Social media: handle with care

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love my social media. I use Twitter and Linked In professionally and I keep my relatives and friends up to date with my family life through Facebook. And yes, I am starting to explore the wonders of blogging through WordPress. Twitter, in particular, has given me so much. It has opened my eyes, broadened my horizons and provided a reach I never imagined possible. There are times when it’s a bit weird – although still on the spectrum of not unpleasant – like when someone approaches me at a conference and says, “Excuse me but are you @Penny_Ten? Amazing to meet you, I’ve been following you for ages!”

But there have been times when it has got messy. Two examples stay with me and make me feel extremely uncomfortable. The first is what I can now jokingly refer to as my ‘claim to fame’ of having been hounded 24 solid hours by one of our finest and most prolific Twitter edu-trolls. Among other things he called me a liar and anti-Semitic. I feel proud that I didn’t buckle under his attempts to humiliate me until he finally skulked away and blocked me. But it was traumatic and degrading. While it was happening, several of my Twitter allies were direct messaging me, encouraging me to keep to my cordial, outwardly calm stance. But my boss was far from happy the following Monday and I really wondered if the whole very public episode might somehow undermine me professionally. Teacher Toolkit writes about his own similar experience and captures well that awful sense of being emotionally violated by his attacker.

The second occasion was when a long-time LinkedIn professional contact of mine suddenly went creepy on me and started propositioning me in the most unwholesome and inappropriate of ways. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was completely out of order and disconnected from him on LinkedIn immediately. I admit that I had stereotypical assumptions about him as he was married, a practising Christian and much older than me. It took me by surprise and made me realise that you never really can tell.

So you see while it would be hypocritical of me to ban my children from enjoying the modern privileges of online life, I am keenly aware that it has real dangers for all of us. Some of these dangers are concerned with other people’s malicious intent to harm us and others are more connected with the relentless nature of being constantly available and always in communication with the outside world. It is my job to make sure that my children know how to be safe. As parents and as teachers we can’t keep children safe all the time and in every situation. What we can do is set boundaries that are age-appropriate, equip them with sound and constantly evolving understanding and hope for the best. Grim and extreme as their example is, Breck Bednar’s parents explain this all too well in the article in the Guardian this weekend. Breck was a 14 year old boy who loved gaming and who was groomed online and murdered in 2014.

When one thing leads to another

I have two daughters aged 13 and 10. Like most young people of their age group, they are pretty active online. My youngest is an avid Minecrafter often joining shared servers to play and chat with a combination of school chums – and people she has no idea who they are. She also uses WhatsApp to communicate with her friends and family. The oldest, like many 14-17 year old girls has two popular Instagram accounts. One has over 2k followers and contains pretty good street photography, the other account seems to be mainly selfies and other such stuff. She invests much time in maintaining them both. She also has Snapchat, WhatsApp and Skype. They both know the rules and understand why we have them – no pictures of you in your school uniform, no sharing your full name, details about where you live, go to school, where you hang out with people with those you don’t know personally. We found watching this short film on Thinkyouknow.com was really useful in helping all of us to get gain a basic understanding of how quickly and simply things can get complicated.

I was quite impressed with my oldest’s use of Skype. Especially since our own family experience of it was excruciating weekly meet ups with the grandparents abroad which mainly consists of various combinations of each side saying “I can’t see/hear you, can you see/hear us?” and then it usually ends up with one of us on the phone directing granny and grandpa on how to switch on the mic or the webcam. We would watch their pixelated looming faces peering into the screen or hear someone bump their head on the desk and swear as they returned from wiggling some cable or other to solve the issue. The kids would invariably slip away unimpressed using the commotion for cover. But no, my oldest daughter uses Skype to do her homework with a friend and for general chit chats.

I did become alarmed recently though when I heard her laughing and chatting away with someone new in her room late one night. When I enquired casually who it was, and she said a name I didn’t know, I asked her where she knew them from. I wasn’t expecting her to say they ‘met’ on Instagram and then one thing led to another. I felt my stomach lurch when she said that. And I saw the look of panic and then defensive defiance on her face when she realised that this was not cool. You see it’s one thing to like each other’s pictures and quite another to start messaging each other when you don’t know each other. But to give out your Skype details and to start actually talking intimately is quite another ball game. The one advantage with seeing someone on Skype though is that you can fairly accurately gauge whether they are who they say they are. Unless they are posing and grooming you to meet their older friends. It has been known. My take on it was to explain that we are all feeling our way on this, and it is better to keep the communication channels open rather than force my daughter underground and into deception and concealing her activity. We talked for a long time about why there may be dangers and how to be careful about these. But I am still jittery and know that we all need to stay alert.

