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

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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.

White privilege, white ignorance, white opposition

White privilege card

For the second time in a year, we are seeing headlines claiming that English schools must not teach white privilege as fact. The first time was by the then minister for women and equalities, Kemi Badenoch, who decided to bring this up in a House of Commons debate on Black History Month. As if by magic, during Black History Month this year, the new education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, has again repeated this warning, following a report by the Commons education committee.

What is white privilege?

To be clear, white privilege is a term used to mean the multiple social advantages, benefits and courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race. It is not rocket science.

Looking at the historical and contemporary ways that white people can be privileged above people of colour is actually a tool for understanding the persistence of racial inequality in the UK and elsewhere. White privilege draws attention to the fact that we don’t live in a post-racial society, we live in a world where huge, tangible inequalities between white and Black and other ethnically/racially minoritised communities exist.

Let’s think about it in a different way – it is a fact that men have privileges which are not afforded to women, because our society does not yet treat men and women equally. Take a simple thing like walking home at night. Most men feel able to do this without thinking twice. My daughter’s male friends, in acknowledgement of their male privilege, walk her and their other female friends home after a night out. Until we end the structural and systemic inequalities that lead to violence against women being an every-day occurrence, we can say uncontested that men have privilege. This is not a divisive stance and does not undermine the cohesion of men and women.

If it’s easier to conceptualise, think about a different marginalised group, disabled people. Most public and domestic spaces are structured in such a way that it makes it more difficult, and sometimes impossible, for people with disabilities to access them. This is called being ableist. Can you acknowledge that it would be a good thing if we make the world more accessible for all? Does it hurt you to acknowledge that as an able-bodied person, you have privilege when going about your daily business? You don’t have to think about how you will do things differently. You won’t have to build in more time (going the long way around because there aren’t lifts in the station near your workplace), spend more money (taking a taxi because there are no accessible stations near your workplace), and so on. Acknowledging your advantage as a person who is not disabled is not a divisive stance and does not undermine the cohesion of disabled and non disabled people.

In a similar way, our society is set up for, and operates to the advantage of white people as the dominant group. The evidence for systemic inequality is undeniable – look at educational outcomes, employment, health, pay gaps and there it is. Clear as day. Whether you think it is because people of colour are treated as somehow inherently less intelligent, less employable, genetically prone to ill-health, deserve to be paid less, or if it is due to inequities baked in at every level of society creating the equivalent of ‘having to go the long way round’, both are clear evidence that white people in England have a level of privilege. This is not a divisive stance and does not undermine the cohesion of people of colour and white people in our country.

Acknowledging your white privilege doesn’t make you racist, and neither does denying it exists or trying to be colour-blind make you not racist. White privilege is not a political standpoint. Acknowledging white privilege doesn’t make people of colour feel inferior.  It doesn’t even have to be a sensitive and complex issue, just as wanting greater equity for women, and for people with a disability doesn’t need to be politically, personally or legally contentious. It is not divisive and nor does it undermine the cohesion of a school or a country to educate other people on these as facts.

How is learning about white privilege harmful to white working class children?

The Commons education committee report, The Forgotten: How White Working-class Pupils Have Been Let Down, and How to Change It, argued that terms such as white privilege, may have contributed towards systemic neglect of white disadvantaged communities. 

It is important also to understand that privilege is always relative. Rather than suggesting that white people face no challenges, white privilege highlights how a group of people are (and can be) affected by discrimination and disadvantage. Disadvantage and discrimination can be intersectional – which takes account of people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexity of prejudices they face. In other words, your disadvantage as a disabled woman will be experienced differently than if you were an able-bodied woman. Disadvantaged white children have white privilege in that their race will not be a factor that contributes to their life challenges in addition to other challenges they face around a lack of economic wealth. They will not face racism as part of their disadvantage. Recognising that some communities can be disadvantaged due to their racially/ethnically minoritised backgrounds doesn’t deny the economic and social inequalities faced by communities from all racial backgrounds. Children who are on Free School Meals have lower attainment levels compared to those from wealthier families, whatever their heritage. To say that white children on free school meals have white privilege shouldn’t be conflated with saying that they don’t feel the impact of their disadvantaged economic situation.

Narrowing the focus on the disadvantages white people face versus all other racial groups reverses decades-long efforts to close the attainment gap. But it also is a symptom of the coalition, and subsequent Conservative, governments’ lack of attention to race as an indicator for mobility in education and the labour market. In fact, this current government seems to be doubling down on its efforts to take race off the table as a contributory factor in education or society. The widely condemned Sewell Report went so far as to claim not to be able to find any evidence of structural racism in Britain today.

How might teachers be breaking the law?

Both announcements by the DfE regarding white privilege stated that schools teaching the concept as uncontested fact could be breaking the law, and this might also be a breach of the Equality Act 2010. The government’s report looked at the poor educational outcomes for white British pupils eligible for free school meals. It saw the reason for this as due to ‘persistent multigenerational disadvantage, regional underinvestment and disengagement from the curriculum’. One has to ask oneself how schools will have created the former two reasons without the decades-long government policy which has impacted directly on families, pushing them further into poverty – a staggering one third of children live in poverty in the UK. These same policies have loaded more of the responsibilities of social care onto schools by cutting social services, mental health support, early years provision and youth services while also squeezing school budgets. Let’s not forget that government also mandated a national curriculum to schools, which now seems to have led to disengagement by some pupils. Pointing the finger at teachers for these issues, and their supposed indoctrination of children with concepts such as white privilege is at best misguided, and at worst, it is divisive and undermines the cohesion of a school and our country.

White privilege, with knowledge, white resistance

There is a strong community of white people within the education sector and beyond, who make it their business to not only acknowledge their white privilege, but to ensure that they are equipping themselves with the knowledge to resist attempts to undermine efforts to build a more equitable education system and society for all. 

If you want to learn more about any of the concepts mentioned here, here’s some good places you can go:

The BAMEed Network has local area groups which you can join for more discussion and support.

There are also many useful resources including:

The Anti-Racist Educator White Privilege Test

My white friend asked me to explain white privilege

Recognise your white privilege

Deconstructing white privilege with Dr. Robin Di Angelo

Understanding white privilege, with Reni Eddo-Lodge

Experts answer your kids’ tough questions about race and racism

If you want to read more about being a reliable white ally see here

The white ally and the fight for racial justice

Source: Penny Rabiger

I remember several years ago now, I went to hear Reni Eddo Lodge speak at a podcast event in a London branch of Waterstones. This was just around the time of her blog post that led to her long read in The Guardian and later to her book ‘Why I am no longer talking to white people about race’. I cringe when I think back to it, as I think it was me that was that white woman who put up her hand, eager to signal my virtue and readiness to help, and asked a question: “Thank you, I really enjoyed your talk, and can you tell me, what can I do, as a white woman, that would be useful?” To which Reni responded something along the lines of, “Herein lies the problem, if you are asking me what you can do”. I now understand what that was about, but at the time, I felt shame and an intense need to understand why what I had said was so unhelpful. 

Just recently, in the space of the same week, I was asked to join two separate organisations’ inner circles to discuss the concept of the white ally in anti-racist work. One was a union Black, Asian and minority ethnic leaders network grappling with some questions about their next steps in their strategy, and the other was a lunch and learn session for a large education organisation which, in their own words, is not very diverse but committed to changing that. Although I went willingly, I didn’t go comfortably with the notion of the white ally or as someone who would be somehow held up as an example of success in this area. 

I have been on a journey since my question about what I can do, and if there is one thing I think that I can do it is to put learning, listening and unlearning before rushing in with ‘doing’. One organisation which has influenced me in exploring this idea of being a white person developing their understanding and committing action to anti-racist work is WhiteAccomplices.org who have developed a website to support white people wanting to act for racial justice. I find their explanation of the difference between the actor, ally and accomplice really helpful. I will summarise my understanding of their ideas, but do spend some time reading for yourself on their website.

Why should white people care in the first place?

I get asked this question a lot. Many people find it hard to understand why someone who doesn’t experience racial discrimination would be fighting for change. I think that this has become increasingly legitimised in my lifetime, that one only needs to care about things that we perceive to have a direct and immediate effect on us – I hear this a lot when people consider their voting preferences for example, selecting the party which has policies that benefit them directly the most, rather than thinking about protecting the interests of those most affected by inequity.

The truth is, that while any of us are oppressed, none of us are free. But more than this, if you understand how structural inequality works, as a white person, to not act to dismantle racism we are in fact complicit with upholding the status quo. WhiteAccomplices.org explains that there are three states of being:

Actor – An actor doesn’t challenge the status quo, and is more like a spectator in a game. The actions of an actor do not explicitly name or challenge racism, which is essential for meaningful progress towards racial justice to happen. While there is oppression, we all stand to lose.
WhiteAccomplices.org cite an excellent quote by Lilla Watson (the indiginous Australian artist, activist and academic) on the need for actors to shift to accomplices: “If you have come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

While there is oppression, we all stand to lose.

An actor might go to demonstrations, change their profile picture to a black square on social media, release a statement on their website about Black Lives Matter, or do other performative acts of beings seen to be ‘with’ Black people. Actors might even join their workplace diversity discussion group, attend an event or read a book on the issues.

Ally – Being an ally is a verb, it is active. Most importantly, ally is not a title you can give to yourself, you may be regarded as an ally by others through your actions at times.

