Navigating the Political Impartiality Guidance when teaching in the ‘days after’

What is the Political Impartiality Guidance for schools?

The Department for Education document entitled Guidance: Political Impartiality in Schools (hereby I will refer to this as the PIS) is an intriguing example of how guidance can be experienced as a coded diktat. The document is, as its name suggests, guidance. It does not, as its content, tone and how it gets operationalised seem to suggest, provide any new legal duties for schools, statutory or otherwise, regarding the freedom to teach issues which could be deemed sensitive, controversial or political. In fact, anything we teach can be, at some point, challenged by someone as any of these things – sensitive, controversial or political. As teachers, we do have a legal duty to endeavour to present a balanced view and to not explicitly promote partisan political views. However, what gets labelled as political is open to interpretation, and in recent years this can feel like it has been broadened to include anything which is not Conservative Party doctrine or even an individual politician’s own personal and partial beliefs – which happens quite often these days from a range of politicians on both sides who don’t seem able or willing to be united with their party on some issues. 

The PIS document occasionally gets reissued, and this is not random. It was first reissued in February 2022, coinciding with schools’ growing publicly expressed interest in equipping young people to understand and question key issues which have an impact on our freedom as citizens and on equity for all. In the wake of the post-George Floyd international re-awakening to racism and the increasingly urgent clarion call to reduce global warming before it is too late, this re-issue covered climate change, decolonising the curriculum and racial equity; naming Black Lives Matter specifically as verboten. This was done through a series of ‘scenario’ illustrations, which could be seen as coincidental random examples or as a warning shot across the boughs of many schools that have taken steps to include antiracist practice and climate-change awareness into their ethos and operations. Following this re-issue, there were a number of schools that had previously freely published their commitment to antiracism and had used the slogan Black Lives Matter, where now in place of the webpage was an Error 404 message. Oops, this page does not exist!

The PIS document also included warning schools and school communities from using their citizen rights to protest or critique government policy through examples such as, it’s okay to put up posters that thank the NHS but not okay to put up posters which say ‘Save the NHS’. It is not surprising that to many it becomes such a minefield that they would rather steer clear of anything which is perceived as political. Especially if you are time-poor and low on confidence in a high stakes, high pressure sector such as education.

Critics of the guidance, including teaching unions such as the National Education Union (NEU), say that rather than clarifying existing legal duties for schools, each reissue adds “new layers of mystification and complexity” and introduces “obfuscation about what is and is not a ‘political’ issue”. You can see how the slippery slope of ambivalence created by a document which parades as giving clarity through prescriptive scenarios actually blurs in such a way that voicing concern, critique or opinion becomes seen as having the potential to be perceived as political, which then becomes understood as thereby concrete proof of politically partiality, and thus not only best avoided but forbidden.

Each time we experience a ‘day after moment’ we can expect the guidance to be updated and reissued. Lo and behold, the most recent re-issue of the guidance includes a new scenario regarding the situation in Israel-Palestine, which is referred to as a ‘conflict’ throughout and which pitches in Scenario G “A teacher finds a resource online designed to support teaching about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is a political issue” (PIS, 2023). Here we see that any engagement with Israel-Palestine has been labelled squarely as political now can be read as: do not proceed, leave well alone, desist. The effect of this is that we cannot speak about any aspect of the situation in Gaza now because it sits in the ‘Political! do not touch!’ bucket. 

When the PIS is operationalised

Many believe that teaching is a political act, should be liberatory and that in order to change reality we must learn to name reality. Therefore, we need our curriculum and pedagogy to ensure that children and staff are well-versed in critical thinking and understand their rights as citizens to challenge and critique policy and policy enactment at school, local and national levels, or wherever they see inequity being in operation in their orbit. And yet, there are a number of forces which are deployed to police schools and teachers around political impartiality which acts as a way of silencing.

Here three recent examples of things schools and teachers have been reprimanded for: 

• Teaching about Greta Thunberg – a colleague shared that this was picked up during an Ofsted inspection, and the school was told that they should not be promoting contested views about climate change, nor celebrating the actions of a child who encourages other children to truant.
• Making white children feel guilty about Britain’s colonial past – Kemi Badenoch chose to warn teachers during Black History Month no less, that if they do anything to make white children feel guilty about colonialism, they would be breaking the law. In her speech she refers to not Critical Race Theory, but Political Race Theory just to really drive her point home.
• The impartiality guidance says we can say that racism is bad and unacceptable but anything else means that we are partisan. This means we cannot define what racism is, how it manifests or what it looks like. We are also bound by the guidance to always give the ‘other side’ so we are not allowed to promote anti-racism as fact or right – so are we meant to teach about the racial inferiority of Black and negatively racialised folk as an equally valid fact to counterbalance any teaching about antiracism? Or as the Sewell Report tried to have us believe – racism is an interpersonal issue of a few bad apples and structural racism cannot be found and therefore cannot be assumed as fact.
  

The impartiality guidance is reinforced and weaponised by many actors it seems. In these three examples we see Ofsted, individual politicians, and supposedly evidence-informed commission reports. (This is what I mean when I have been heard to say ‘beware the impartiality police’).

So how do we proceed?

It’s important to give some hope and some practical solutions rather than providing something that could be perceived as just a diatribe railing against the impartiality guidance. I want to draw on a useful conceptual framework called Days After Pedagogy, developed in the USA and which is deployed to centre perspectives of equity and justice in the days after major events, traumas and tragedies at local, state, national and international level.

The key principles are:

1. A commitment to justice and equity 
2. Student-centred and humanising interactions and spaces
3. Risk-taking
4. Adaptability and flexibility
5. Sociopolitical awareness
6. Vulnerability

When teachers, curricula, schools work through these principles, they can:

1. Resist silence in the face of oppression
2. Refuse neutrality
3. Reclaim voice and agency for themselves and their students
4. Teach towards transformation

How can you use Days After Pedagogy to help you with the Israel-Palestine situation:

1. Resist silence & refuse neutrality – Ask students what they think they know already and what they would like to know more about. Using Freire’s principle of encouraging problem posing not problem solving.
2. Reclaim voice and agency for yourself and your students – group the ‘what we know’ and ‘what we want to know’ into clear themes and gather 10 distinct lines of enquiry. Form a working party with a remit, clear time and space to meet regularly, terms of engagement to ensure safety and care are prioritised but silencing is not an option, and start to research answers to the things we don’t know, and fact check assumptions we think we do know.
3. Reassure the students that we are going to all learn and develop our understanding together over time. The situation is dynamic and so are we.
4. Teach towards transformation – everyone will be transformed through this process.
   Tell your students that together you will find answers, perspectives and ways of understanding based on what you have captured from them and that together, over a period of time, you will have a series of constructive and courageous conversations.
   If we want balance, critical thinking and to prime our young people to be able to go deep, think wisely and feel hope, we need to model this and do it over time. Not one PSHE lesson, not shut it down completely, not a ‘write to your MP’ lesson.

The young are our future – we must believe in them and allow them to co-create the future in the present.