Social media or anti-social media?

Earlier this week the NSPCC chief executive, Peter Wanless, warned of a nation of deeply unhappy children, due to “the pressure to keep up with friends and have the perfect life online … adding to the sadness that many young people feel on a daily basis”. And this is something that has also had mixed impact on us as a family. My youngest was a little isolated socially until we managed to get her a smart phone on Freecycle and suddenly she was meeting up with her classmates at weekends and chatting with them after school during the week. It was as if the floodgates were opened and her social life took off. My oldest also has a varied social life but actually getting up and going out gradually became less of a priority. Until we had a very dramatic incident which shook her out of it.

I am not sure I will be able to convey the force of the drama clearly here but it went like this: over a period of weeks, she had been on her phone what seemed like constantly. She was putting herself under pressure to build up her Instagram following, and she was chatting to school friends as well as some of her friends from our previous life abroad. Evenings and weekends would be spent getting homework quickly out of the way and then endless screen time. TV on so she could keep up with Dr Who discussions later, WhatsApp pinging, thumbs scrolling and pumping ‘like’ on photos so others would ‘like’ hers. It was relentless. And we regularly intervened, nagged and set boundaries. We gently placed her phone in a drawer overnight and switched off the Wifi at 7.30pm.

One Friday we could see yet again she had no plans to meet anyone real face to face or do anything meaningful over the weekend. The next day we tried to help her find someone to meet with, offered to spend the day out together and eventually in desperation, established a no-screens-until-evening rule – and it was hell. Our mature, reasonable, sensible girl was simply like a raging addict. By the Sunday, she wouldn’t even get up, wash, eat, establish eye contact. We did everything we could to get her to move on to something else. By Sunday night she was like an empty shell. On Monday morning she announced she was ill. I was outraged and quite alarmed and felt I had to put my foot down. I insisted she get out of bed, wash and go to school. She was morose, floppy, glazed. But I was determined that she would go and get off the blinking screens. Off she went, still protesting, but she went. Dad and the youngest left for work and school. She must have been waiting and watching nearby and saw her chance. She didn’t know that I was planning to work from home that morning before I had to go to a meeting and so when she crept back in, she nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw me there glaring at her. She turned and fled and for a while we had no idea where she was.

The long and the short of it is that it all came to a head, and we ended up that evening having a three hour, very intense and deep discussion about what it is to be a teenager nowadays. She was distraught, bursting forth hearty wails and gasping tears. She had reached an extremely dark and painful place. It was frightening for me to see her like that but it was important to unpack, together, how the intensity of feeling had been fuelled by this relentless online interaction and screen time. I could see how it had become mesmerizing, sucking up her energy and how she just couldn’t get herself to disconnect and to meet with some of her offline real-people friends, face to face. She challenged me about my use of social media and whether I needed to rein myself in a little too and then she came up with the idea of writing down and committing to everything we had discussed. So was born the “A Healthy Use of the Phone” contract we have hanging on our pinboard and that we are all bound to as a family.

As parents, as teachers, as people who live in a digital age, we need to help each other to honour healthy use of the Internet and social media. We need to stay alert to the wonders and the potentially addictive nature of this tool. We need to do this regularly and especially when things are going well. In honour of the memory of Breck Bednar, next week I plan to sit down with my children and watch the harrowing documentary about him on BBC3 called Murder Games. I’m not looking forward to it but I feel we must.

Sources:
Think You Know is an excellent resource on safe use of the Internet for young people, parents and teachers http://thinkyouknow.co.uk/

Bad Blogging by Teacher Toolkit http://www.teachertoolkit.me/2015/11/08/bad-blogging/

Guardian newspaper article on Breck Bednar http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/breck-bednar-murder-online-grooming-gaming-lorin-lafave

Murder Games: The Life and Death of Breck Bednar http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03cgtx5

Daze Digital short piece on girl Instagrammers http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/28682/1/hit-follow-on-these-teen-photographers-taking-over-instagram

Guardian article about the online pressures of social media making children unhappy http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/07/online-pressures-unhappy-children-cyberbullying

 

‘When Governments ask for the World’

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Annual Trustees’ Lecture at the Arts and Media School, Islington. It’s always a treat. Last year was delivered by the stimulating and entertaining Grayson Perry and this year it was by the highly sensible and eternally affable Tim Brighouse.