Your actions as an ally are more likely to challenge institutionalised racism and you will have a good understanding of terms like white supremacy and whiteness. An ally is a disrupter and an educator in white spaces – unlike the actor, the ally sees something inappropriate and interrupts, explains and tries to educate those present. WhiteAccomplices.org is careful to point out that being an ally is not an invitation to do this in Black and brown spaces to be seen to be performatively “good” or “on side”. You would not tell someone else’s story of experiencing racism from your perspective of how you helped them tackle it. But you would disrupt a conversation taking place in a predominantly white space that is inappropriate and take the opportunity to educate those present.
Allies need to constantly educate themselves and do not take breaks from this work.

Being an ally is a verb, it is active. Most importantly, ally is not a title you can give to yourself, you may be regarded as an ally by others through your actions at times.

Accomplice – The actions of an accomplice are meant to directly challenge institutionalised or structural racism, colonisation, and white supremacy by blocking or impeding racist people, policies, and structures. This is where you can absolutely use your proximity to power and your white privilege in your workplace and spaces that you occupy.

This is the stage where you fully understand that our freedoms are intertwined, dwell not only in what people say but are enmeshed in structures and institutions, the way we recruit, develop and retain people, the way people are treated at work, in public spaces, by healthcare providers, and so on. This is where you know that retreat in the face of oppressive structures is not an option. 

Accomplices actions are informed by, coordinated with, and sometimes even directed by, leaders who are Black, brown, minoritised, or who identify as people of colour.

An accomplice listens with respect and understands that oppressed people are not all the same in their needs, tactics or beliefs. 

Accomplices are not emotionally fragile or motivated by guilt or shame.

Accomplices are not emotionally fragile or motivated by guilt or shame. They recover fast and reflect, aware that they have been socialised into structural racism and the unlearning process is iterative, constant and consistent. They need to be accountable, will build trust through consent and act collaboratively for that accountability.

An accomplice might do much of their work without fanfare or seeking public recognition. They will be looking for opportunities to amplify and elevate their Black and brown comrades’ good works and to challenge and dismantle structures and systems that uphold inequity. There is a personal cost to this. Some spaces will no longer be open to the accomplice because of their perceived disruptive nature. Similar to, but not at all the same as, the fact that some spaces are not open to people from Black, Asian, and minoritised backgrounds because of the colour of their skin. Once you see, you cannot unsee. It’s not about being ‘comfortable with the uncomfortable’, or about “diversity” as a broad catch-all term – it’s about being absolutely unable to accept or condone the status quo and acting to dismantle it.

So how do I move forward?

It should already be clear that there is no formulaic way to ‘get there’ and ‘there’ isn’t a destination but a constant journey. But here are some things you can think about that can take you beyond the actor, towards something that is meaningful for your own awareness and action:

1. Educate yourself – Read, listen, watch, develop a critical mind and commit to change your habits so that you are not consuming things that uphold racist stereotypes, or that exclude voices from a range of backgrounds. This might involve giving up on a lot of things that you consume on screen! Join a reading group, or set one up.
2. Change your view – Do an audit of your LinkedIn, Twitter, social platforms, actual friends and acquaintances and you will probably find you live in an echo chamber of people who look, sound and have had much the same experiences as you. Seek out and follow people that perhaps work in the same field as you, share the same interests as you and that don’t share the same worldview or background as you. Listen to what they have to say.
3.  Change your spending – Raise money and donate to causes that benefit people of colour. Seek out and use your economic capital to support businesses owned and run by people of colour. Use your privilege and access to capital to channel that towards people of colour and grassroots organisations that benefit people of colour.
4. White communities – Start the conversation with white family members, colleagues and friends about racism and whiteness. Encourage others to engage with the issues. Encourage your workplace to engage in training and anti-racist action. Disrupt white spaces and create discomfort where white people and whiteness would otherwise remain a pillar of white supremacy.
5. Advocacy – Make calls, send emails and sign petitions advocating on behalf of policies being advanced by racial justice campaigners. Amplify voices of colour. Attend meetings, hearings, public events and add your voice in solidarity. Bring other white people with you.
6. Your work – Make sure your job involves organising internally or externally to fight against institutional racism. Use your job position to actively seek out people of colour to interview for a job, for development opportunities and promotion within the organisation. When seeking external people, employ people of colour to provide services, training, as speakers.
7. Volunteering – Consider volunteering as a mentor, a tutor, at a food bank, for a local racial justice focused organisation, join an organisation with the explicit aim of naming and disrupting racial injustice.
8. Confronting injustice – If you see violence, intimidation or harassment, stand close and watch, interrupt and film confrontation, engage white people in conversation about their actions when you see or hear racism or microaggressions (focus on the intent vs the impact), call for help where necessary.
9. Vote – Use your voting powers for the benefit of anti-racism and policies that will make a difference. Support candidates of colour, donate to campaigns, actively fundraise and canvass, use your energies to mobilise white communities to get behind candidates and policies that will make a difference to people of colour.
10. Your children – Educate your children about power, privilege, race, intersectionality. Send your children to state schools where they are in the racial minority if they are white. White children need to see people of colour in positions of power and leadership as much as children of colour need to “see themselves”. Take your children and their friends to events where people of colour are speaking about racism, their lived experience and things of cultural importance to them. Talk to your children explicitly about the issues and what they can do to disrupt and be change makers. Talk to your child’s school and get involved in parent committees or the governing board with a view to disrupting and reframing deficit narratives and moving towards inclusivity.

For more resources, information, support and involvement, you are warmly invited to visit The BAMEed Network website 

Does teaching racial justice and equity have a place in our schools?

Tottenham children’s #BLM march 2020

Just when we thought that schools couldn’t possibly absorb any more of society’s most complex needs being driven through their already heaving agendas, the crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic over the past 6 months suddenly focused a more harsh spotlight on the way in which increasing divisions between the haves and the have-nots determines outcomes for children and their families, not only in terms of academic achievement at school and beyond, but now in terms of health, employment and life-expectancy in the face of a global pandemic. Stark divisions which have already become entrenched during prolonged austerity, have become even more acute in the face of national lockdown measures, forcing many families into precarity they never imagined would touch them, and pushing the already vulnerable deeper into poverty which seems fitting for Victorian England, not 2020. 

We have seen schools step up to the challenge without hesitation, sourcing food parcels for the families they serve, reinventing teaching through online lessons, providing devices and internet access for those that need it, producing work packs for home delivery where technology just isn’t going to be an option, rallying round and making sure that everyone is okay, learning, connected in one way or another to the school community. On the backdrop of so much activity, care, and action, the gross injustices of racial discrimination seemed to suddenly rear up into focus as well, as the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in the USA resonated with so many people worldwide, as a sign that enough is enough.

The grassroots organisation, The BAMEed Network, has been working with schools throughout the pandemic to ensure that the needs of staff from Black and Asian backgrounds in particular, have been adequately taken into account through producing a risk assessment and guidance document specifically for these staff members. Although statistically, Black and Asian colleagues are at higher risk of illness and death from Covid-19, nothing had been produced to safeguard them as frontline workers in schools, in the way that the NHS had accounted for their staff members’ needs as key workers. We were glad to be able to close this gap and produce the guidance for schools ourselves in a timely manner. Part of the guidance document’s purpose was to support schools to do more to see the needs of their staff members that are from Black and Asian heritage, and to start a conversation with them more widely about their lived experience of class, race, and discrimination within our schools, workplaces and society as a whole. The focus on racial justice by the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder has made this conversation even more relevant and important and it has helped to bring a new lexicon and new understanding of the issues for many, that were oblivious.

It is one thing to consider the importance of racial and social justice on the workplace conditions of adults in our education system, but how do we ensure that this extends beyond ticking boxes of the legal duties of the Equality Act and takes the form of meaningful change over time? Where do we start to ensure that we all improve our awareness and education on these important matters? When is it the right time to start to learn about racial and social justice? One thing that has come to light as a result of the focus on inequities and structural racism endured by Black people and other minoritised people of colour, is that our education system has somehow simultaneously been seeing itself as a great equaliser, while perpetuating structural inequalities through its own practice. Part of the cause for this is the focus on quantifiable, measurable outcomes to come above the more intangible and yet vital ‘soft’ skills of critical thinking, empathy, a sense of collective social responsibility. 

It was interesting to see the surge of emotion and the subsequent urgency to take action that ensued from the George Floyd incident and which emulated from the education sector. The BAMEed Network inbox has been inundated with requests for support from every level, be that CEOs of major education organisations, leaders of teacher unions, senior staff at local education authorities, multi-academy trusts or diocesan boards of education, as well as from headteachers and leaders from individual schools, and individuals from within the junior ranks of school staff, or parents, governors and even young people themselves. Across the board, people are looking for answers and seem ready and willing to take steps to ensure that their own practice is inclusive and actively anti-racist.

There’s nothing new here, so what has changed?
Questions of race, racism and teaching are not new and have been debated for decades. One primary site for anti-racist practice is to consider the curriculum. The MacPherson Report, published 6 years after the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, strongly suggested that inclusivity and diversity in the curriculum can improve social cohesion, prevent racist attitudes taking hold and instil the value of cultural diversity from an early age in young people. Improvements in the content of the curriculum is vital for many reasons, not least to provide a balanced view of history, and of the contributions of people from a variety of backgrounds who have lived side by side in Britain as the result of migrations from far and wide since the middle ages as well as more recent migrations as a result of our colonial past or the displacement of peoples connected with our involvement in wars in more recent times.