Sources and resources

What you need to know about political impartiality in schools (DfE pamphlet)

DfE Guidance: Political impartiality in schools

https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620473/gd-teaching-controversial-issues-290418-en.pdf;jsessionid=6123884AD91FC4CCBAACDC8F33B20B17?sequence=1

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/feb/17/guidance-on-political-impartiality-in-english-classrooms-confusing-say-teachers-unions

Political impartiality: Ten ways to sit on a fence

Schools in England told not to use material from anti-capitalist groups

Alyssa Hadley Dunn (18 Apr 2023): “Why did we never learn this?”:
preparing educators to teach for justice and equity on days after, International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2023.2181456

Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed

G is for George, Gaza and Genocide

A painting I did in the early 2000s of Palestinian women mourning at a graveside

G is for George

In the wake of the brutal public murder of American citizen, George Floyd, at the hands of police in May 2020, it seemed like just about every organisation worldwide whether commercial, third sector or public sector put out a statement about their commitment to being actively anti-racist. It was as if the (white) world woke up to racism and there was a sense of cautious hope that things would get better. They had to, surely? 

For many previously oblivious to race and racism, a range of new terminology and concepts came into view, such as lived experience, bias, racial equity, representation, structural racism, white supremacy, microaggressions, liberation, emancipation, freedom, justice – some even dabbled with learning about the tenets of critical race theory and considered what the impact of perceived historical colonial oppression might mean today. In schools and universities, efforts sprang up to implement anti-racist strategies, to consider the lack of representation in staffing, even in some places pledges to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.

Since the ‘George Floyd moment’ and subsequent antiracism (re)awakening only three years ago, there has been a simultaneous reactionary shift further towards right-wing, nationalist policy across many countries, including the UK. Educators in particular have felt government doubling-down on demands to de-politicise and neutralise their work through techniques such as bolstering impartiality rules, and a gradual broadening of what constitutes the politicised. Race, gender, and class are seen as ‘best left outside the school gates’, dismissed as ‘woke nonsense’ or punishable as ‘dangerous extremism’. This, coupled with what can only be described as wilful ignorance and indifference, means that teachers and schools faced with the current situation in the middle east, are floundering. Also seemingly missing is an understanding of the state of Israel as a settler-colonial project specifically conceived of as an extension of the European colonial formation and ‘a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism’ (Herzl, 1895).

G is for Gaza and Genocide

On October 7th 2023 a group of Hamas fighters, the organisation designated as a terrorist group by many countries around the world including Britain, caught Israel off guard and entered from Gaza in large numbers, slaughtering citizens and military personnel. Other people such as foreign workers were also caught up in the violence. Hamas, seeing itself as fighting against the Israeli state’s ongoing violent settler-colonial oppression on behalf of the Palestinian population, killed 1,400 and kidnapped over 200 people. Israel’s military, backed by many foreign powers claiming its right to defend itself, has launched a brutal bombardment on Gaza in retaliation, and in just nine weeks, around 16,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result. The vast majority of those killed are civilians, including women and children. Gaza is essentially a densely populated open prison, held under tight control by Israel, where 50% of the population are children. Bombardment of Gaza for the purpose of eviscerating Hamas, as is Israel’s stated aim, is not possible without vast civilian deaths and casualties, including the Israeli hostages held there. What is unfolding is a genocide, while the world seemingly condones it, ignoring demands for a ceasefire .

In amongst all of this, some teachers and educators are trying to find a way to position themselves and do right by their students. Despite perhaps feeling that the three years since ‘the George Floyd moment’ might have supported the sector in prioritising and addressing huge deficits in racial literacy, the Israel-Palestine situation in general has been written off as too charged, too complicated and even somehow divorced from previous commitments to antiracist and decolonial practice. Some even justify refusal to engage with students demanding time to learn, process, protest and grieve with a declaration that ‘if I had a solution to the situation in Israel and Palestine, it would have been suggested by now’, as if one can only speak about it if one has a way to fix it. I have heard others say that there is no point taking up teaching time because it won’t be included on the GCSE or A Level papers for a number of years now, if at all, so students don’t need to know about it. Still others seem to be blighted by what filmmaker and critical thinker, Adam Curtis, terms ‘oh dearism’ – we find the world’s news too depressing and scary to bear, dismissing it with a plaintive sigh and moving on. This defeatist response to the news has become part of a new system of political control, Curtis asserts. With more reporting than ever and 24-hour rolling news, coupled with social media feeds featuring opinion, sound bytes, live citizen-coverage, we become less able to extrapolate coherence from the abundance of images coming at us. As a result, discourse is destroyed, massified messages are muddling, and faced with overload, we disengage. Stepping into the breach, guiding the public to understand where they may or may not stray, the government has deployed divide-and-conquer colonialist strategies to suggest or reinforce select messages at this time. Building on previous changing legislation attempting to curb recent mass demonstrations waving the Palestinian flag may now be a criminal offence; the Online Safety Bill could also be used to censor Palestine flags; visitors to the UK who incite antisemitism will be forcibly removed and the definition of extremism is to be broadened to include anyone who ‘undermines’ British institutions and values. Teachers are already spooked by the Department for Education’s impartiality guidance that was updated in 2022 in response to rising antiracism and social justice activism, and which no doubt will be updated and reissued in light of the current climate.

Silence is not an option

It is on this backdrop as educators and scholars – and those that claim to position ourselves on the side of the oppressed and not the oppressor – that we must not shrug, mutter ‘oh dear’ and turn away but to struggle, honouring our role to facilitate learning, critical thinking and dialogue, even if we don’t have all, or any answers. We must and should learn about the complex geopolitical background to the situation in Israel and Palestine and now is also as good a time as any to ‘put the theory to work’, as my Phd supervisor and colleague Professor Vini Lander often reminds us – for there is great comfort in the understanding that can be gained from theory, not least in times of extreme pain and anguish such as these. The settler-colonial formation which is the state of Israel, which Hamas sees itself using violence against violence to resist, has a dynamic and specificity which we can and must absolutely deploy our racial literacy to understand. And this struggle is raced and gendered in ways that we can absolutely see clearly in operation, especially if we compare schools’ responses during the first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Racism is an invention of colonialism (Silva, 2007) and the imposition of race on people serves to ‘exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into “racial ones” to stake a claim on nationhood’ (Robinson, 2000: 26). Racism has an impact on all our psyches, as we reproduce racial logics in myriad ways, wherever in the world we are situated, and however we are racialised. Both racism and colonialism work hand in hand, staking a claim on definitions of humanness – the dehumanising of ‘others’ ensures that they are re-situated outside of the dominant group’s perceived nation-building colonialist endeavour and will be treated accordingly. In the words of Tuck and Yang therefore, ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’ (2012: 1) and ‘decolonisation never takes place unnoticed’ (Fanon, 1963:36) – neither is it a pen and paper exercise concerning just the curriculum we teach in response to events of spring 2020. Colonialism is not something that only happened in the past, or a past event which has long tendrils into the present. It is here, now, with the same genocidal intent and disastrous human consequences. If we cannot point to the solution, we can certainly identify some of the technologies of racism and colonialism that have constructed, fuelled and which lock into place the 75 years of violence in Israel and Palestine. If we are to overcome fear of ignorance and the dread of accusation, we may also have to abandon our own need to see ourselves as innocent. Deploying critical pedagogy will support students to question and challenge all forms of domination, including understanding the beliefs and practices which dominate (Freire, 1970). Supporting each other and our students to recognise oppressive forces shaping society and take action against them starts with identifying what we don’t know, challenging what we think we know and working together to move towards clarity and action.

Some resources and links you might find helpful:

Podcasts to help discussions about Israel-Palestine in the classroom

Google Drive full of resources on Palestine – Israel

Free eBook of Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

Attendance: racialised factors to be mindful of

A walking school bus (Source https://www.flickr.com/photos/salforduniversity/10208517244)

I often get asked to help people by being a critical friend and suggest where they might pay attention to raced, gendered and classed elements to their work. You may know that new plans to drive up attendance rates in schools have been announced by the Government including the expansion of the Attendance Hubs programme aimed at areas of the country with the highest levels of pupil absence. A request I received recently was from someone preparing an application to become an Attendance Hub.

