or not? After five minutes, I walked out. I didn’t hear anything, but then 10 years later I was in the doctor’s and he looked at my notes and said, ‘It says here that you’re autistic. I was, like, ‘Is it?’ Because I didn’t even know.”
Giggs belatedly learning his own diagnosis coincided with his battle to obtain diagnoses and education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for Israel and his daughter, Isla. Last year, he went on Newsnight to rail against the flaws and inadequacies in the Send educational system. Israel was given his EHCP the next day.
Yet this clearly isn’t an avenue for most parents struggling with the difficult, opaque Send system. Prime minister Andy Burnham recently acknowledged that the overladen system is “broken” and pledged greater assistance for the parents of special needs children attempting to navigate it.
The difficulties Giggs had getting these crucial assessments for his children was a primary motivation when he decided to launch St James House. He and his co-founder, OMG Foundation CEO Jamal Miah, have long been acquainted.
“I’ve known Giggs since he used to record in a south London music studio that I ran 20 years ago,” says Miah, when we meet on an earlier visit to the school. “We kept in touch then coincidentally we found that we had both moved out to Kent. We saw a lot of disadvantaged kids around Gravesend and decided to do something for them.”
OMG Foundation already runs one school in east London. When Miah and Giggs decided to start one in Kent, Giggs insisted it needed an assessment centre built in. “Because a lot of parents don’t know how to get EHCPs,” says Miah. “Until their kids have got those, it’s hard to do anything for them.”
The school and assessment centre will be overseen by executive head Frances Akinde, a specialist in neurodivergent education who praises the value of art and music therapy. “I also used to do parental advocacy work, and one of the parents I advised was Giggs,” she explains. “What he is doing with the St James House project is tremendous.”
The assessment centre, employing educational psychologists, occupational therapists and speech-and-language specialists, opened this month. The school is due to follow suit in January. Miah reports that OMG Foundation are well on the way to raising the £930,000 they need to begin operations, spurred by Giggs pulling in big names for a recent charity auction.
“I reached out to people that I know,” he says. “Damien Hirst gave us seven artworks. Dynamo agreed to do two private shows. Stephen Fry gave us stuff, and Ed Sheeran and Robbie Williams. They all wanted to be get involved. They’re all proper, man.”
It’s a remarkable venture, and when St James House opens in the new year, Giggs knows exactly what he wants it to do for the autistic and ADHD children thronging through its doors.
“I want us to be Professor Xavier for the neurodivergent universe,” he concludes, referring to the founder-educator figure in the X-Men comic books. “The X-Men started as a school before they all became superheroes. We can help autistic children to realise that they are geniuses and show them how to use their superpowers.”