Tim Brighouse delivered his lecture ‘When Governments ask for the World’, which you can also read here in full.

One of the most striking things he pointed out was just how education has changed through the ages – and how the power has shifted from the classroom practitioners to the Secretary of State for Education who has more and more powers over increasing levels of detail in the classroom. I have attempted to summarise it below

Five Ages of Education

Age	Years	Assumptions	Powers of the secretary of state
Trust and Optimism	1944 -1968	1)     Central government’s role was to set the general policy guidelines only; the detail and most power should be left to local government which was closer to the people and therefore better able to understand their needs. 2)     Political freedom, moral freedom, social justice resonated with politicians from all parties. Education was a ‘good thing’ and we needed more of it. Schools were built; Colleges of Further Education, Teacher Training Colleges, Colleges of Advanced Technology – later turned into Polytechnics (and ultimately Universities) – were created and run by LEAs. Local Authorities also created a Youth Service, Adult Education Centres, Teachers Centres and Outdoor Pursuit Centres for residential trips as they also founded a network of public libraries and youth employment services (later called the Careers Service). 3)     It was not for governments to interfere in matters best left to professionals. In education ‘matters best left to the professionals’ meant what should be taught and how it should be taught	Three: 1)     Removing air-raid shelters 2)     Securing a sufficient supply of suitably qualified teachers 3)     Rationing scarce capital resources for new buildings
Doubt and Disillusion	1968-1980	1)     Pupils weren’t being taught properly or the right things 2)      ‘Education isn’t working’ theme 3)     Central Government – at least in England if not in the other parts of the UK – was determined to act	Five
Markets and Managerialism	1980-2015	1)     ‘Choice’ (for parents), ‘diversity’ (of provision and types of school) ‘autonomy’ (for schools) and ‘accountability’ (by schools and local authorities). 2)     A belief in market forces and competition as a means of finding a solution to most problems. 3)     Seeing now the words ‘Equity’ and ‘Equality’ and they demanded regulation by the state since market forces, though never publicly acknowledged, couldn’t be relied upon to deliver those ideals. 4)     Markets and competition tend to produce winners and losers – sometimes more of the latter than the former. So we have managerialism by the state.	Forty
Confusion	2015-2020	1)     No national agreement on what the purpose of education is. 2)     Disproportionate focus on Literacy and Mathematics with little mention Music, Art, Drama, Dance or outdoor education or residential. 3)     Fragmentation of the system.	Over 2,000 and very little accountability. It extends to the Secretary of State defining in detail what shall be taught, how it should be taught and when it should be taught in England. This approach is not replicated in Wales Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Ambition and Partnerships	2020 –	1)     An accountability system where achievement as well as attainment is assessed, where there is an overt attempt to assess the progress of children in terms of their health and well-being, how they are able to be team players especially in solving inter-disciplinary problems which are the hallmark of the modern world, and how they are intelligent rather than how in intelligent they are. 2)     Access to schools would need to be fair rather than the competitive scramble it is now. 3)     A shared language of school improvement.

If you found this interesting, you might want to explore this timeline dating back as far as http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/timeline.html  600 A.D

Four assumptions on the purpose of collaboration

“Through a narrow window we can see only part of the sky, and not the whole vastness, the magnificence of it.”  ― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Life Ahead: On Learning and the Search for Meaning

Picture: The learning community in the Arava desert in Israel

I’m new to my role as Head of Network Development and I must say I do start each day with a spring in my step, feeling intellectually challenged by the task at hand. My main focus is to get my head around understanding what is working well and how this is being shared effectively locally and nationally. It’s an amazing place to be, at the heart of a busy, collaborative, purposeful network of over 300 schools across the country.

Personally, I need to collaborate in order to make sense of the world. I’m happiest and most productive when my job involves team working, challenge and collaboration. Similarly, my ideal holiday is one where at least part of it is spent creating or building or doing something meaningful with like-minded people. (Although with my dicky knee and as I get older and more decrepit I am warming to the idea of just slowing down and sitting in the sunshine reading a good book instead).