Already, the Department for Education (DfE) framing of the programme pitches it as race-, class- and gender-neutral, and using well-worn language such as ‘disadvantaged pupils’, who are perceived to need intervention. This intervention will always focus on the individual, will always have raced, classed and gendered notions of deficit and potential of those individuals, but doesn’t explicitly acknowledge these or problematise them. It will also never trace the source of the so-called disadvantage back to the systems, processes and systemic ways that they have been disadvantaged by State policy, and policy enactment in national and local government, and by teachers and leaders in schools on the basis of their perceived race, class and gender.

There is quite a bit of evidence that several things can impact on attendance for Black and racially minoritised young people specifically. Here are just a handful that are worth considering.

Racism
First of all is the threat of racism and/or experiencing racism from peers, teachers, and the school environment more generally is a real factor for young people in schools. This can impact on mental health and wellbeing of students and cause them to be late or not attend school. It is tricky to get an accurate picture of this, as schools are not obliged to log racist incidents even though 49% of young Black people think that racism in schools the biggest barrier to attaining success in education, and evidence shows that school staff are ignorant, oblivious and ill-equipped to understand, manage or prevent racism in schools. But it would be prudent to assume that children of colour and their families may stay away from school for reasons related to racism, trauma associated with racism or just needing a day off from racism in school.

Research on chronic absenteeism, for example, demonstrates how even mundane school policies create suffering in Black schooling experiences. Attendance policies and practices are seen to antagonise Black students and parents while simultaneously blaming them for their challenges with regular attendance. An article on Anti-Blackness and Attendance Policy Implementation demonstrates some of the issues you should look out for which are the result of a study in the USA but which is highly relevant and transferable to the UK.

Poverty and precarity
People with a minority ethnic background suffer higher rates of unemployment, face more barriers to work and receive lower pay than white workers. This group will also suffer more racism and inequitable treatment at work which in turn can mean they need to spend longer hours at work or take other measures to mitigate racism impacting on their keeping their job. Therefore factors associated with demanding, low-paid and precarious work can impact on school attendance. This can be through seemingly simple things like not having food, bus fare, clean clothes, children taking on part-time work to contribute to family income, parents being on shifts and work patterns which prevent them being available to monitor children getting up and to school on time. It can also be exacerbated in winter-time when conditions are more difficult due to fuel poverty and having to make difficult choices between food and heat.

Ill health
People with an ethnic minority background are more susceptible to ill health and mental ill health due to racism, poverty and barriers to accessing healthcare. Therefore children may be home sick more often, or parents/carers may be off sick and unable to get children to school. Sometimes a parent with a number of children may keep everyone home when one child is sick as they cannot leave them sick and unattended while they take their siblings to school.

This was happening quite a bit in one school, and they realised that part of the issue is due to the erosion of community, and the way that individualist ideologies have destroyed any sense of collective social responsibility in favour of an each-to-their-own mentality. The school has been pitching the idea of a walking bus, where families can scoop up children from the school on their route and ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ becomes more of a reality than a catch-phrase or nice to have. The school in question also encourages parents/carers to call the school and request a pick-up if they find themselves in the situation where they can’t leave the house to bring a child to school.

Children may also be caring for older siblings or adults who are unwell. They may be needed to accompany them to medical appointments either as carers or as translators. Similarly, children who are multilingual may attend other appointments with parents, such as housing issues, bank appointments or other logistical issues so that they can translate/lend support.

In some cases, ill health and mental ill health are deeply private matters and the school may not be informed of this as a reason for absence. There is no quick fix for this, and it requires sensitivity and trust-building on the part of the school.

Period poverty/ Heavy periods
The average school child who has started getting their period takes three days off each term due to period-related issues. Some young people have extremely heavy menstrual periods and with restricted access to toilets during lesson times or unsafe toilets due to bullying – or just the toilets being gross, understocked with tissue and washing facilities, and not private enough – they may stay away from school during their period. Remember that periods can be irregular as well, so you may not see a pattern of times of the month that young people are absent due to periods. Period poverty can mean that families cannot afford sanitary products in the quantities needed for comfortable attendance at school. Black families are disproportionately affected by period poverty.

Punitive school environments
Schools which claim to Teach Like a Champion, deploying techniques like SLANT or other punitive environments where children are controlled heavily and will be punished for small misdemeanours like missing equipment, uniform, hair, language use or other infractions may stay away from school rather than be punished – especially if the punishment means they will not be able to collect siblings from school, attend after-school commitments such as work, extra-curricular study or caring responsibilities.

That is probably plenty to be thinking about, but there will be much, much more. Feel free to add in the comments other factors and reasons which may contribute to absence and which are raced, classed and/or gendered.

Why do we refer to children who are multilingual as if they have a medical diagnosis?

A group of elementary school girls listens to their teacher during class. Source: https://edsource.org/2023/bilingual-students-do-better-on-tests-than-native-english-speakers-why/685215

Being bilingual is not a disease or an impediment so why do schools regularly refer to children and families who ‘have EAL’ (English as an additional language) as if it is?

Things I have noticed about schools’ attitudes to being bilingual or multilingual:

⛔ Schools cite poverty, deprivation, Free School Meals, children with special educational needs (SEND) and Education & Health Care Plans, and children who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) as if they are an indicator of impoverishment.

⛔ Multilingual children are seen as being deficient in English, rather than rich in languages. There is concern that they will hold other children back in the same class or ‘contaminate’ their English somehow.

⛔ Children who are white and speak European languages such as French and Spanish are seen as cultured and sophisticated. Black and Brown children who speak these languages, less so – and Black and Brown children who speak languages which are not European, are seen as needing extra help to ‘catch up’. Teachers are generally monolingual, especially in schools with majority white leadership and/or teachers. This country doesn’t value language learning and the second language learning is waning in schools.

This can result in:

⛔ Relying heavily on members of staff and community members (or children!) to provide free translation services on a grab and go basis. What about paying people for their services instead?

⛔ A lack of understanding about literacy, bilingualism and multilingualism. Many people speak fluently, but written language may be harder to have acquired, especially if we have moved around a lot or if we have grown up in a country which doesn’t prioritise retaining multilingualism. Yet schools send home letters in a variety of languages which have been directly translated from English edu-jargon using volunteers or Google Translate and are of varying quality, often to people who really can’t decipher them at all.

⛔ Many teachers wouldn’t think twice about staying in another country and not knowing the basics about the language, and similarly will have years of experience with communities which speak a range of languages and they will know nothing about these languages. This is why my child’s school thought it was merely baffling that my child was writing backwards with no vowels in Year 2 and still couldn’t read fluently in English in Year 4. Her first language is written from right to left and has no vowels (and now we know she is also dyslexic).

What could you do instead?

✅ Prioritise language learning on the curriculum and hire staff with skills in a different languages as an essential or desired criteria on the job spec.

✅ Find out about the languages children speak and learn about the poetry, stories, authors, scholars and important literary figures in those languages. Incorporate these into the curriculum.

✅ Learn about the terms, concepts and words that don’t have direct translation into English – you will be enriched.

See also Bell Foundation resources here

A thought exercise ahead of your next school International Evening

White British educators, I have a question or a thought exercise for you.

If you were asked by your child’s school to package up your culture into traditional dress, a food, music and some symbolic artefacts, what would you do?