Looking beyond formally taught subject matter, discrimination in education is also enacted through disciplinary practice. For the decades since the MacPherson report recommendation to do so, schools have been dutifully recording racist incidents, monitoring the numbers and self-defined ethnic identity of excluded pupils, and these are published annually on a school-by-school basis. There are a range of practices which underpin Black students’ exclusion and which impact on their educational attainment for example, which are starkly detailed in the DfE Timpson Report on school exclusion of May 2019 and which result in Black British children of Caribbean heritage being more than 1.7 times more likely to be permanently excluded as compared with their white British counterparts.

What seems to have shifted, and potentially divided educators along the way more recently, is the notion of institutional and structural racism which is inherent in every element of society and not least, school life, and which runs like a stick of rock through our practice unless we make particular efforts to seek it out and adjust what we do, accordingly. At the end of the academic year of 2019-20, two major Charter School chains in the USA, Uncommon Schools and KIPP, denounced their own use of ‘carceral’ or ‘no excuses’ discipline techniques as racist. These were practices that had been the cornerstones of their educational philosophy. These techniques have been much lauded by a number of schools in England, and these schools have not subsequently re-evaluated their position, adamant that any less of an iron grip on children’s bodies, gaze and mouths will result in destruction of their lives as disadvantaged young people. The interesting thing is that both camps in this schism around discipline, believe that they are acting in the best interests of the young people from disadvantaged backgrounds that they serve. However, what is clear from one methodology, is that it is about ensuring that young people get the grades, sometimes at any cost, that will take them onto educational pathways for the future without questioning, disrupting or skilling up young people, or their teachers, to see or tackle the socio-political causes for the disadvantage, inequity and structural discrimination which creates such deep divisions in society in the first place – or indeed why the the gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students has stopped closing. And this is the key dividing line that has seen the initial surge of interest in making changes go through a further self-selection process. After the public statements of intent were posted on websites, or circulated by letters home to parents, some driven by guilt or alarm, and others by an emerging or enduring understanding of racism, it is clear which organisations are willing and able to see that structural racism needs to be dismantled at every level, and which organisations have retreated to tinkering around the edges, at most perhaps creating some better optics and remembering some more pressing issues they might focus on right now. And there are many pressing issues for the education sector right now.

Looking at whether a sharper focus on racial justice in the form of anti-racist practice should be enacted in schools or not is one heck of a question. There are a growing number of programmes, awards, charter marks, organisations, formal change management structures and guide books which are emerging that can support schools to map their pathway to dismantling structural racism in their curriculum, employment and staff development policies and practices, discipline, hair and uniform policies, and in supporting teachers’ professional understanding and practice in the classroom and beyond.  However, alongside these developments, there seems to be growing pressure on schools not only to not disrupt the status quo, but with what some educators see as sinister suggestions that doing so may be treading a fine line between enacting the Equality Act and breaking the law for standing up for equality in a way many witnessed during the time of Section 28 only 30 years ago. At the start of the academic year 2020-21, new DfE guidance on the teaching of relationships, sex and health education has become the site of specific instruction to schools around the potentially extreme political stances held by the very resources and external agencies they seek support from to deliver this statutory curriculum area. In this document, such extreme stances include: “divisive or victim narratives” and “selecting and presenting information to make unsubstantiated accusations against state institutions”. Around the same time that this guidance was published, a letter to headteachers and SLT was circulated by a new organisation which sees itself standing up to anti-racist discourse, and specifically Critical Race Theory, as divisive, rife with so-called victim narrative, and potentially illegal, supposedly going against the 1996 Education Act and Teachers’ Standards which state the need for teachers to maintain political neutrality. By shifting the focus in this way, the anti-racism narrative stops being seen as about creating greater race equity, and instead about anti-white sentiment, or is seen as an expression of political leanings rather than a desire to understand the historical and societal causes of inequalities which have played out over generations in terms of educational progression, health outcomes and life-expectancy for Black and Asian British citizens. This group advises teachers that to regard the acceptance of structural racism as fact, to challenge inherent bias, or have any association with Black Lives Matter is politically motivated and therefore should be viewed as indoctrination. In their view, discussion of anti-racism will make teachers, children and their families feel guilt and that actively seeing race is a way to divide us. 

What’s the core purpose of education?
When considering whether teaching racial justice and equity has a place in our primary schools, we need to think carefully about the core purpose of education. For the proponents of the ‘no excuses’ education and the charter schools movement, it has been about moving children through the testing process with as much skill and knowledge necessary to ensure that they compete with their more privileged peers and reach the next stage of their education with comparable test scores. Until these tests explicitly contain questions about racial justice and equity, there is no place to learn about it. Our testing system in itself is inherently flawed as it requires one third of children to fail for the two thirds to succeed. In the words of Daniel Koretz in The Testing Charade, “When test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. That is exactly what happened when high stakes testing became the core of education ‘reform’”. 

In modern complex society such as ours, we need to be able to give children something that will serve them as powerful adults with agency in their own right. Learning is as much about agency as it is about knowledge retrieval, and there is a strong body of evidence to suggest that the work that schools do now to prepare their students for the 21st century, should include a consistent and high quality focus on knowledge and understanding, skills and attitudes. Gert Biesta’s work suggests that what we do in the classroom can make the biggest difference to children while they’re in our schools and the way in which we guide them to ‘meet the world’ will serve them now and beyond their schooling. We need to connect education to our core purpose, which cannot simply rest on passing tests.

There are several good examples of schools serving the same kinds of underprivileged cohorts which may receive no excuses, rote-based learning in some circumstances and yet which deploy an entirely different framework for learning and discipline. School 21 in Newham for example, is an all-through school which educates the ‘head, heart and hand’, seeing the aim of school to educate for knowledge, values and attitudes and also manual skilled tasks such as craft and handiwork. Inherent in their curriculum will be what they call ‘Real World Learning’ about social justice, and developing the critical skills to know, think and to talk coherently about history, politics, societal structures, inequalities and more. Students are engaged in answering complex questions in partnership with organisations such as the Justice Department and the Metropolitan Police, such as ‘With the continual restrictions on legal aid, how can we ensure wide-ranging and fair access to justice?’ and ‘Does the Met Police effectively engage with young people and what could we do differently?’

At primary, Inspire Partnership Trust serves disadvantaged areas Greenwich, Medway and Croydon. Their curriculum structures itself around similar lines to School 21 with a focus on the cognitive (head), affective (heart) and psychomotor (hand) domains of learning. Academic engagement is rooted in relationships, and is about students’ own commitment to being a learner, social engagement as an active participant in school life and intellectual engagement in the learning. The curriculum framework is rooted in core texts which have been carefully selected to be contemporary enough to allow pupils to engage deeply and critically with a range of complex issues, linking to an outcome which has a social justice element and supports children to make sense of a modern complex society with strong and robust knowledge which will help them develop the skills they need to navigate some of the challenges they will encounter in life. For both these examples, the journey of learning is what makes the outcome strong and there is absolutely a place to give the children the knowledge they need to understand the past, the present and to imagine a more just and equitable future, which they will be active agents in creating. In this way, providing children a way to make sense of themselves as learners, a focus on themselves as meeting the world but not the centre of the world, gives them and their teachers the opportunities to be trusted to explore complex societal problems such as inequity, race and racism, gender, climate change and more. Schools like these should and absolutely do see themselves as equipped and adept at teaching racial justice and equity, without fear of straying from their core purpose. In the words of Paulo Friere, “Education is a political act. No pedagogy is neutral… Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world and with each other.” And so it stands that while racial injustice and inequity exist in the world, so must learning to dismantle them exist in the education of both teacher and student.

We will overcome this global crisis and emerge as better societies, workplaces and communities

I am one of the lucky ones that manages to spend my working days in the intersection known as Ikigai, where I do what I love and love what I do.

At my place of work, Lyfta, we have been collaborating with the British Council, DFID and UK Aid to deliver our course, ‘Teach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), skills and values with Lyfta’ as part of the Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning programme.

One of the first questions we ask teachers who participate, is to what extent they are aware of the SDGs or Global Goals as they are also known. In our experience, it is normal for a vast majority of teachers to start the initial webinar with us unaware of the SDGs beyond a vague understanding that they exist. By the end of the course, they can see what a powerful framework the SDGs can provide for guiding tomorrow’s global citizens in today’s classroom. As the world experiences a shift in circumstances with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, now more than ever, we can feel the powerful relevance of global connectedness and an international commitment to solidarity around tangible goals to support a healthy, equitable and responsible future.   

What are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

Source: United Nations

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015 and “provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future”. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are central to this, and although we often might perceive them as intended for our fellow citizens ‘over there’, they form an urgent call for action by all countries – so-called developed and developing – in a global partnership. These global goals make clear that urgent action must be taken to eliminate poverty and inequality, address climate change, and act for peace and social justice for all people, everywhere. The SDGs build on decades of work by countries and the UN, including the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and can be found here https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org.

