My teachers thought I would amount to nothing – then I saw one of them in the street

When Laurie-Anne Power was 11 years old, she was made to stand outside her school because of what she was wearing.

The little girl had arrived for the first day of school with a headscarf, in keeping with her Rastafarian family’s culture – but instead of being welcomed into the classroom, Laurie-Anne was told she could not come in through the gates.

‘The headteacher refused to allow me onto the premises with it and made me stand outside,’ Laurie-Anne, 50, tells Metro.

‘I was 11 years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I didn’t know how to articulate it, but I knew that it felt like injustice.’

It was a moment that would help shape the woman Laurie-Anne would become – but back then, as a young child, she didn’t speak much and struggled socially.

At home, she was close with her grandfather, who was part of the Windrush generation and worked at the Co-op milk factory.

Every evening, he would get in from work and watch the news with his granddaughter, who would ask him about the topics of the day, from war and famine, to the latest political story.

Eventually, he told her: ‘God, you talk so much, you must be a lawyer when you grow up.’

Coming from a rich West Indian culture, Laurie-Anne grew up surrounded by strong family values – but a career in law did not feel like an obvious path. ‘We didn’t have any privilege in the sense of accessibility to a profession like that,’Laurie-Anne explains.

Even so, it soon became her ambition and as a teenager in secondary school, she confided in a teacher that she wanted to become a barrister. Laurie-Anne was starkly told that she should focus on sport, as she didn’t have an academic future.

The words stung – but they only made her more determined to prove her teacher wrong.

In the classroom she was often labelled difficult, but the mum-of-two insists, ‘I was probably voicing my opinion as strongly as you would need to if you were to be a lawyer, but back then it was seen as disruptive.’

It was only when her history teacher, whom Laurie-Anne greatly admired, pulled her out of class in her final year and had a stern, but well-meaning word with her, that she realised things had to change.

‘He told me: “If you don’t stop f***ing around, you’re gonna mess your life up”.

‘That really was my wake-up call,’ Laurie-Anne admits.

After getting good grades in her GCSEs and A Levels, she had to take an unexpected break when she became pregnant just after her 19th birthday, with her daughter Sharinka.

The following September, when her baby was seven months old, Laurie-Anne returned to her studies as a single mum, with the support of her family and herdaughter’s father’s family.

In 2000, she finally achieved her dream and qualified as a barrister, but Laurie-Anne soon discovered that the profession was not necessarily designed for people with backgrounds like hers.

‘I’d say the first five years or so were me just trying to keep my head above water,’ she remembers.

I had to work twice as hard to get half as far

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Within a decade, Laurie-Anne began working beyond the courtroom with the United Nations-linked Special Court for Sierra Leone, as a consultant on the use of child soldiers during the country’s civil war and sexual slavery.

It was her first real exposure to what Laurie-Anne describes as ‘the horrors of inhumanity and conflict.’

Children had been recruited as soldiers and forced to commit horrific acts, while women were subjected to sexual violence as part of the conflict.

For Laurie-Anne, it was ‘an unearthing of some of the darker sides of humanity’.

It was an all-consuming job and at home, her parents helped look after her daughter while she travelled back and forth between London and Sierra Leone. Then in 2011, she had her son Noah, who was born extremely prematurely at just 25 weeks.

With her son in neonatal intensive care for a year, Laurie-Anne made the decision to step away from work to look after him. When she finally returned to her job, she quickly discovered that working while caring for a sick child proved even harder than starting her career as a teen mother.

It left her with a tough decision to make. ‘I was going to either continue to rise and do good things at the profession, or take some time out and maybe just stagnate for another 10 years,’ Laurie-Anne reflects.

Eventually, the mum-of-two found a way to do both.

‘When there is a time for me to put the job on the back burner and be there for my children, there’s no case on Earth that’s going to stop that. There’s no judge that’s going to stop me.

‘I’ve been unapologetic, both to my children and to my work,’ she explains.

But it was also important to Laurie-Anne that her children saw that reaching the top takes commitment and sacrifice, as it was what gave her the chance to send her children to private schools and raise them with opportunities she did not have growing up.

‘It’s about making sure that you strike that balance,’ she adds.

That commitment came full circle a few years ago, when shortly after taking the silk in 2022, Laurie-Anne saw one of her former teachers outside the Old Bailey.

‘Although now in his early 80s, I immediately knew that it was him. It’s safe to say that he was as shocked to see me in my barrister robes,’ she wrote for Counsel Magazine in 2024.

‘As he enquired about my journey, an unexpected surge of emotion came over me; some of it positive but mostly hurt and anger. Our conversation was pleasant but what I really wanted to say was “Look at me now!”‘

‘I had never held him personally responsible for the trauma of my formative education, but he was the head of an institution that stifled the dreams and ambitions of many of my peers.’

Laurie-Anne has since made it part of her career to help other people from backgrounds like hers enter the profession.

But fighting for greater equality has come at a personal cost. She has ‘lost friends and gained allies’ in her pursuit of equality.

Laurie-Anne shares that there have been people within the profession who refuse to accept that disparities exist, despite the lack of Black judges and people of colour in senior positions.

‘I’ve lost friends when I’ve challenged that narrative.

‘When I speak about equality, diversity and integration, I’m speaking about it from every single aspect, not just from a race perspective,’ such as those from working-class backgrounds, Laurie-Anne explains.

‘Sometimes it just takes that one person… two, three, four, five people, until you’ve got a team to just keep gently applying the pressure. I think the Bar is changing. It’s far more accessible than it used to be. But we still have a long way to go.’

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