It’s worth thinking about this, because on school International Evenings, what do the white British families do – or what are they asked to do? Why aren’t they also asked to distil themselves down in the same way as Global Majority children are?

The steel bands, saris and samosas* approach to ‘celebrating difference’ can culminate in a ‘parade your otherness’ event as people are given a moment to perform their distilled ‘cultural identity’ while white English people, who somehow don’t consider themselves to have a race, ethnicity or culture – they ‘just are’ – look on.

As a secular Jewish, Iraqi-Israeli-English family we were a bit baffled by the ‘traditional’ dress bit. What should we wear?
Dust and mud-stained clothes to show we work in the fields growing Jaffa oranges or Galia melons?
Maybe an army uniform and a gun to embody the settler colonial aspect of being Israeli?
Should we dress up as Ashkenazi Hasidic Jews or in Iraqi shalwar and hashimi dress to honour some distant ancestors?
Maybe we should bring fish and chips, roast beef, kugel, falafel and kubbeh to eat.

And aside from bringing these things and wearing that outfit, does anyone else present have the foggiest idea of the meaning of any of it? Ideally you learn about a range of things connected to heritage all year round and this is just a culmination in which everyone will feel knowledgeable about what they see.

Worth thinking about before you organise your next event.


* ‘Steel bands, saris and samosas’ is a phrase coined in 2001 by Modood & May in their article, multiculturalism and education in Britain: an internally contested debate.

Supporting children with exams: what can parents and carers do?

Exam periods are not only a source of stress for young people, but how your teen responds can set the mood for the whole household. During the pandemic, my kids were working towards their GCSEs and A Levels respectively, only to have them replaced by teacher assessed grades. This year, while one is coming towards the end of her second year at university, the other child is preparing for A Levels. Of course, for their school cohort, these will be their first public exams and the stakes feel higher than usual.

As a parent, here are some ways you can help your child during this seminal moment:

Remember, their experience is gospel

As parents, we have the benefit of hindsight, but if there’s something I have had drummed into me by my children, validating their experiences is the most supportive thing you can do. Even if you know this too will pass, understanding that the first few times you experience something, it feels huge and you need to be allowed to fully feel whatever it is that you feel. This is why for example young people report as the most lonely of any age group – when you get to my age, you know what periods of loneliness and isolation feel like, and you know what you can do to mitigate them. But to young people, this is a terrible new sensation and it can feel like this will be the rest of your life! Yes, it can be reassuring to have a parent tell you that in the grand scheme of things, things will be okay, but there are ways to do this without dismissing their real feelings of anxiety, doom, panic, comparison with peers and a lack of self-confidence. Think: what can you say that reflects back what they feel and also reassures them? Consider asking your child what they would find reassuring and then say that.

Ask what they need

Giving advice and helping with exam preparation practicalities can be brilliant, but only if they are receptive at the time that you give advice. Also, what worked for you, back in ancient times, may not feel relevant or helpful. So ask them first what they need right now. Perhaps you can suggest that when they feel ready, you can help them plan a realistic revision timetable, or maybe they would like some help with devising revision techniques, or maybe to join you on a trip to buy some nice flash cards, coloured pens and other stationery to help get prepared. Give them a written list of things you could help them with and let them know exact times of the day, evening and weekends when you will be available to help. When they are ready, they can book you in for whatever it is that they want your support with.

Feed and water them

It sounds obvious, but making sure that your child is eating well and is hydrated makes revision go more smoothly and can help keep them well throughout the exam period. Healthy snacks and drinks can help with concentration and staying power, and can also make your child associate pleasure with learning. If I see my child working hard, I will bring them a nice pint glass with a drink, some ice and a straw, a plate of chopped fruits, and a handful of nuts and quietly slide them into view by way of quietly saying “I see you, and applaud your efforts”. If I’m on my way home from work, I might pick up something they particularly like as a treat and surprise them as a reward for keeping on track with their work or as a commiseration if things aren’t going too well.

Go there, even if it feels counterintuitive

Young people can feel immense pressure to perform and aim for high grades. They can also be extremely fearful of failure and of disappointing their teachers and family. Dismissing this as nonsense or adding to the stress by nagging or pushing them to work harder are never good strategies. In my household we say, ‘Let’s go there and see how it feels’. By this I mean, we will talk through what the options are in different scenarios. ‘You don’t make the grades you need for your next step, what are your options? Can you appeal? Can you re-take? Are there other pathways that interest you?’

Having a plan B is important, and visualising yourself having not made the grade but still having options is empowering too. Allowing your child to imagine the feelings of shame, disappointment, upset and jealousy of peers who have aced their exams in a safe space as just one option, is cathartic. It is also an opportunity for you to show that you will walk with them, whatever happens.

Collective social responsibility

Remember that your child is not alone in their efforts to study and reach their goals. Their friends will be having their own experiences and homelife dynamics. Create a collaborative study space and invite them to host study sessions as a group, or perhaps they can all go and work together at the library nearby. Remind them of the advantages of working together, preparing revision materials and testing each other as well as the fact that not every child has a space at home to study. Modelling to your child the collective social responsibility we have, empathy for others and the benefits of social interaction rather than competitive self-absorption is crucial, especially in an often individualistic society. 

Use technology

There are so many wonderful technology tricks and apps that are readily available and either free or that the school will subscribe to:

• Plan a realistic revision timetable using the calendar attached to your child’s school email account, or if you have Gmail, set up a shared one so you can help them stay motivated and make sure they build in breaks, time with friends and rest time. You can also use software like Notion or Trello and create a basic project plan or a to-do list with Todoist. My favourite is Asana, not least because you get galloping unicorns if you complete a string of tasks!
• Digital flashcards apps like Quizlet are great for revision. You can also find lots of revision sets already created that you can adapt. Children in the same class can make the workload manageable if they divide up different topics and create shared revision sets for all to benefit from.
• Online learning platforms, lessons and explainers are things that some schools will subscribe to like Hegarty Maths for example. But there is a lot that is free and publicly available. If your child is confused by something or perhaps missed the class when that topic was being taught, catching up online can be a great relief.
• Timers setting an alarm to start and finish a revision session is a good idea. Taking breaks and building in down time can all be managed on a smart phone.
• Background sounds using apps like Spotify for music can help. You can download pre-made study music or create your own playlist. There are apps like Rain Rain with a huge range of white noise from crackling fires, to freight trains or waterfalls which can really help with concentration and mood. These can be useful for helping wind down before bed or if your child experiences anxiety-related sleep disturbance and needs soothing in the night.
• Time lapse video might sound bizarre but one of my children uses this as a motivator. They will film themselves studying on time-lapse or slow mode and then it creates a speeded up short version later. The longer they study, the more satisfying the video as you see, perhaps the sun go down in the background, or people passing by through the window and so on. Even though she’s a young adult and manages her own time away from home, we occasionally receive one of these via WhatsApp and it’s a nice way to elicit coos of encouragement from her parents and sibling.

The final advice is take care of yourself too. As a parent, you need to be rested, calm, centred and present during this challenging time so build in space for your own nutrition, exercise, off-loading onto listening ears outside the home and so on. And take your own advice, when the going gets tough know that this too will pass!

Speech at Race Equity Networking Event 2022

Good evening everyone. It is so good to be here and to see so many people in the room who I imagine are on a journey from curious to committed when it comes to race equity in their work and lives more generally.