Shared responsibility and global solidarity

The United Nations report, which came out in March 2020, ‘Shared responsibility, global solidarity: responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19’, looks at how the global pandemic affects all SDGs. 

A number of elements of this report stand out, when looking at the work we are doing with schools, teachers and students to explore the power of human stories from around the world. We often find ourselves helping teachers and students alike to realise that the global goals outlined in the SDGs are not ‘over there’ but very much here and now in our own society and the communities we serve. The socio-economic impacts of lockdown in the UK have acted as a magnifying lens for many of these global goals. 

SDG 1: No poverty

With the partial closure of schools, we see how this can impact on families our schools serve. A shocking 4 million children live in poverty in this country. That’s 30% of children or 9 children in every classroom of 30. Two thirds of these children’s families will have at least one parent in work, yet they will be earning an income below 60% of the UK’s average. Loss of income as employees are furloughed or laid off altogether, can have a devastating impact on already precarious lives. In addition, individuals who haven’t previously experienced poverty, have seen their incomes impacted by the lockdown, and may experience their first taste of immediate financial insecurity.

SDG 2: Zero hunger

For many of the families already living in poverty, and those newly threatened by it, school provides an important service not only through delivering a formal education, but also by ensuring a reliable source of nutrition in the form of a daily cooked meal. Food production and distribution can be disrupted by the lockdown. It is reassuring to see how schools have upheld the importance of food distribution for their vulnerable families, and have put pressure on the government to provide a voucher scheme to support them through this difficult time, including during school holidays. Schools are mindful that not only those defined as being eligible for free school meals are at risk at the moment, and are making arrangements for any family that is in need at this time.

SDG 3: Good health and well-being

With restrictions on all of our mobility, no matter the socio-economic circumstances, everyone is feeling the impact on their physical and mental health of the lockdown. With the daily routine of work and school disrupted, families are under strain. Young people’s mental health is already under the radar as they are particularly at risk of increased anxiety. With 87% of the world’s student population away from schools and universities at present, and GCSE and A Level students having the rug pulled from under them as they were sharpening their focus on the upcoming exams, this is particularly acute. Hand in hand with these growing levels of mental health concerns, is also a growing awareness among young people and they are stepping up to the challenge by running campaigns, volunteering to support vulnerable peers and contributing as innovators in the good health and well-being space on and off line.

SDG 4: Quality education

With learning moved to the home for most institutions, introducing some form of remote online learning has been the response of many schools across the country. For some, online learning is less effective or even inaccessible. We can see digital inequality playing a part as some schools serving privileged populations are able to continue the delivery of the timetable with a shift to remote learning, knowing that their students will most likely have an adult to support, children with their own room to study in, a personal device to work on, and reliable internet access. Other schools are sending home paper-based activities that will at best keep children occupied for a short stint during each day, provided they can complete them without adult support. Without clear leadership on a digital strategy for a new landscape, teachers are doing their best, but many may not feel able to step up to the challenge effectively yet.

SDG 5: Gender equality

Women are more likely to be in the caring professions and account for the majority of health, social care and the teaching population who are exposed to COVID-19. We are already seeing increased levels of domestic violence against women, as they spend more time in the home and are less likely to be able to seek support from friends and family. Even with both parents at home, in two-parent families, it is often still the women who will take on most of the caring and housework responsibilities. This can be while simultaneously trying to work from home or being required to take on longer shifts as a keyworker.

SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation

Never before has this been more important in this country, when it is often seen as something that impacts on developing countries ‘over there’. We are suddenly keenly aware of the impact of inadequate access to water and sanitation that can hinder handwashing, one of the most vital preventive measures in the fight against the spread of COVID-19. And of course, the street homeless and rough sleepers are always impacted by limited access to sanitation, which is ever more crucial at this time.

SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy

Many families in the UK are already living in ‘fuel poverty’, meaning that they spend more than 10% of their income on energy. Fuel poverty affects over 4 million UK households – roughly 15% of all households, before the COVID-19 crisis. This looks likely to rise given the economic impact of the crisis. With so many people at home, and the NHS working flat out, the strain on electricity supply – and in many cases on broadband services, as many workplaces move to online meetings – is tangible. Home utilities bills are going to be impacted as many of our indoor leisure activities require electricity.

SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth

For many occupations, unemployment, lower incomes, and longer hours are now the norm where previously they might have been perceived as realities reserved for others. For the school workforce, the window has opened for handing in notice to seek employment in other schools, either for a change of scene or to pursue promotion opportunities. How this will work in the current climate is uncertain now.

SDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Economic activity is suspended for many industries. And yet, we have seen a surge of innovation and altruism across the education sector, with industrious and innovative schools raiding their science cupboards to donate protective goggles and even making personal protection equipment on 3D printers where they have them, to send to hospitals.

SDG 10: Reduced inequalities

The impact of the pandemic on employment, education, mental and physical health outcomes will be a clear driver in further exacerbating the huge economic, gendered, and educational inequalities we face in this country. The gap between rich and poor has already been growing during the last decade, and although the virus itself doesn’t discriminate, newspapers and researchers alike are reporting the effects of inequalities on the outcomes for people who have less access to resources.

SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Areas of high population density and multi-generational or overcrowded homes will be hit harder by the risk of exposure to COVID-19. It is heartening to see initiatives spring up to use resources effectively and to think about measures that are put in place now, that could endure and support more sustainable living in the future. We seem to be better at remembering people that live alone and the elderly, of late.

SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production

Panic buying and resource hoarding has been much-reported in the news, followed by reports of food wastage as bulk bought items are discarded unused. On the other hand, we are not able to keep up with demand for personal protection equipment and vital ventilators needed by hospitals. It seems that more education is needed around our collective social responsibility to each other’s well-being and access to resources.

SDG 13: Climate action

On the one hand, there has been a hiatus in the attention given to climate change activism, but reports of the positive impact on pollution levels and on wildlife due to reduced industrial production and transport-related emissions is heartening. This also relates to SDG 14: Life below water and SDG 15: Life on Land. But will this have a lasting impact, unless we continue to raise awareness?

SDG 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions

Nothing is more evident than schools’ commitment to this goal. We see how many school leaders have stepped up as civic leaders and guardians of social justice at the heart of their mission. It is also important that Ofsted inspections, SATs, GCSEs and A Level exams and league tables have been suspended for now. There is much debate about what this will look like when we reach the other side of the lockdown and return to a new normal.

SDG 17: Partnerships for the goals

While some parties are seeing the global pandemic as evidence against globalisation, it also helps highlight the importance of collaboration across borders and across continents on issues such as public health, research and knowledge-sharing. Civil society and community-based organisations are feeding and caring for vulnerable families, and edtech companies are providing free access to resources for schools, for example.

We will overcome this global crisis and emerge as better societies, workplaces and communities

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a defining moment for modern society, and history will judge the efficacy of our response not by the actions of any single set of government actors taken in isolation, but by the degree to which the response is coordinated globally across all sectors to the benefit of our human family. The United Nations global footprint at the national level is an asset for the global community to be leveraged to deliver the ambition needed to win the war against the virus. With the right actions, the COVID-19 pandemic can mark the rebirthing of society as we know it today to one where we protect present and future generations. It is the greatest test that we have faced since the formation of the United Nations, one that requires all actors – governments, academia, businesses, employers and workers’ organisations, civil society organisations, communities and individuals – to act in solidarity in new, creative, and deliberate ways for the common good and based on the core United Nations values that we uphold for humanity” 

‘Shared responsibility, global solidarity: responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19’ p23

It is my hope that an even clearer shared language of civic engagement and collective social responsibility will take centre stage, encouraging the view that school leaders are in fact civic leaders – using their autonomy to create spaces where change and progress can happen in ways that work for their communities and that both provide models for, and draw on learning from, other communities worldwide. 

I hope that schools will be able to spend time considering their digital strategy – not just for their students but also for staff CPD. We are hopeful at Lyfta that with a renewed focus on weaving online and face-to-face activities into the curriculum and ensuring digital equality for all students as part of their gap-closing priorities for the future, schools will be able to engage with global citizenship as a given at every age and stage of their students’ education. 

More than ever, we remain committed to our mission at Lyfta to ensure that, by the time a child has completed their education, they will have been able to visit every country in the world, and will have learned from at least one human story from each place they find themselves in the world. We want to support the leaders of tomorrow to be world-wise, globally aware and to bravely consider the UN’s global goals as our collective social responsibility wherever we are in the world, and whatever the obstacles we find ourselves up against, now and in the future.

If you would like to take advantage of Lyfta’s free online CPD courses and access to stunning immersive human stories, email info@lyfta.com to secure your place now.

 

Cultural capital: an exploration

The following post is a summary of a keynote presentation I gave to open a wider INSET day on closing the gaps at a secondary school in the south west of England. The stated aims of the session was to unpack what cultural capital means and to challenge some of the assumptions about cultural capital  as it is often being deployed in schools.

How do I come to stand before you?

I am not an expert in cultural capital. I do see myself as someone who can challenge and support effectively, and this is my aim with this piece. Many of my experiences, from being the only free school meals child in my class at grammar school, teaching in primary and secondary schools in Jerusalem, returning to work in a start up environment in the UK after 12 years away, I have experienced the dissonance of feeling that my set of cultural norms and values, base knowledge and experiences, even my language and gestures are at odds with the norm. I have also been able to see the patchwork of cultural references and knowledge as useful in my survival toolkit in many situations.