I think one of the happiest times of my life and the most relevant in terms of personal development, was working in a newly founded learning community in the Arava desert in Israel. The community was based loosely on the teachings of great educationalist and thinker Krishnamurti where the purpose of daily life was self-awareness and growth through collaborative exploration.  The key teaching of his that I took away was, “understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action.” I think Krishnamurti has a lot of wisdom when it comes to collaboration of all forms. I will try to use some this to illustrate my thoughts below.

Collaboration and competition

I’ve never found it easy working with those that hold their cards close to their chest and who are constantly in competition with colleagues and wary of others. I remember my distaste of it from the early days of my own schooling where I saw some children would be hunched over their work, protective arm cradling their page and head bowed to prevent ‘copying’ from any angle. Or those indignant cries you still hear in schools from children young and old: “you stole my idea!” I was so against it that when a school friend was anxious she wouldn’t have time to do her biology homework that evening for various reasons, I did it for her alongside my own. When she got an A+ and I got a B, we both thought it was hilarious and so telling of how wrong the world can be!

Even in the 8 years I have just spent in the highly competitive world of business development, I have steadfastly believed in sensible sharing of information, platforms and opportunities with others operating in the same space. I was told once that the CEO of one of The Key’s fiercest competitors used to spit on the floor of his office every time he had to say our name, and yet I would always make sure I go and say hi to their business development team at their conference stands and would be genuinely interested in their progress. Aside from the spitting CEO, we frontline BD folk were cordial and warm to each other. Why should we not be? We were all working for the same cause, to solve the same problems and enjoyed our work immensely. Krishnamurti says, “real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”

So I am curious about how collaboration and competition can exist side by side and I am cautiously starting to investigate what collaboration is for when it comes to the education sector. There are several interesting blogs and articles on this that I have read recently. Assumption number one could be that collaboration and competition are not mutually exclusive. There can indeed be collaboration in a competitive environment and competition isn’t all bad in a collaborative environment.

Purposeful collaboration

While I love to collaborate, I am the first person to tear my hair out at long and pointless meetings that don’t seem to achieve anything except provide an outlet for those that love to talk (myself included). I will be trying to define the purpose of a meeting, project, discussion, working group before I agree to take part. In a classroom setting, I suppose the most obvious form of collaboration is the oft dreaded and much debated ‘group work’. This can be highly fruitful or completely soul-destroying depending on how it is defined and how and when deployed. I often hear my Year 8 daughter wail over the dinner table school-day-debrief when referring to another group work session at school. It goes like this:

“I mean, it’s like my teachers just want me to fail! Why do they make me do their work for them when I can’t teach the kids that don’t know what they’re doing? And all that happens is that we end up with something crap and I feel totally stressed out having to do all the work and get them to concentrate and work!”

My Year 6 daughter’s experience is different. She is a bright bunny but writing, spelling and organising herself on the page are often a struggle. She will come home buzzing:
“ We had such fun today in literacy – I’m really strong at ideas and can think of good words to use, Anna is great at getting it all down on the page quickly and has great handwriting and Carlos mucks about a bit but he is so good at making the story interesting with funny unexpected twists. We wrote a really good story and when Carlos read it aloud to the class they really liked it!”

As a teacher, coping with heterogeneous classes of up to 36 students, I often would use group work as a way to sub-divide ability groups and make sure I could spend meaningful time with each group in rotation. It takes immense clarity of purpose, clear instruction and iron rule to make it work. I am sure many teachers have really great examples of group work where the stronger students feel empowered and that they are consolidating their knowledge and skills while the weaker students feel enriched and ready to take on the challenge set by their more able peers. Tom Sherrington writes about this in his pedagogy postcard and his post on science co-construction.
Assumption number two of any collaboration is its purpose must be clearly defined, mutually beneficial and create impact and growth for all parties involved.

Collaboration with efficiencies, outcomes and impact

Collaboration can’t just be about sharing practice. Schools are flooded with examples of practice. But it can be around working out what works. This is what the school-led self-improving system is all about. And thoughts on evidence-informed self-improvement are key here. Collaborating around practice is especially useful if you can save money and time and avoid reinventing the wheel.  It can also be a way to help you understand with absolute clarity how something is going to work in your school’s context. And you are more likely to believe in what you are doing and have success if you have gone through this process. Krishnamurti believes that “you must look most intimately and discover for yourself; then it is your own, not somebody else’s, not something that you have been told, because there is no teacher and no follower.” 