For those that don’t already know me, I was a teacher for over a decade before moving across to working in leadership with education organisations on their start-up to grown-up journeys. I had the honour of being one of the founding team of The Key for school leaders, and have worked for Challenge Partners as head of membership and for Lyfta as director of engagement. Alongside this work, I have been what might be called a scholar activist – campaigning on issues around race equity as a co-founder and trustee of the BAMEed Network – which Amjad Ali, Allana Gay and I set up about 5 years ago and Arv Kaushal and Lizana Oberholzer have subsequently joined as trustees too. More recently I have been working with Leeds Beckett University as a coach on the anti-racist school award and the mental health leads programme, which in turn has led me to undertake a full time phd on unlearning racism in schools.

That’s the long version. The short version, which I am increasingly using is: My name is Penny, and I point at elephants. Those large, obvious and hard to miss issues around structural racism that are right there in so many rooms, spaces, interactions, events, and situations.

One big elephant could be me. I am white – you might have noticed. And it is quite often that I get asked why I even care if I am not directly impacted by race or racism. Well, guess what? I am not just white, I am racialised as white. As white people, we are able to swim comfortably in the waters of structural racism without even knowing what water is, if we so choose to. I am impacted by racism in some ways because I am Jewish, but I can choose when and if to reveal this. I am impacted by racism because the battle against racism is our issue as people racialised as white. Until we are all free, none of us is free, and until we learn about our own racial identity, we will walk this earth oblivious to the responsibility we have personally, professionally and consistently to disrupt the status quo as if our life depends on it – because our lives do depend on it. White people have a proximity to power that affords ample opportunities to point at elephants and ask, “what is going on here?” We should do this not because we come here to ‘help’ but because all of our liberation is bound up in this work too (to draw from the words of Lilla Watson, Artist and Indigenous activist from central Queensland).

We live in increasingly difficult times when it comes to questions of race equity. We are told by the Sewell Report that institutional racism cannot be found in this country. It is a thing of the past we are told. Just this week we are told, the proof of equality is in the amazing range of racial diversity across those stepping forward to lead the Conservative party right now. But should we be wary of people who in the same sentence speak of how their parents sailed here to the motherland with nothing, and are ready to deport you to Rwanda tomorrow? And what of these people who have enjoyed wealth and privilege, who point at deficit narratives to explain gaps in achievement by some ethnic groups, and who extol the virtues of meritocracy and ignoring race, as strategies for success? One thing I have learned through reading about the last 75 years of education policy in this country is that whiteness is not a skin colour, it is a system and we go in cycles of gains and losses when it comes to race equity. Drawing on my own Jewish heritage, I liken it to dancing the Hora – linking arms and stepping one step forwards, two to the side and back again we go – hopa hey!

But seriously, we have forever work to do. Tony Benn said: “Every generation must fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no final victory, and there is no final defeat” 

I believe that as humans who are living in a structurally racist society, we must learn about our own racialised identity, and make conscious choices about how we show up and do the work necessary to see, acknowledge and disrupt racist practice using the tools we have at our disposal. As educators, we have such power and influence – and we can cause much damage. We have work to do to consistently and repeatedly refuse to be neutral, and to find the spaces in which we can show up as reliable accomplices (and not just self-appointed allies when it suits us) in the collaborative struggle for justice.

We started with elephants, and so we will end with them. I will use the words of the late Bishop Desmond Tutu “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of the mouse and you say you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality”.

There are elephants everywhere. We have work to do.

Keeping an eye on EDI and anti-racism

Prof. Paul Miller 2022

Written by: Penny Rabiger and Prof. Paul Miller

The dual pandemics of racism and Covid 19 dramatically collided in Spring 2020, bringing a sense of urgency and declarations of “we must do something” from many white-majority organisations far and wide, ranging from village schools to high street fashion outlets, national charities to global food chain stores. In some cases, there’s been an organisational equivalent of the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – that could be translated to the stages of workplace commitments to change, emerging over this period. Social media has been instrumental in amplifying and making public much of this phenomenon.

How did antiracism become EDI?

Anti-racism was the clear and urgent priority following the murder of George Floyd, and over time, this seems to have been re-routed to a more generalist approach. Although it is not exactly the same as declarations that ‘all lives matter’ or the ‘whataboutery’ often deployed to what is perceived as a need to counter prioritising one injustice over another, it’s hard not to sense that this might be a softening, as anti-racism work becomes increasingly tricky and demanding when the dust has settled on the public announcements and the work begins. One crucial question often seems to be, ‘If you are saying you want your organisation to be ‘anti’ racist, does this mean you are ready to accept as fact that it is in fact structurally racist at present?’ People of colour (usually in roles in the existing hierarchy that lack power, influence, a budget, or agency precisely because of the racist structures they seek to disrupt) have been hired within their own organisations only sometimes to find themselves isolated or abandoned to do the work, feeling they are token, powerless and exposed in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. In some scenarios, the role has been discontinued in favour of some training, and pledges to do better. In other cases, having lifted the lid on it, working on racism is said to seem ‘combative’ or ‘unduly negative’. The logic goes that since there are actually Equality Duty objectives which hold us accountable to demonstrate equality for all of the nine protected characteristics, it seems inequitable to just give oxygen to the one: race. This can be further explained by those who have heard that since inequity is intersectional, we can legitimately work our way through all of the protected characteristics with that in mind. This problem has been acknowledged by Miller (2019) who tells us that “”issues to do with ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in education have been subsumed in wider discourses around ‘diversity’, the result of which is the subsuming of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity issues under a single diversity banner is contributing to the invisibility of the quotidian experiences of ethnic minority people’ (p.223).[1] Miller’s observations are consistent with Kimberle Crenshaw’s entreaty to engage in intersectional anti-racism work, but not in place of actual anti-racism work.

Social media has also colluded with the situation to create an army of freelance Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) experts with varying knowledge and practice experience, of all ethnicities. Whilst the market is large enough to accommodate all these experts, organisations must be discerning so their spend in this area can take them forward in knowledge and practice. It might come as a surprise that despite the intention and activism of staff and leaders there is only limited evidence EDI programmes are in fact increasing diversity. Not much has changed during the various waves of EDI work since the 1960s, aside from of course some new technological advances to help gather and track data. Organisations still rely on ‘diversity training’ to reduce workplace bias, and ‘anonymous recruitment practices to try and improve attracting and recruiting new candidates. Whilst these important actions, without organisational and individual ownership of anti-racism, meaningful change is quite possibly further away than imagined or believed.

There’s almost always an elephant

One unintended outcome of the fragmentation and marketisation of EDI work and the associated social media noise, is that it might actually be driving a shift away from focus on anti-racism to one centred around a more generalist diversity agenda pointed out above. ‘Diversity’ can be a way to sanitise what was seen as a great urgent concern two years ago, and perhaps now still feels deeply uncomfortable – and therefore attract more business. It feels more fair and equitable, and it opens the door to people who perhaps feel they don’t have skin in the game to rely on as their driver for change to find their ‘in’, and can perpetuate the notion that racism is a ‘Black problem’, as opposed to something firmly rooted in the structures of whiteness. Furthermore, EDI professionals need to ensure that diversity management is a strategic priority for those willing to employ their services and by setting out the ‘moral and business’ cases for diversity. Organisations are guilty of overriding the moral case and not sufficiency engaging with the business case, leading to a zero sum game.  