My activism work with The BAMEed Network and lately the Haringey BAME Achievement Group, being Chair of governors at a Tottenham primary school and on a multi-academy trust board in Greenwich has also informed and fed my fascination with this notion of cultural capital.

Who are you?

Picture by Mona Chalabi

Ask yourself: who am I? What do I bring to the table? Why? Where do I get it? What parts am I proud of? What parts are seen as valuable to others and why? Does this change depending on what context you are in at the time? Would you give a different set of responses to colleagues around the table at an INSET day compared with the one you might give to friends over a meal out or at a job interview?

What is cultural capital to you?

In schools we use this term freely, but do we know what it means and where it comes from? What do you think you bring in terms of your cultural capital to the students you teach? Have you built in anything around what they bring to you as a teacher?

What is cultural capital, actually?

In his “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” (1977), Pierre Bourdieu coined the term Cultural Capital. He was interested in French education system in the 1960s, which saw itself as purely meritocratic – the belief that offering the same opportunities to all students was the same as creating equal opportunities for all students. Bourdieu wanted to explore why, despite this, working class students consistently had worse outcomes than their more privileged peers. This led to his understanding that some students come with a set of culturally valued experiences and prior knowledge which give them access to the curriculum more readily.

The phrase cultural capital refers to the tastes, manners, skills and credentials that are sometimes earned, but more often received from your family environment, are particular to your social class and social interactions with others in daily life. If we accept the notion of cultural capital uncritically, we will be unable to see how inequality is created from the get-go. The cycle is such that if you have the ‘accepted’ cultural capital, you are more likely to have wealth, and if you are wealthy, you are more likely to have greater cultural capital.

According to Bourdieu, cultural capital manifests itself in a number of ways:

The Embodied State – this is the knowledge that is acquired consciously and inherited passively through socialisation, through our culture and tradition. It is not something that can be inherited like physical assets but it is certainly impressed on our character and way of thinking, which in turn leads us to seek out and become more open to similar cultural influences.

The Objectified State – this is how cultural capital manifests itself into material, physical objects such as property that are indicators of social class – for example the clothes you wear, the food you eat, your car, and which can also extend into the way you walk, stand, talk and so on.

The Institutionalised State – this is the way in which society measures social capital – for example doctoral degree has more perceived capital than a expertise in a handicraft or being streetwise. I can’t help wondering which one has more actual worth in time of need – being able to stay alive, or having a high degree of philosophical knowledge.

We know what is valued, but why?

Picture: the sorting hat from Harry Potter movies

This picture is a great example of differing cultural capital. To me, it is the sorting hat from the Harry Potter movies. To my partner, who although he has a PhD, is an associate professor at a London university,  came to the UK in 2007 and therefore on sighting this in my presentation slides said “oh my, is that a pile of poo?” Our cultural capital differs on the matter of the sorting hat.

If I ask you to do a quick sorting activity, how would you rank the following?

Supermarkets: Lidl, Waitrose, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons

Universities: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Berlin University, Harvard, Exeter University, Oxford, Brighton University, Durham University

You can play this game and find out so much about how our minds work, what we are socialised to believe and how assumptions around cultural capital come into play.  Trying this out on a room of over 100 teachers, I saw that they had no problem setting to work on the task. A few asked for more criteria but on the whole we generally agreed that the supermarkets could be ranked on a scale with Lidl and Aldi at one end of the scale and Waitrose at the other. Interestingly, if you compare the same basket of items from Lidl and Waitrose, the costs will be wildly different, but the actual quality and even source of many of the products will be identical or equal in comparison. Go figure.

The same with the university exercise. For many employers, overseas university equals assumed lower quality, unknown, impossible to perceive as valuable to the same degree as a UK one. Many people immigrating to this country with degrees in medicine, teaching, and so on, are told they need to re-qualify without any exploration of what they actually learned on their courses and whether this maps onto the requirements for the job. This can be further divided into racial assumptions – we are happy with teachers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand taking up teaching posts, but if your teaching degree is from Delhi, Cameroon or Nigeria, objections being raised are far more likely.

The Ofsted framework

The Ofsted framework states that no institution can be rated good unless its curriculum gives “all pupils, particularly disadvantaged pupils…the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.”

The schools inspection handbook has linked cultural capital to the national curriculum, introduced by Michael Gove, in setting out “the essential knowledge pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said”.

The best that has been thought and said. We are judged as schools on this. But do we really understand what it is, and what is the best that has been thought and said? This is a place to pause and think again about the uncritical engagement with the term and concept of cultural capital. This is especially vital as the new framework has such a clear focus on curriculum. We are going to have to make decisive value judgements about what is the best that has been thought and said.  We are going to have to decide what the things are that every child should learn in our school, in each discipline, across the curriculum as a whole.  We are going to have to decide what counts as ‘knowledge’. (If there was ever a time to start understanding the importance of decolonising the curriculum, it is now – more on this later).

What are the things that every child should know?

According to the Civitas thinktank’s English version of ED Hirsch’s work, every child should know the following:

Year 1 Acorns; Brer Rabbit tales; continents; English civil war; jungles; Machu Picchu; Mexico; AA Milne; musical pitch; Henry Moore

Year 2 Tap dancing; Louis Pasteur; rabies; mosques; Hansel and Gretel; Atlantic Ocean; extinct animals and fish; Great Wall of China; dinosaur bones; Roald Amundsen

I have so many questions. How do you define what is essential knowledge? Should you define and dictate what knowledge is before you start? What is culture and what is the cultural capital that is valuable to children in your school? Is your school’s culture different to another school’s culture? How do you define that? What is included and what is excluded? Who decides?

Things that personally slowly dawned on me as someone of Jewish heritage growing up in the UK were things like, ‘how come the only thing we learn about Jews is the Holocaust and Shakespeare’s Shylock?’ Later in life, my own cultural experience of this when compared with Israeli Jewish cultural representation was fascinating. The experience you have of your self-worth as a Jew in Israel is radically different to that of a child growing up Jewish in the UK secular school system. Many of my esteemed colleagues, my own partner and children, all of whom have immigrated to this country often share similar experiences of the dissonance between their learned self-worth and what self-worth they are now afforded by those around them.

Bourdieu’s work should help us to see that compulsory education was created as one big sorting hat, designed to divide along clear lines – sorting the workers from the owners of the means of production and those that are used as the means of production.

What do you notice from just these few topics listed as essential knowledge for children in the early years of their education? There are no women (unless you count Hansel’s sister Gretel of course). To me it seems like the memories of a very specific, white, middle class experience of a 1970s childhood. And who was a child in the 1970s? Well I was, and despite the free school meals status and Jewish heritage, much of this is deliciously familiar and often subtly useful. But more significant is that the people in power and determining education policy now are largely from white, middle class backgrounds firmly rooted in that era either as 1970s parents, 1970s children or the children of those that had 1970s middle class, white, childhoods.

Back to the sorting hat

Let’s relate this concept of cultural capital back to our education system as a whole. What has changed since the industrial revolution?

Let’s acknowledge again that our compulsory education system was designed to be a sorting hat channeling children to be either the owners of the means of production, or the workers earning the wealth for the ruling classes. Therefore, there had to be a dividing line. Not much has changed today. The British education system is the most divisive in the world. Thanks to the education reforms of the last decade, it is now the most fragmented in the world.

Cultural capital and wealth go hand in hand now as much as they did during the industrial revolution. The harsh truth is that 7% of children are privately educated and they hold 94% of all elite jobs (judges, CEOs of FTSE 100 companies, the cabinet). A person from an underprivileged background with a 1st from Oxbridge is not as likely to hold one of these elite jobs as someone who has any class of degree from any university and who is from a privileged background.

Even if we have thought through carefully what is the ‘right’ cultural capital to give our children so they have a fighting chance of the achieving the goals that we see as important to ‘success’, the part of cultural capital which we cannot give young people are networks, the sense of entitlement and the wealth that gives privileged young people a place at the front of the queue. More than this, without a critical examination of cultural capital, and the curriculum, we are constantly communicating to groups of young people that they are not entitled, that their cultural capital is neither culture nor capital. We do this through a myriad of ways.

Loaded terminology

With this in mind, let’s consider what we are portraying to students with some of favourite edu-lingo terminology. We often talk about these buzz words, alongside discussions about gaps for certain groups, cultural capital and curriculum, as if we know what they mean.

Aspiration – is this about financial wealth or is it about aspiring to have the embodied, objectified and institutional states that are deemed worthy?

Mini case- study: a headteacher at a school in coastal Essex told me it took him years to realise that they were labelling students as lacking in aspiration because they preferred to take on apprenticeships with their family members and stay in the same postcode than leave family, guaranteed work, property ownership, good quality of life and education for their children in exchange for a university degree, at a time of the highest post-graduate unemployment rates, £50k debt and isolation from support networks and family. There is no logic to selling this to young people, unless you absolutely believe that gaining the ruling classes’ cultural capital is worth such a huge gamble not only financially but also at the expense of your own cultural,  social and societal values.

Social mobility – this goes hand in hand with aspiration and seems to mean moving away from and turning your back on where you’re from. You can see more about my thoughts on this in one of my first blog posts way back when here

Disengaged – what does this mean? Have you asked students themselves what they need? Do they feel valued as the people who are going to be running the show one day?

