Angela Pollard took her first degree at Portsmouth University and then her Masters in Development Economics at De Montfort University, where she also taught. Most of her career has been in schools, working in Sussex for eight years before a two-year spell in Ethiopia. She taught briefly in Leicester and Solihull before moving to Bedford twenty years ago to work initially at Bedford High School and, for the past fifteen years, at Bedford Modern School where she was Head of Economics and, subsequently, Head of the PPE faculty until September 2016.