The elephant in the room of course is unpacking what we mean by diversity and how it is used. Language is important, after all. Firstly, people cannot be ‘diverse’. And yet we hear EDI specialists and the general public talk of ‘diverse candidates’, ‘diverse teachers’, even people referring to themselves as ‘diverse’. But the use of the word diverse in this way, actually reinforces the status quo and normalise a notion that default and standard is one thing (white, male, heterosexual, cis-gender, able bodied, middle class), and anyone who falls outside of this is ‘diverse’. Similarly, ‘diversifying’ the workforce, or ‘diversifying’ the school curriculum is often talked about as if there’s a trunk road of normal, and some small lanes of scenic routes we could add in to make the journey to our destination perhaps more scenic and enriching. These notions are as problematic as they are important.

The most significant elephant in the room, we find, is that of power. On a grand scale we need to contextualise power within the framework of capitalism and the necessity of inequalities to create the power structures for the system to work in the first place. On a smaller scale, diversity practitioners themselves often overlook the centrality of power in the equation, and in doing so fail to reposition organisational discourse, practice and the responsibility for leading change towards those with the power to do so.  As Miller (2020) sets out, “leaders have the power to establish and influence cultures; to influence race relations positively; help reframe problems, ameliorate conflicts and inform strategies; secure buy-in and create an institutional multiplier effect, and to influence practice outside their institutions” (pp. 5-6). [2]  As Professor Paul Warmington said recently, ‘racism is everyday, it is not a glitch in the system, it is the system’^[3] – a situation which makes it even more urgent for anti-racism to be done, and to be done by those with appropriate knowledge, skills, and lived experiences.

Another outcome of the furious competition and fragmentation of EDI work is that it plays straight into the hands of capitalist market forces and creates a situation where true collaboration and powerful alliances become difficult. There becomes an ironic mirroring of the power dynamic of having the owners of the means of production and those that generate the profit for them through their work inherent in the capitalist model. Noisy self-appointed EDI celebrities create what they refer to as collaborations through drowning out the perceived competition, effectively colonising the space and co-opting others’ work, allowing them to grab onto their coat-tails in exchange for ‘exposure’. While this can be useful for both parties, if examined through an educated lens of diversity, equity and inclusion, it should be problematised and openly critiqued for a space to be created for truly reflexive and emancipatory work.

Keeping an eye on EDI and anti-racism

Racism lies at the centre of society as a powerful tool with massive reach. We absolutely must think of the nine protected characteristics detailed in the Equality Act 2010 and work towards our duty to make workplaces and society friendly to all humans. It is also important to not lose sight of the fact that when we consider race, we are talking about peoples upon whom the greatest genocide in human history was enacted and which was systematically justified through flawed and carefully manufactured logic of race and racism. A logic which is still embedded in our psyches today, and by which society is still ordered in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. In short, people of colour are still paying the price for the fact that “racism as a tool for ordering society is bigger than any weapon of mass destruction” ^[4]. We need to keep a critical eye on EDI and antiracism work, and ensure that we are not falling foul of the structures of inequity and systems of division that nurture inequity through our own work. We need to build equitable alliances and collaborations to ensure that our work is powerful, agile and enduring. We need to generously showcase counter-narratives to the status quo that show pockets of hope and examples of activism, wherever they can be found. We cannot afford to allow apathy, a lack of trust or competition to railroad both EDI and antiracism efforts, wherever they are taking place.

---

[1] Miller, P. (2019) ‘Race’ and ethnicity in Educational Leadership. In T Bush, L Bell and D Middlewood (Eds) Principles of Educational Leadership & Management (3^rd Edn), London: SAGE.

[2] Miller, P. (2020). Anti-racist school leadership: making ‘race’ count in leadership preparation and development, Professional Development in Education,  https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2020.1787207

^[3] Critical, post, anti or ante race and education in colourblind Britain – Prof. Paul Warmington lecture at the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality, Leeds Beckett University, 1st June 2022

^[4] Ibid.

What I have learned about staff mental health and wellbeing in schools

Over the past six months, I have been supporting school staff who are on a DfE-funded Mental Health Leads course. Having carried out about 120 coaching conversations with staff members leading on this work in their schools, I feel that there are some clear themes coming through that we need to pay attention to. I also have read a number of research reports which have been useful to support my understanding of the picture nationwide. The following are some thoughts on what I have learned about mental health and staff wellbeing in schools.

Schools in context
When it comes to mental health, schools are influenced to both push and pull factors. ‘Push factors’ are those which can be influenced by the organisation such as leadership practises, school policies, pay and conditions. ‘Pull factors’ are those which may not be influenced by the organisation such as health issues, staff moving away, pregnancy and maternity. 

There are interdependencies between the push and pull factors which should not be overlooked. According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, teaching staff and education professionals report the highest rates of work-related stress, depression and anxiety in  Britain. The wellbeing of the school workforce is of concern because over 947,000 educators currently work in state-funded schools in England, and research has shown that the wellbeing of teachers affects both their retention and their students’ outcomes.

Some of the factors identified in the Ofsted research which impact on how teachers feel at work are:

• health (how we feel physically and mentally)
• relationships with others at work
• purpose (including clarity of goals, motivation, workload, ability to influence decisions)
• environment (work culture, facilities and tools)
• security (financial security, safety, bullying/harassment)

Pull factors for schools

The education sector itself
While teachers have strong moral purpose and can be positive about their workplace and colleagues, they expressed disappointment with the profession as a whole whereby the advantages do not outweigh the disadvantages e.g. workload driven by national policy, how the profession is regarded externally (although this has risen between 2013-18 according to the EPI study), feeling dictated to by policy-makers.

According to the Education Policy Institute (EPI) study, secondary school teachers show lower levels of happiness, life satisfaction and worthwhileness than primary and early years teachers but also have lower levels of anxiety despite reporting high levels of work-related stress and less manageable workloads. (It would be worth exploring gender differences in this sector). Also in the EPI study, teachers’ view of their profession has worsened since 2013 significantly.  Interestingly, the Education Support Teacher Wellbeing Index 2021 found that teachers identifying as Black and Ethnic Minority reported lower levels of stress than their white peers, and they are following this up with further research to explore why this might be.

Lack of agency
Teachers do not have enough influence over policy, either at national, local or school level. This is increasing with gradual weakening of the unions, increased pressure on schools from government to academise, and to tackle many wider societal issues which arise from policy-based and structural inequity e.g. gender and ethnicity pay gaps, poverty, general mental health crisis. This can be exacerbated if they are part of a multi-academy trust (MAT), where this adds an extra level of centralised decision-making on which teachers are not consulted.

Ofsted
Increased administrative workload, feeling of threat, leadership threat levels from impending Ofsted inspection and changes in framework lead to additional workload. The suspension of Ofsted inspections during the pandemic was triggered to prevent staff burnout.

Again, MAT structures can mean additional levels of mock-inspection, monitoring, scrutiny and compliance activity.

There is recent pressure on schools rated outstanding by Ofsted that have not been inspected for many years, and who will likely be downgraded as the inspectorate seeks to reduce the number of schools rated outstanding overall. 

Work-life balance
The workload is high and this is affected by increasing administrative tasks, marking, staff absence (exacerbated by the pandemic), staff shortages, diminishing external support specialists (e.g. SEND), behaviour management of children with increasingly complex needs, frequently changing government policy, lack of skills and training.

The TES survey report shows that 67% of UK teachers said their workload is unmanageable in 2021. In 2020, this figure was 22%. 

The Education Support survey showed that 70% of staff that have considered leaving the sector attributed this to workload (80% for senior leaders).

While many sectors have been able to give more flexibility around working arrangements including condensed hours and working from home, this is less possible for schools.