Mini case study one: People often get irritated with examples from Finland, so I will temper this with a UK one too! Young people I have heard speaking about their education in Finland see education as a great privilege and see their teachers as preparing them to be the rightful future leaders and shapers of tomorrow. The only time we seem to hear about young people in our country are the jumping-for-joy photographs on results day, derisory articles about them skipping school to moan about the environment, and polar opposite tropes of evil-gang-youth and a snowflake generation. Disengagement might just be a function of self-preservation with messages like these.

Mini case study two: Inspire Partnership MAT is a group of primary schools in areas of high deprivation in SE London and Kent. The Junior Leadership Team is a group of children of all ages that takes an active part in all aspects of school life.  When I met them recently at one school in Medway, we heard about their work looking at feedback and marking across the school. They were able to identify a gap in consistency in one year group’s books and when investigated more closely, it transpired that this was a year group with newly qualified teachers – they realised that these teachers needed a bit more support from the senior leadership team to ensure that the children had more effective feedback and marking. How great is that for showing the children their worth, engaging them and ensuring that they not only are heard, but also understand the intricacies of learning and teaching in its wider context.

Context – No education takes place without context. We desperately need to decolonise our curriculum. We need to question Black History Month vs history which includes Black history in this country every day.  I would also add that while it is of course important for children from diverse backgrounds to see themselves in the curriculum and in the teaching staff, it is vital for white children to see people of colour as holders of power and influence lest we believe the pervading post-colonialist narrative of  what is commonly accepted as “the essential knowledge pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said”.

The value of education – That Essex case study says it all. We do need more critical thinking skills from an early age though,  rather than leaping straight to more vocational education as the answer to the students who we see as not understanding “the value of education” as it is first served up to them. We can revisit the streetwise vs. PhD question here again too – which one is more likely to keep you alive? Teenagers always ask how will what I’m learning help me in life? Do we ever discuss with children why they are learning what they learn?

Parental engagement – this is another favourite term when we are thinking about cultural capital and “closing gaps”.  There are some really crude assumptions made around how parents engage in and therefore we assume, value, their children’s education.

Mini case study:  A headteacher of school with 98% Bengali parents once gave a fascinating case study at a NCSL conference that I will never forget. He explained that he and staff were tearing their hair out trying to get parents into the school. It was only when he actually spoke to students about their families, that he understood that their parents would never speak directly to a teacher as this was seen as disrespectful and interfering. They trusted the teachers to educate their children. The bridging from assumptions and cultural bias took a long time, involved careful dialogue, and ensuring that a more suitable method of interaction and involvement was pursued. The headteacher set up an internet cafe at the weekends, where parents could come in and see what their children had been up to via a parent-school communication platform that many schools use to engage parents that are working or otherwise unable to come into school frequently.

Role models – Again, schools often only start thinking about this when we have “students from visibly diverse backgrounds”. But have you considered carefully who are the role models among your staff, the texts you use, your library books, the pictures on the walls. To put it blandly, does your science lab feature all white men on posters? Are all your senior leaders and decision makers from the same kind of background?

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it

Policies aren’t just pieces of paper – What is valued as cultural capital is communicated beyond the curriculum and it’s important to consider what your policies actually communicate. For example, “extreme hair” policies often class Black children’s hair as extreme for just the way it grows out of their heads. Think carefully about blanket bans on certain styles and cuts or more subtle expectations about what ‘professional’ looks like for staff.

If you have considered what your staff team looks like and discovered that all the powerful positions taken up by white middle class men, do you need to revisit your recruitment policies?

Decolonise the curriculum – We need to go beyond the ‘dead white men’ curriculum choices but also be wary of falling into the trap of thinking you have diversity nailed without seeing that all the diverse texts you have chosen feature people of colour as oppressed, weak, underdogs, deviants or exotic for example.

When and how do you engage with parents? Look carefully at the assumptions you make about so called disengaged parents. Please assume this: ALL parents want the BEST for their children. No-one wants their child to fail or have a bad time at school.

Do you ask parents (and students) what they want, when and how? I have sat through so many parents evenings that are full of acronyms and edu-speak that even to me as an educationalist are impenetrable and serve to distance me from feeling included. For most of us parents, we are happy to trust you with the education of our children if you can respond positively and honestly to the question, “Do you like my child? Do you see their potential?”

Supplementary schools – You can’t do everything, especially in our over-scheduled school day, but one clear way to value cultural capital that is broader than the scope of what school can offer, is to give space, time and honour to typically marginalised experiences by inviting supplementary schools to operate on your premises after hours as part of the educational offer. The knock-on effect can be incredible for your students’ feeling of self-worth, engagement and celebration of cultural capital.

What’s your strategy?  You have to be strategic. Do you have an achievement strategy that is about what YOU are going to change and not about interventions that extend the child’s already extended day? You can see a good example in the Haringey BAME achievement strategy

Over to you

Cultural capital is “the cultural knowledge that serves as currency that helps us navigate culture and alters our experiences and the opportunities available to us”.

What can you take away from this? What will you do next?

 

 

 

Leadership: doing it differently

The following post is a summary of a keynote presentation I gave to close the WomenEd Bexley event in July 2019. The theme of the event was Leadership: doing it differently. For my slides, I used a series of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons for illustration.

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

I was a playworker for 8 consecutive summers from the age of 16, and found myself leading a team of 15 people over four sites by the time I was 18. My first taste of leadership – until I left to go travelling at 24 and didn’t return until I was 37. During that time away, I was a qualified teacher for over ten years. Following my move back to the UK with my family, I took up a role at The Key for School leaders and went on an incredible journey with the then government-funded pilot to the Fast Track 100 company it became, serving nearly half the schools in the country.  I spent 7 happy years on the leadership team as Director of Business Development.

Following that, I have been in various leadership roles including at a small social enterprise and at the national charity, Challenge Partners. After a year working with a number of organisations in the education sector on their journey from start up to grown up, I am now Director of Engagement at the Finnish organisation, Lyfta Education.

In my spare time, I am on the steering group for the BAMEed Network, Chair of governors at a Tottenham primary school and on the Inspire Partnership Trust board. I will set out some of the learning and the developing thoughts I have on leadership and the concept of doing it differently, based on several years of leadership in both paid and unpaid work, and many years of feeling “different and differentiated”.

Doing it differently isn’t a choice

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

Doing things differently isn’t often a choice we make. Quite often, it is a gradual realisation or a sudden change of circumstances that makes us feel we are different and therefore going to have to do things differently. Our personal narrative is important and can help shift the feeling of difference from a deficit model to something that includes our own values, needs, and moral purpose.

It’s also important that this narrative includes a contextual social, historical and political understanding so you can zoom in and zoom out of your personal experience within the context of the world we live in, and within the context of where you are now on a continuum of where you have come from and where you are going.

Know your narrative in context

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

It’s really important to engage with and understand the societal and structural factors that impact on our being successful leaders and that includes factors that impact on the people that we lead. WomenEd has been set up to address some of the structural challenges that hold women back. The notion of ‘10% braver’ could be problematic if it assumes that what is missing is women’s bravery and that it is all about us lacking in confidence. But perhaps its saying that despite all we know about how the odds are stacked against women, in a world that is conditioned to see leaders as white, middle class and male, we need to gird our loins and go forth anyway.

Angela Browne’s Chapter 6 in the 10% Braver book sets out how bias and discrimination hold women back. The BAMEed Network is about addressing the issues around race, structural racism and the bias that holds back men and women of colour from progressing within the profession. Being a Black woman for example means an intersectional double-whammy of disadvantage and an exhausting struggle in a predominantly white, male system. If you need to be 10% braver as a woman, how much braver do you need to be as a woman or man from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background? We mustn’t lose sight of this in WomenEd, lest we become a ‘white feminists first movement’

As a woman racialised as white, I know that I have enormous privilege and that I have a responsibility to ensure that I can act as a reliable ally. This means recognising my own privilege and taking the time to listen to my colleagues from BAME backgrounds, to do the work MYSELF to learn about structural racism and to do everything I can to be actively resisting this. I need to understand that I have been socialised into a society which sees women and sees people from non-white backgrounds as inferior. No amount of pure thinking and pretending I don’t see difference is going to change this.

As a leader, your personal narrative is important but you need to know your context beyond your own personal story and you need to know how your own personal story fits into the societal and political context of our times. And you need to contextualise your and other people’s narratives within this. That’s difficult, but vital to do if you want to lead differently.

What would Beyonce do?

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

Understanding others’ narrative is essential to leadership. We all too often try to lead people, especially if we are doing it differently, knowing they aren’t going to like what we have to say, or worse, being surprised when they raise objections. Too many people try to ram through decisions anyway, or blame those above them, or the system, when delivering messages that others might find difficult to hear.

People who have worked with me will know that I absolutely believe in objection-handling as an essential component to the leadership toolkit. I’ll explain what I mean. You know those people in the leadership team who say “ just playing Devil’s advocate here…” or worse, fixate on a particular issue, making your strategy, idea or suggestion seem unworkable. And how many times did you see that coming and just hope they would be ill or inexplicably mute on the day?