If by collaborating you are going to be challenging yourself and each other, as well as developing some way of quality assuring each others’ and your own practice. This shouldn’t be confused with comparison, ranking, rating, measuring and grading each other’s efforts. Krishnamurti says, “most people think that learning is encouraged through comparison, whereas the contrary is the fact. Comparison brings about frustration and merely encourages envy, which is called competition. Like other forms of persuasion, comparison prevents learning and breeds fear.”
Assumption number three is that collaboration is worthwhile if it results in saving money, time, resources and involves an element of holding each other to account. You should be able to clearly articulate ‘what works’ in your context and the impact of this collaboration.

Collaboration to understand the problems

What schools need is time and space not just to deliver the curriculum and get through the packed school year – or to collaborate even – but to properly think through what the problem is they are trying to solve. This should happen even before they look at collaborating around how a certain practice may solve that problem. After that, they also need time to think how to incorporate a new practice into their school and to articulate how the problem they have identified will be addressed by this.  But the first step should be as Krishnamurti says, “If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem”
Assumption number four is if you can define what the problem is that you are solving and what has improved as a result of the collaboration, this is a sign that it has had an impact and was time well spent.

These are some initial thoughts on the purpose of collaboration. As I steep myself more in the theory, the practice, examples and the actual outcomes of collaboration, I am sure I will be able to articulate myself more clearly. But in the name of collaboration, I have shared some thinking here with the hope that you will help me develop it over time. Comments welcome.

Sources

http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/krishnamurti-on-education/1974-00-00-jiddu-krishnamurti-krishnamurti-on-education-chapter-5

http://thelearnersway.net/ideas/2015/10/11/education-competition-vs-collaboration

http://headguruteacher.com/2014/04/04/pedagogy-postcard-9-group-work/
http://headguruteacher.com/2013/10/28/y9-science-co-construction-update/

http://www.workingoutwhatworks.com/en-GB/Magazine/2014/9/The_self-improving_school_system

If you are serious you have to go hunting

The Festival of Education list of speakers is out

The  initial list of speakers proposed for the Festival of Education 2016 is out. There are some great names there and I’m really excited to be going again this year, as I have every year since it started. As I scrolled down the faces, it really stood out how many of them were white and male (not to mention that five of them are called Andrew/Andy!) I pointed out this white and male bias on Twitter and was met with the inevitable flurry of likes and retweets and a couple of push backs.

The main thrust of the small amount of resistance I received to my pointing out that there is an imbalance seemed to be that this was a self-selecting group. To become a speaker there relied in part on people putting themselves forward. 300 people did, and none of them were turned away. I think I understood my Twitter colleagues as saying that if people don’t put themselves forward that aren’t predominantly white and male, then they are just making the balance the way it is. It was hard to explain myself in little 140 character snippets so I want to set out what I feel needs to be said here.

Who should speak?

As a teacher in the classroom and later in my professional life as a leader running meetings, I was always aware that everyone in a group should have a voice. It’s easy to get this wrong and through good intentions to crush those that are naturally outspoken and enthusiastic and swoop down and ask someone what they think while they quietly die inside from having all eyes on them. But we do have a responsibility to make sure every voice is heard and to find a way that works for everyone to have those voices included in the debate.

These days I often take part in meetings and discussions in my day to day life. I know that I have no problem speaking up most of the time. In fact, I know that I have a duty to be very attentive to how much of the group’s time is taken up by my own voice. It was a breath of fresh air to be in a management meeting recently where we discussed exactly this and decided how we would ensure that everyone has space, time and the awareness of their colleagues to help get this balance right so we can make good decisions together. It can make people who are outspoken feel just as anxious as those who are not, if the balance isn’t right. No-one wants to feel they are contributing too much or too little. The best environments are where everyone takes equal responsibility to get the balance right and it is recognised that there are certain inbuilt imbalances that need to be watched for carefully and which can change depending on the issue at hand. If we want to get this right, we have to hunt out these imbalances and actively address them. If you are serious, you will whether that’s in a small meeting or you are scanning the proposed list of speakers for a major event.

The problem with self-selection

Self-selection on the face of it seems like a wonderfully fair and open way to organise an event. It clearly invites people who think they have something of worth to say, to have a platform to say it. You might ask what the problem is. You are guaranteed to get some really enthusiastic, responsible people coming forward who will consider carefully what they are going to say, how and why – lest they make fools of themselves in front of everyone who is anyone in education – because everyone who is anyone tends to rock up to the Festival of Education. (If you haven’t been, imagine an extremely civilised education equivalent of the Glastonbury Festival – without the mud, the terrifying toilets, the noise, the drugs etc).