Funding and resources
Decreased human resources increase workload, efficiency, and can mean taking on responsibilities outside of a staff member’s area of expertise (high risk strategy for performance and progression). Lack of physical resources can impede teaching quality and impact of teaching. This is especially acute for smaller schools which will need to fund a leadership team and cover material costs of running a school on smaller budgets.

Funding is and will increasingly be inadequate for schools to even cover their staff costs.

Relationships with parents/carers
Parental/carer expectations and the high-challenge, high-threat climate in schools regarding outcomes for children and inappropriate communication between staff and parents can be stress factors. The marketisation of education has created the notion of parental choice and pressure on schools to deliver in order to retain popularity with parents/carers. 

The Covid 19 pandemic
The pandemic, working from home, remotely or in blended ways has created a worldwide re-evaluation by many around the meaning of work and a ‘great resignation’ as people move to different patterns of work, professions and relationship with the world of work. While leading up to the pandemic, 1:3 teachers left the profession within their first five years, this trend starts with the fact that 1:6 leave within just one year. In the Education Support survey, 54% of staff said they considered leaving the sector in the past two years due to pressures on their mental health and wellbeing (63% SLT, 53% teachers)

Staff report that they feel much less confident performing their role now than they did in 2020 2020 79% felt confident compared with 38% in 2021).

Push factors for schools

Students’ behaviour
Low-level disruption impacts on teachers’ wellbeing and impacts on learning. Inconsistency and lack of support around behaviour management leaves teachers feeling exposed. The pandemic has also impacted on relationships with students, with the TES survey showing that while in 2020 83% felt they and colleagues had good relationships with students, but in 2021 this was at 58%.

Lack of support
Teachers feel unsupported by line managers in appropriate ways and solutions are often offered when it is too late. Not enough recognition for work done well, positive feedback, professional dialogue, development and nurture rather than monitoring and target-oriented performance management. About a third of teachers report that they don’t get enough support with just under 50% saying they get some support but that it isn’t adequate.

Lack of agency and trust 
The TES survey showed that nearly 50% of 2,995 UK respondents to their survey reported that they don’t have a voice about how things go at their school. 44% of staff in the Education Support survey say  they feel fully trusted by their line manager with 91% of those who felt distrusted reporting it impacts negatively on their wellbeing.

Lack of training and professional development opportunities
Nearly half of respondents in the TES survey said there were no opportunities for them to develop in their current role, and a similar number thought they were not working towards personal goals.

74% of teachers in the Education Support survey say that their Initial Teacher Training courses did not prepare them well to manage their own or their students’ wellbeing.

Poor leadership
The TES survey shows that less than 40% think that their school has a vision for the future. 16% feel that information is shared effectively between staff in their school. The pandemic has forced physical restrictions on ad hoc communication between staff outside of their ‘bubbles’ and the volume of emails has become so great that messages can often be missed.

The EPI study shows that SLT have the highest levels of both positive wellbeing and anxiety.

The Education Support survey shows that 42% of staff consider their organisation’s culture as having a negative effect on their wellbeing and 27% of staff feel the relationship they have with the SLT impacts on their wellbeing most negatively.

How might we be tackling some of these issues?

Schools can limit their response to staff wellbeing and mental health to being reactive to poor mental health and wellbeing through offering Employee Assistance Programmes and taking out insurance to cover costs should a member of staff have to take time off. Other responses can be around ‘compensatory’ measures without addressing issues which may be connected to push factors listed above. These can range from yoga and meditation sessions, small gestures like cakes and treats, through to tangible offers around revisiting workload around marking and feedback, or offering each staff member a ‘mental health’ day that they can take once a year.

According to the Mercer study on digital healthcare innovation, a third of companies plan to grow their virtual or telehealth solutions as part of their employee support benefits. The report says that employee-focused digital technology can support staff to contribute their best if they are able to develop new leadership skills, can target feeling stress and burn-out swiftly, and if the organisation can shift the culture around mental health, and invest in meaningful programmes of support targeted at employees’ needs.

The following are some of the ways which companies offering wellbeing solutions for staff may be able to tackle some of the issues identified:

Helping line managers know how their teams are doing
Regular staff surveys can create a view of staff wellbeing which is not possible to gain in the bustle of day to day life at school. These are only as good as the line managers are at using the results in positive ways. Where they are used as surveillance tools, this is extremely negative for staff who then either don’t participate, or limit how honest they are.

Anonymous feedback from teachers
Many schools say they have an ‘open door policy’ for staff to come and ask for support but teachers are often afraid that by reporting a problem, they will become the problem. Anonymising feedback is a good way to know what is happening without letting bias creep in. Again, in some coaching calls, staff described tactics used by line managers to try to find and ‘have a word’ with those they perceived as negative or lacking resilience who reported feeling unhappy at work.

Helping teachers set goals professionally and personally
Teachers being in dialogue with themselves around goal setting relieves the pressure of goal-setting being always around performance management targets and being held accountable to management. Unfortunately, the consensus from most staff I spoke with was that there is no time outside of performance management routines to have professional conversations. Some, however, had fantastic cultures which included strength-based leadership and peer coaching as powerful methods to promote professional growth and autonomy.

Staff recognition and appreciation 
Time pressures and workload often mean this is left unsaid and the only feedback teachers get is when things aren’t going well. Other times, when this is given, it can feel tokenistic, especially if the basics of good people management aren’t in place.

Whole-school communication about students behaviour and wellbeing
CPOMs and other online tools have created useful tools for teachers to quickly and effectively register concerns about their students. Where they are able to form a team response, teachers feel supported and although concerns for students are high, they don’t feel as much burden dealing with issues alone.

Supporting leaders with Ofsted compliance around staff wellbeing
In my investigations into technology to support staff wellbeing, one of the apps I explored links their offer directly to Ofsted compliance. Being able to show how you monitor, respond to and support staff wellbeing is helpful. Again, when it is done as a performative act to satisfy the impending threat of Ofsted, that’s a red flag.

What are schools doing well?

Based on over 120 hours of listening to Mental Health Leads talking about mental health and wellbeing in their schools, here are some insights.

Workload is a massive issue
Schools have tried to tackle this through a combination of looking for ideas to reduce workload, especially those that are evidence-informed like moving to a whole-class feedback and no marking policy. Other workload-related ideas intersected with trust and autonomy, which we know influence employees’ sense of wellbeing at work and job satisfaction. So, for example allowing teachers to do PPA time at home, having restrictions on when emails can be sent and/or read, kicking-out times from the school site, finding easier ways to communicate that aren’t email-based (or WhatsApp groups) like Teams or Slack.

HR and the way people are treated
Schools that had in place clear, people-centred policies and had done training around the sorts of life-cycle and seminal moments issues that staff face seemed to fare better in terms of protecting staff mental health and wellbeing.

For example, generous and equitable practice around parental leave, fertility, bereavement, family break-up, attending children’s plays and medical appointments, menopause, moving house, duvet days.

Professional development pathways
In small schools and those with low staff turnover, staff can become frustrated that there is nowhere to develop. The schools that seemed to be aware of this had developed firstly a way to link performance management and professional development to building on strengths rather than correcting weaknesses. Some had gone as far as thinking about using something like Strengths Finder 2.0 or an adult equivalent of SDQs to map how everyone was using their strengths. Good schools will be building development pathways that tap into local, regional and national CPD offers, networks and opportunities. Others will align themselves with a professional body like Chartered College of Teaching to ensure that teachers can develop through action research, special interest groups, NPQs, Masters courses and more.

Significant and regular development conversation
One big missing element was significant and regular development conversations that happen frequently and that aren’t tied to performance management cycles ie. not an annual ‘have you met your targets?’ conversation.