It’s foolish not to do the work ahead of time and do some objection handling. Imagine that person who likes to put a stick in your spokes and think, what would X say at this point. Force yourself to think about the questions you least want to be asked and have answers for them. Address them head on, name them and pick them off one by one in your initial presentation of the proposal. Use research, clear rationale, previous experience to back up your handling of the possible objections that you think will be on people’s minds.

This is not a tool to help you get YOUR way more often, it helps you to see, hear and appreciate the diversity of thought and opinion within your team and to take a small piece of this into your own practice rather than resenting people who have different opinions and world views to you. It makes decision-making faster and easier as you have done the work ahead of time to think up all of the reasons why your plan may be less easily accepted by others. It helps your colleagues trust you and know they are heard, seen and felt. It actively promotes including diversity of thought into your own leadership practice rather than simply making sure you have a top trumps team of diverse people sitting in front of you not actually being included at all.

And as a school leader, don’t forget to extend this to beyond the leadership team. Do you know what your teachers, teaching assistants and catering staff think? Students? Their families? Local businesses and the wider community?

Understanding strengths

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

To succeed as a leader, you need to know what your strengths are and you need to see the strengths of those around you as complementary and not threats to your authority.

Good leaders have the confidence and wisdom to surround themselves with people that are far better than them at a myriad of things. They build the right team and draw on others’ expertise without feeling this threatens their ability to lead. Quite the opposite. If you have the right people rowing your boat, you can concentrate on navigating the choppy waters using your skills and expertise properly deployed.

Strengths Finder is an excellent tool to do this. Use it across the organisation and it shows a commitment to find the leading strengths in each person and gives you an opportunity for dialogue around and deployment of these strengths. Things you thought were quirky personality traits might be revealed to you and others as your unique and essential leadership qualities. E.g. I’m a person collector and a people connector. This has been integral to my leadership since Strengths Finder made me realise that this is a hugely valued and massively enjoyable strength I have.

When you are under threat or being made to feel inadequate, revisiting your Strengths Finder profile can be very affirming. It’s something that should be revisited regularly as you will see that you tend to take things for granted and even leave some strengths behind rather than developing them.

Identified Strengths should be developed. We spend too much time trying to get better at things we hate and are crap at in the name of being leaders. Much of what we do with performance management is ridiculously wed to this. This is nonsense. As long as you know where there are gaps and where you have the support, you will be fine. You need basic competencies at a range of things and you shouldn’t be building dependencies that are irreplaceable – I’ll say more about institutional knowledge in this context next.

Knowledge is power and institutional knowledge is powerful

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

When building your dream team of people cleverer than you at myriad things be careful to not build a wobbly Jenga tower. They say the mark of a good leader is when everything runs smoothly when they are there and when they are not. However, it is easy to rely on capable people too much and you can come unstuck:

• When you take your eye off the ball and lose any link with the detail
• When they leave and take valuable institutional knowledge with them

In organisations I have led in, it has been really important to ensure that knowledge, where possible, is institutional knowledge and that our systems and processes capture essential information. This means that if the worst happens, and someone leaves, they aren’t going to leave you high and dry, unable to function.

This can be as simple as knowing the code to the science cupboard so that when the science teacher is suddenly taken ill, you can get in and support the practicals that students need to do that day. But it also means capturing the “way we do things here” so that they can be used effectively to empower new starters in their induction period, and that they can be co-created, reviewed and embedded into everyone’s practice so that you feel certain that everyone is rowing in the same direction, understand the values and moral compass that steers your ship and keeps a happy crew. Values are much, much more than a poster on the wall.

Working in a role which requires much relationship management, I am not losing ANYTHING if I leave clear and useful records of contacts, interactions and next steps for the organisation. I can also take away with me my professional relationships without taking anything away from the organisation and clear in the knowledge that I am doing both parties a favour by ensuring the good work they do doesn’t collapse because I am leaving. They will both remember me kindly for this.

Be outward facing

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

Part of the call to action around engaging with the social, political and cultural experiences of yourself and others, can also be answered by being outward facing. Schools are insular places. Many teachers don’t engage with what is going outside their own classroom, let alone collaborate across departments, local schools, nationally or internationally.

Social media platforms like Linked In and Twitter are an excellent way to broaden your personal learning network. They can highlight things you need to read, think about and do differently as leaders. But I challenge you to engage with people who don’t look, sound or express views that are like your own, as well as with the usual mirror-tocracy of connections. It’s important. It could be the start of a way to change your world and change the world in general. Do an audit if your twitter connections, your professional connections, Linked In. Does everyone look like you or could belong to your family?

Every leader, whether you are a classroom teacher leading learning for 5 year olds or a MAT CEO, should have a mentor or coach that puts them through their paces. This should be someone neutral and you should consider paying for them, as you would a therapist or someone who does your eyebrows.

Every leader should be sending the elevator back down and lifting others in their networks. You learn as much through supporting someone else as you do through gaining support from others. Make time for it.

Go to events. Get business cards made and set yourself goals for events you attend. Scour the list of event speakers before you attend and hang about at the end of their talk to give them feedback and exchange contact details. Reach out to attendees ahead of time to arrange to meet for a chat in one of the breaks. Be proactive, people are friendly and want to connect. Twitter celebrities are a figment of everyone’s imagination. Be clear on what you have to give and what you would like to gain from connections. Follow up after you have met with a clear action if you can genuinely think of one.

Know your shelf life

Credit: Calvin & Hobbes

It took me a long time and several jobs to realise this. I have never been the one to leave a lover or a job. I have resilience, developed from childhood, which is actually like Teflon to abuse and neglect. That’s not the type of resilience that does anyone any good. This means it never occurred to me that if things weren’t working out, I should actually get up and go. It felt like failure to me. If I just tried harder, worked smarter, was good and likeable, it would all pan out. And gosh, when things were good, why would you EVER consider leaving?

Well, this is what I have learned and it is incredibly empowering. I now know that my work with any organisation has a shelf life. I know that I can lead well for a specific leg of the journey we need to go on. I work with organisations on their journey from start up to grown up and I now know exactly the point where I can enter to add value, where I need to bring on team members and work with them to build capacity, co-create institutional knowledge, expertise and sustainability, and where I need to get the hell out of the way.

Rather than living in fear of being found out, or worse being driven out, or getting bored, I can have a frank conversation with any organisation I work with about my shelf life, what they would like to get from me and how and when we speak about the journey towards exit. Working with younger people, it is really obvious to them that two to three years is ample time in one role and they will be looking for a change of role or change of scene within that time period. As a leader, you need to know your shelf life and those of the people you lead and prepare for it accordingly. Too many leaders hang on forever, long past anything that is dignified. Too many leaders are offended when people move on to pastures new.

A good leader leaves at the right time with a bounce in their step and leaving empowered team members ready to keep pushing forwards. A happy employee leaves feeling empowered for the next step in their journey and taking a small piece of the great culture, values, systems and processes you established, into their next role. Like a small piece of your leadership DNA ‘infecting’ for good and making a dent on the universe by proxy.

What’s your shelf life?

The power of storytelling and narratives in learning

This Saturday, I was fortunate enough to attend the Portobello Festival of Learning in Edinburgh. I am writing this while the train home carries me hurtling through green fields and northern cities, with a feeling I haven’t had for quite some time. It’s a mixture of deep pain and uplifting joy, both are the direct result of feeling connected to a shared narrative experience. The golden thread running through the event was around storytelling and narratives as pivotal not only to learning but to the human connection which makes learning sticky, memorable and even a deeply happy experience. Nina Jackson’s incredible hour-long keynote was as harrowing as it was hopeful. Like a phoenix from the flames, she took us deep into the fire of her experience in childhood and early adulthood and right through to the colourful and whole person she is today. The intensity of 300 pairs of eyes tracking her glide around the centre stage was visceral. Her ability to tell her story, to elicit gasps, laughs, to have us leaning in and then recoiling again, was phenomenal. Her pulling together the themes, tying them into clear strands and using minimal visual inputs at carefully timed intervals was clearly craftwork.

When I refer to storytelling and narratives as a tool for learning, it is clear to me that this is not just about teachers telling stories that make learning happen in the classroom, although the inimitable Hywel Roberts’ session definitely reminded me the power of a carefully prepared narrative containing dramatic development, coupled with a deep understanding of sound pedagogy, to activate the senses and make engaging learning take place. As he led us through some of the methodology he uses in the classroom with teachers and children alike, I had a physically and emotionally intense response to the suspense and drama he created. The group was positively bristling with excitement and childlike willingness to enter into an adventure with him. We mustn’t forget as teachers that our ability to facilitate learning in others is most powerful when coupled with our own commitment to lifelong learning as a human being. Part of this learning means seeking out the human stories of those around us, so that we can expand our view of the world, the possibilities and similarities and differences. Prior knowledge means that we have anchors and reference points to draw on, but alongside this is also the fact that what we often class as prior knowledge is often deeply flawed, contextually irrelevant or even just plain learned bias. Lyfta’s workshop took participants on a journey to immersive storyworlds with embedded human documentary stories. Opening the session, Serdar Ferit started with the fascinating contextual framing that led to the Lyfta concept being born. Guiding the group around the storyworlds Lyfta has created, and before playing each human story documentary, he asked, “what can you say about what you can see, and how do you know?” We’re all willingly sharing our assumptions as our eyes scan an Ethiopian village, a Palestinian family living room, a Finnish ballet studio and we hazard a guess, only to be gently redirected as we watch the short film that follows, and as we listen to real human beings telling us their story. By the end of the session, teachers in the room spoke of what sounded to my ears like a renewed commitment to treat what we have learned with the challenge it rightfully deserves. One of the powerful yet simple learnings I have gained from reading about race and class in recent years is the toxic nature of the presumed innocent question we often ask people we meet, which is along the lines of “where are you from?” or “what do you do?” This can be loaded with racially stereotypical and classist connotations and assumptions.  One way around this, which is also faithful to the importance of storytelling and narratives is to ask “what’s your story?” – giving people the opportunity to respond in as narrow, wide, personal or generalised way as is fitting for their own contextualised narrative journey of the current moment.