To my mind, while this self-selection is a good way to get some initial ideas for willing presenters, if it was the only way of selecting speakers, it would be lazy and the same as standing in front of a class and saying, “if you know the answer, shout now”. I must point out that because this shout out for speakers by the Festival of Education was done on Twitter, it is like standing in the furthest corner of the classroom whispering or texting a couple of people saying, “if you know the answer, shout now”. Most educationalists are not on Twitter. Hard as it is to comprehend this fact, I have to keep reminding myself of this daily. And many educationalists that are on Twitter and who blog have ample platform to say what they think.

I know this isn’t the only way that the Festival of Education organisers are looking for speakers, so this is not an attack or an accusation. So again, if you are serious, you need to go hunting using a wider method than shouting out on social media.

Event organisation and programme management is a serious business

I have quite a bit of experience of event organisation. This is from all angles as a delegate, an exhibitor/sponsor and as an organiser thinking through balanced programmes for events. It’s not easy. You need to do a lot of research and talking to people to find the right speakers and to get the right balance that reflects the sector you are operating in and the issues you know for a fact need to be covered. You need to include known names and people that will pull in an audience in the first place or no one will come, but you also have a unique opportunity to bring in some people that are perhaps lesser-known and have much to say that could be of benefit to the community you know will be present at your event. And you will need to work hard to find these people, to describe what they are going to say and why others need to hear it.

It can be even more difficult to get speakers that are actually good at speaking publicly. Some people have great experience and probably much to say, but they aren’t great at speaking. And others can be very entertaining or very well known, but don’t really have anything new, interesting or relevant to say any more. There were some grumbles last year at the Festival of Education that one extremely well-known education speaker was flown in at vast expense and was frankly a bit ‘meh’.

I went to two events on social mobility recently – one had a panel of young white, entrepreneurial, middle class, mainly men who spoke of their experience of trying to create a more socially mobile environment for students through the various charities and social enterprises they had set up. They were really enthusiastic, obviously wanted to make a change for the better and were consciously able to use their place of privilege in society to do so. But I felt a bit like they had a very them-and-us view of the world and that they ticked off a great list of boxes, almost saying, “it’s okay guys, we’ve got this”. I wanted more enquiry, more challenge. The other event I attended had a panel that was well-balanced with regards age, social class, race, experience, and included people from education, business, social care and other sectors. It also included people young and older people who felt they had been able to be socially mobile and those that felt they had not. I felt truly stimulated and that I had learned a lot from the second panel. My eyes were opened and I was left feeling uplifted but also thinking about some really uncomfortable truths about my own society and my place in it in relation to others. That, for me, is a good balanced panel and a good experience.

After finding this balance, a good event organiser must almost choreograph the dance of themes, issues, ideas, take-aways and calls for action that will take place on the stage in front of participants. Furthermore, a good event often needs to be both accessible to anyone with a passing interest and simultaneously stimulating to people who have been living and breathing the issues for years. If you are serious, you need then to both go hunting and to choreograph what you bring into the mix.

Social responsibility and amazing opportunity

There are so many situations where we have a social responsibility to be self-aware and aware of the context within which we are operating. I mentioned it earlier, in some situations I speak loudly and often. Therefore, I need to be aware of those that don’t and listen out for them. I need to know when I can speak up for others and I need to know when to shut up. As a parent governor for example, I had to perform the excruciatingly difficult balancing act of being a representative from the parent body but not a representative of the parent body. I had to look out for the interests of all children and that included my children but my frame of reference should never be through my children but rather all children belonging to the school community.

I often tie myself in knots with these kinds of levels of awareness. I feel the same awareness about my class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, my age and more. I don’t always get it right. In fact, a lot of the time, I feel that we are all trampling about stepping on each other just by virtue of our attempts to not do precisely that. And so I feel that the organisers of the Festival of Education are going to face the same difficult task of making way for the many voices, issues, interests and debates that need to be heard. And they have a social responsibility and an amazing opportunity to make this as balanced, fair, interesting, challenging and inclusive as possible. To the organisers I say, you made a good start with the initial self-selection but I know you are serious, so happy hunting!