Regular one to ones, and knowing there is at least one person within the school who has your best interests at heart is important. This could be solved through a peer to peer coaching model with monthly sessions covering ‘What’s going well?’, ‘What could be even better if..?’ and ‘Where can I help you?’

Some basic coaching training and matching people in cross-hierarchy pairs would create an interesting dynamic and space for professional coaching conversation.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion matters
Connected to this is a big win to be had around equality, diversity and inclusion. If this work can be linked to structural barriers, it could be extremely powerful. Gathering some basic data on individuals could yield some simple red flags connected to development pathways, HR and other elements that can impact on mental health and wellbeing and that are also linked to protected characteristics.

Employee Assistance Programmes are patchy
Many schools have these but have no idea if or when staff use them. Many mental health leads thought that these could send a message that the school cares and that this is there if you need it, while others thought that it was a bit useless especially if the issues are caused by school itself but dealt with externally. Most of the mental health leads in schools felt that there needed to be a way to build a culture of engagement with the services they use, and that there’s a need to change school culture so that you don’t have to push yourself to breaking point. These programmes can give the message that they are there because school will break you eventually.

It will be interesting to hear your thoughts and experiences on these matters whether you are a school leader, leading on mental health in your school, or even part of a company supporting schools with a programme or a technology solution to alleviate some of the pressures on schools.

Sources:
TES (2022) Wellbeing Report 2022: UK https://www.tes.com/for-schools/content/staff-wellbeing-report-2022

Education Policy Institute (2020) The wellbeing of the school workforce in England https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/wellbeing-school-workforce/

Ofsted (2019) Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/936253/Teacher_well-being_report_110719F.pdf

Education Support (2021) Teacher Wellbeing Index https://www.educationsupport.org.uk/resources/for-organisations/research/teacher-wellbeing-index/

Mercer (2021) Connecting health and tech in the workplace https://www.mercer.us/our-thinking/health/mercer-marsh-benefits-health-on-demand.html

Wellbeing and mental health: most people don’t stay in a job for the cake trolley on a Friday

Source: Penny Rabiger

Over the past few weeks, I have been talking to schools about mental health and wellbeing. It is fantastic to hear that teachers and leaders are taking mental health and wellbeing of children seriously and are putting things in place to ensure that it is integrated into the curriculum, behaviour management and relationships across the school.

What I have felt through talking with schools is that nurturing good mental health and wellbeing of staff doesn’t come naturally to many. While they understand that no amount of cakes, recognition walls and coffee vans are going to cut workload and the stresses of the job, leaders seem inexperienced around what does matter to human wellbeing in the world of work more generally, and which are in their power to change. 

My experience of the world of work tells me these things matter when they are done well, and can break people when they are not. You could file all these things under building good organisational culture, which I believe is as grounded in the niceties of daily interaction as they are in solid, routine and dependable processes and practice working in synchronicity.

Feeling valued professionally

Most people don’t stay in a job for the cake trolley on a Friday or the Christmas party. What really matters is feeling valued professionally. When this is done badly, you might get a hint of your value through the thrill of being new, being one of the old timers whose place seems secure, or be flavour of the month for a fleeting period. But what really matters for our health and wellbeing at work is similar to what we want in place for the children in our school – does everyone have at least one trusted adult who consistently has their best interests at heart, who can coach them through difficult times, set clear boundaries and support them to reach their full potential?

Professional value can be communicated through the following ways:

Does my line manager schedule regular 1:1s with me?

Do they show up to them without fail and hold a conversation with me around a simple agenda: 

• What’s going well?
• What could be better for you?
• What’s stopping you?
• What will you do next?

Do I have regular opportunities to look at my performance targets and see how I am doing on reaching them? Did I have a hand in crafting them so they are realistic, achievable, measurable and motivating? Does my line manager walk with me on the journey to achieving them? Or are these written for me, filed and then looked at again at the end of the year? 

Knowing you have someone who takes an interest in your professional journey, who helps you trouble shoot, identify issues yourself and supports you to find answers, celebrate successes, and pushes you to reach your potential makes coming to work feel safe, challenging and motivating. Don’t underestimate the power of investing 45 minutes a week in someone else. And as a line manager, you also will benefit as your own professional knowledge will be enhanced, and you can keep your finger on the pulse around what happens in different classrooms and through the eyes of different professionals.

Does my line manager and the rest of the team know what my strengths are? 

Are these being used frequently or am I being forced to get better at things I hate and am bad at?  Do I know other people’s strengths and am able to draw on them and collaborate?

See my previous post on Strengths Based Leadership here

Do I have opportunities to lead, learn and develop?

Even if there isn’t a clear formal TLR or ladder rung to climb, do I have clarity on where I can take on projects that make me visible across the school as a competent leader? Can I work shadow, be seconded somewhere, lead on a project, collaborate with a more senior colleague?  Can I have coaching and mentoring for my professional development?

Do I have opportunities to develop my leadership and knowledge?

Is reading, doing action research, online learning and other CPD valued by the school or is it all channelled into INSET days and twilight sessions?

Can the school show it values staff as professional beings through professional membership of things like the Chartered College of Teaching, local area networks, attending conferences, being bought books, online courses, time to visit other organisations, be part of a network like The BAMEed Network Challenge Partners or PiXL?

Does my school engage with and understand some of the structural barriers?

Is there a commitment by your school to understand and lean in to some of the structural barriers that people from typically marginalised groups can face? Remember that these can be intersectional as well,  but women, people of colour, people with disabilities, people who are LGBT+ will face daily micro-aggressions, outright discrimination and structural inequities which will impact on their professional journey, day to day wellbeing and general outlook. Schools should be absolutely clear on what they have in place to ensure that the workplace is equitable, and should be putting extra support and nurture in place where appropriate. The BAMEed Network provides coaching for staff from Black, Asian and racially minoritised backgrounds, as well as support to schools with their diversity and inclusion work.

Feeling heard, held and seen through seminal moments

For me, these seminal moments have been make or break situations. The way that an organisation treats staff in its day to day operations is embedded in the culture and can be supported by having policies in place. However, these policies aren’t worth the paper they are written on if as an organisation you don’t have a robust plan in place to support people through seminal moments. Fudging it, getting it wrong, being clumsy, ill-informed or insensitive can be make-it-or-break-it moments for many people at work.

What do we mean by seminal moments?

Marriage, birthdays, births – does everyone get the same attention & gifts or is dependent on how popular you are?

Attending your own children’s first day at school/nativity/doctor’s appointments – can you do this guilt-free – or at all?

Parental leave – do you have Keep in Touch days and are these used well? What happens when people come back to school after parental leave? Is there provision for breast-feeding mothers to pump somewhere private and store milk somewhere appropriate? 

Fertility – can a staff member have treatment and are they supported appropriately? Does the school know what it means to go through fertility treatment both physically, emotionally and financially? Would it be worth knowing about it now, even if you have never encountered it in reality and no staff member needs support with this yet?

Menopause – do MEN and women know what to do/expect? What are the physical, emotional and professional impacts for women going through menopause? What can the school do to support with this in small yet meaningful ways? 

Moving house, death & divorce – They say these three seminal moments are of equal impact on our psyches. Does the school have a clear leave policy or is it all a bit ad hoc? What is our agreed shared language we use with each other to acknowledge and show compassion?

These are just a few examples of how you can make sure people feel valued professionally and personally at work and which will impact positively on mental health and wellbeing more than a thousand cakes and coffee vans. With these in place the other things won’t feel tokenistic.