Paul Dix reminded us of the importance as educators to lead on the co-creation and at times to own the narrative for our young charges. The simple process of reframing the narrative can diffuse potentially disruptive situations in the classroom. He laid out carefully why we as adults need to be clear on our part in the story that is unfolding right there in our own classroom. We may need to retell the story to include perhaps a historical context that allows a potentially volatile young person to rewrite the story in real time. Instead of entering into a battle of wills, trying to get a child back on task, you can say for example, gently but with conviction, “remember last week you helped me clear up when the lesson was finished, and you stayed behind to make sure everything was in place? That’s the person I know, and that’s the person I want to see here now”. This reminds the young person that this positive element is still part of their story, and is included in the whole story. Paul used dramatic demonstration and emotionally engaging dialogue to help us understand that as responsible adults, we can reframe, redirect and take charge of the narrative so that behaviour is guided back on track leaving both your and the student’s dignity and self-respect in tact.

Aside from learning about others through taking an interest in their narrative and on their own terms, is the important work of learning to connect with our own narratives. By this I don’t mean to endlessly hone the story we tell others about ourselves, which we often defensively beaver away at to show ourselves in the best light.  Learning one’s own narrative means being able to zoom in and out, and as we gain greater perspective and distance, weaving in the contextual, socio-historical backdrop to give more rich and layered meaning to our own pinhole camera view. Parts of the day were personally resonant, and therefore profoundly painful for me and I’m sure many people in the room. But I know that I am also increasingly able to understand my own childhood experiences firmly within the political backdrop of Britain at that time. I contextualise my parents’ decisions and behaviours that led to some serious negative outcomes for their children within their class-based economic constraints, educational achievements and resulting restricted opportunity, and the contemporary gender role expectations – as well as the commonly-held beliefs about childhood of the time. This helps to ensure the story I tell is iterative and nuanced, based on my own emotional growth and psychological bandwidth to zoom out from the pure hurt to an external packaging which humanises the chain of events without betraying my own experience.

Whatever our narrative, and however we weave storytelling into our professional, pedagogical and personal life, perhaps we all need Nina Jackson’s reminder of the Japanese practice of Kintsugi – repairing broken ceramics with gold. Kintsugi wisdom says rather than disguising the broken pieces, you recognise the story of the object and visibly incorporate the repair into it, while outlining the places which are whole and in tact. By outlining the places that broke us, or where the story changed, we can also remember the beauty of the process of retelling and rebuilding that resulted in who we are now.

Pupil voice in a sit down and shut up culture

I gave a presentation at a session on Pupil Voice alongside Joe Pardoe from School 21, chaired by Ed Finch at the NEU Celebrating Education conference on Saturday 30th March 2019.

I knew that Joe Pardoe would most likely be outlining the fabulous work done at School 21 on pupil voice and so I wanted to take the conversation to a different direction and to try and ask some provocative questions of the attendees. The following is an overview of my presentation.

As educators, we need to ask ourselves some challenging questions about the voices that are heard in our schools.

 

Children and adults need to see a range of people and voices. The curriculum needs to reflect a diverse range of voices, and that includes a diverse range of speaking styles and opportunities. We might need to practise switching from Shakespeare to slangspeak and back again, depending on the situation. (But should we be switching Shakespeare into slangspeak? Probably not.)

Children need to experience a diverse range of speaking styles and opportunities, and they need time for reflection and discussion that is built into the school day. This is exactly the sort of thing that is the golden thread that runs through School 21’s head, heart and hand curriculum for example. 

There’s a lot of emphasis on teaching children vocabulary (or more cynically, teaching year 6 children the vocabulary we think will come up on the SATs paper, or technical terminology we think is needed for GCSE exams). But what about engaging children in etymology, and exploring where words come from, as part of our curriculum, and how they got there in the first place. You’d be surprised how many every day words and phrases have come into our language as a result of our colonial past, for example, let alone the myriad migrations to Great Britain over the centuries. (If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend the Our Migration Story resource put together by the Runnymede Trust here). We desperately need to decolonise the curriculum!

Diversity is good for business
We know from the McKinsey Report that diversity works & is good for business – so ensuring there are diverse voices being heard within the staff team, from our clients, the children, and from the local community, will lead to a more productive and happier school. The McKinsey Report found that diverse teams make better decisions, are more productive and the more diverse the voices included in the decision-making process the better. That includes a range of voices from the shop floor right up to senior management – which is why we need to include children’s voices in schools’ decision-making around policy and practice where appropriate.

Lack of diversity is dangerous – seat belts and space suits
Up until far too recently, women and children were suffering massive injuries or dying in car accidents despite wearing seat belts. This is directly related to the fact that the people designing these seat belts were men, testing them on themselves, and not considering others outside their own assumed “neutral” position, not realising that women and children would also be using these seat belts while not being the same height and weight to benefit from the design.

If you can’t see it, you can’t be it – role models for children and adults
A lot of people like to say that Black children need to see Black role models in schools. I do agree with this adage that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. But I also strongly believe that white people, those people that are traditionally used to holding positions of power in our society, need to see people of colour in positions of power and authority too. We are socialised to believe that the logical leader is a straight white man. We can’t unlearn this without ensuring that we all have experienced role models that aren’t white and male.

There are ways that you can ensure that you challenge your own biases, and the simple first step would be to join the activity of grassroots organisations like the BAMEed Network, WomenEd and LGBTEd.

We are all so conditioned to accept the white man in charge that we become immune to, or at least tolerant of, incompetence when it is plain to see. How many times have you waited for someone to step up, and then wondered why they are in charge when they are obviously completely under-skilled and overconfident? This short explanation shows just why incompetent men fail their way to the top and what we can do to stop being complicit in this.

We need to change the narrative about what a leader looks like. We need to change the narrative about what people in power look like. We need to change the narrative around who gets to be heard. We are peddling a narrative that “neutral” is white and male. Have you ever tried to buy a plaster? What colour are they? “Skin” colour? Whose? Back to those seat belts and space suits, the lack of plasters, make up, hair care products, lack of understanding by healthcare professionals and more…

We need to give opportunities for children to identify what they have in common and what is different, to look at different possibilities for identity and to identify with people who are the same and different. One way to do this is through the excellent resource produced by the Finnish organisation, Lyfta. You can see a short clip here that explains how this is used at Aureus School in Didcot, for example.

Politicise them. When do children learn about politics except if they do Politics A level or if we absolutely have to, for example when there’s a general election or we need to explain to them about Brexit (not that any of us know much about that except that it is an absolute ominshambles). Schools like The London Academy of Excellence in Tottenham oblige their students to spend a compulsory half day a week on social activism and community work as part of the curriculum.

Socialisation and stereotyping should be explained and unpacked for students at as early an age as possible, and should be revisited regularly.

Enquiry-led models of learning like the Finnish phenomenon-based learning, or the Canadian Spirals of Inquiry can help students to understand about making choices and taking informed risks.

When we speak to our students, what do they hear? When we include or exclude things in the curriculum, what does that communicate? When we talk about pupil voice and we talk about the curriculum, we need to understand how inherent bias works too. Bringing Black role models for Black children is important but it isn’t enough. Teaching all children about stereotyping and prejudice is one step, but it doesn’t take away the damage that is done by implicit bias i.e. what is communicated to people of colour, for example, in explicit and implicit ways throughout their lifetime. The Doll Test is a painful and real expression of how strongly these messages are heard and internalised by children from a very young age. You can watch it here

 

This is one of the many pictures from the newspapers on the children’s climate change march that happened recently. The condescending attitudes to children who went on strike and marched for climate change by the media, by some adults, and among them educators, was mind blowing and yet a true reflection of our disdain of young people and youth in general.

Compare ours with social attitudes to youth and childhood in Finland and you will see a country whose youth are consistently told that they are the next leaders, that the weight of responsibility to learn today what is needed to run the world of tomorrow lies with them.

In our system, education is about numbers and letters, not even whole sentences any more.

Try taking the questions I posed at the beginning and conduct a one-day exercise using them as an audit tool at school.

Check your own bias! Be honest about where your own starting point is and think about how you build your own curriculum of learning to get to a point where you can start to implement some changes, and for the right reasons. You might find the resources on the BAMEed Network website useful.

Think about recruitment practice in your school, especially to senior leadership positions and put in a plan of action to ensure that there is diverse representation at every level in your school.

Sign up to Lyfta and the British Council training for free.  You can find out more about that here

Join BAMEed, WomenEd, LGBTEd and take action. Develop your own voice on this, be heard and amplify the voices of others that need to be heard loud and clear.