This blog post is about something really important to me. Important because I have 4 sons ranging from 3-16, I work full time, and am hoping to become a secondary headteacher in the future.

Right now, I am writing this blog while son number 3 (aged 6) is at a bowling birthday party, and #4 (aged 3) is playing in soft play with his friends. Neither need me to be constantly supervising them, so I will pick up and put down this blog a paragraph at a time to check in on them. I have become accustomed to code switching but have never been able to effectively multitask. I can concentrate on only one thing at a time. Doing things in this way enables me to get quite a lot done but I don’t think I will ever be able to multitask so I have let that expectation go.

The tips in this blog are far from the finished article, I will never entirely have this right, and I always continue to work on my time management. I have had times in my career where I have found work load unbearable, and have often found that this comes from my own failure to have firm enough boundaries. This is due to my perfectionist, and slightly obsessive, nature. Self awareness is really useful. Know who you are, what drives you, and actually what in your head is the ideal balance you are looking for. For some people this is flexible working, and for others, it isn’t. If you want to be connected to people who are doing either really effectively then DM me and I will link you up with people who can help you.

In the last two years since writing a blog called ‘Having it All’, I have learned so much more and want to share this with others who may find it useful. I read and listen to audiobooks, I make use of coaching and my networks to draw out things from other peoples lives that can be practical in improving my own working practices, habits and priorities.

I came across a brilliant book recently called ‘Style and Substance’. It is by a fabulous woman called Helen Morrissey, who is a very successful business woman and mother to nine children. If you want to really know how to win at combining work and a family, then this is essential reading.

The expectations that other people have of you are also something you need to consider. Another really good book that helped reframe my thinking is a book called Unbound by Kasia Urbaniak. She empowers women to be able to say no to things; but also encourages readers to be very explicit about what they want and to be aware of ‘invisible labour’ in the home. This can be very overwhelming if you have more than your fair share of domestic husbandry and decision making. The book also discusses the fact that delegation in the work place can be a real privilege to both parts of a working relationship. I go back to the idea in that other blog I wrote that ‘having it all’ is not ‘doing it all’.

Below are a list of tips that I have put into practice and that work for me:

Emails, if you email a lot, then people will reply. This becomes very time consuming. Email less.

Read emails only once. When you read them, respond and don’t come back to them. If you don’t have time to respond then don’t read them until you can. Set aside specific time slots to read and action emails. I am still practicing to get better on this because if I see a red dot or hear a ping I find it very hard not to look. Removing notifications is helpful. A good time for me to do emails is in the afternoon or in the evening when my energy levels are low – but I will come back to this later.

Find your time to do hard thinking. For me this is first thing in the morning when I’m not likely to be disturbed. A hard task in the morning could take me 30 minutes then but over an hour if I did it in the afternoon or evening when my brain is frazzled.

Know when to do easy things – this links on to the previous ones. If I need to make requisitions for my lessons or fill out order forms for resources I will do this in the afternoon as they take little conscious effort.

Have boundaries- a start and end time to your day. Get into the habit of sticking to this.

Get good at prioritising. I write lists of the most important things I must action. Bullet journaling works for some but didn’t for me. Post it notes are my level!

Ensure that you effectively use support networks/ in every aspect of your life. This is give and take. Try to give as much as you can but be careful that relationships are balanced. People can get into the habit of taking advantage.

Read Ken Blanchards One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. It is an easy read but is a game changer. I had it recommended by my NPQH coach. DO NOT take on other peoples monkeys unless they actually are yours. I’m not going to explain any more because you definitely need to read this book. If you have no time to read it, make time as it will lead to you having way more time!

If you consider Edutwitter to be work, don’t do it. My husband considers me looking at it, writing blogs etc as work, I consider it a hobby. Decide for yourself. If it feels like work then give it a miss.

Proritise:

I don’t have time for myself ..… sometimes you have to be really strict with this one and make time. Often when people say this, I feel that they aren’t prioritising time for whatever it is. Molly-Mae Hague got an awful lot of stick for her comment about there being the same 24 hours in a day. In some senses I saw her point. When I feel like I don’t have any downtime I check my phone usage record. If it’s hours of emails then that is work, but if it’s my social media use, or audiobooks then this is my downtime. This downtime is essential but be realistic and honest about the fact you are getting it, and if you want to use the ‘you time’ in a different way then do it.

Habits:

In physics we know that overcoming inertia is hard and keeping going is easier. It’s the same with everything. Once something becomes a habit then it takes less effort to keep going. Recently I started running again. This is after a very long break. I have joined a running club on Monday evenings and have made sure my husband comes too (leaving my big children to look after the little ones). It is 45 minutes a week. For the first two weeks, I tried to back out at the last minute. Getting my husband to insist I remain committed to it makes it easier for me. I’m actually looking forward to going tomorrow. It is now a habit.

Time consuming things (that I did not enjoy as pampering) such as haircuts, brow dye, waxing, lash extensions and having gel nails, I have now alternate things in place so that spare time can be used for things I do enjoy. Obviously if these are things you enjoy, then do prioritise this ‘you’ time, but I don’t enjoy these things myself. I now do all of these things myself, with exception of the haircut but we have a hair dresser come to the house every 5 weeks or so to do everyone in one go.

Weekend and after school clubs. If you have children then the treadmill of swimming, ballet, judo, football or whatever can add another very time consuming dynamic to your week. Consider a balance that isn’t overwhelming. As a child I went to brownies once a week. I survived perfectly well on that. Don’t feel you need them to have a very full social life. It can sometimes be quite stressful for them and remember they need time to decompress too.

These are all things that have helped me. At present I feel that I have achieved a good balance. From time to time I accept that this will change so stay posted for future updates!

There is something currently fundamentally wrong with education in the UK at the moment. When did schools change from simply celebrating students successes in August and also start acknowledging themselves as ‘the best results in the county’ or shouting from the rooftops their Ofsted grading? When did this become so important? Why are schools competing against other schools? I mean I know why they do, but why did it become so important? We need an education system where all of the fish are swimming in the same direction and not racing each other.

Game theory has been around for a while, but in recent years Simon Sinek has talked and written about Finite and Infinite games in the business world. According to Simon, Infinite games are those where the objective is to stay in the game. Finite players the aim is to win.

He says the game is balanced if finite player are against finite players. This clip summarises the ideas from his book: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbYzF6Zy5tY

How this applies to education? Simon states we become more obsessed with the metric (exam results) than we are with the child. It’s an easy trap to fall into. They come in Y7 at a certain summative point from their primary education. This point maybe the true reflection of a well rounded broad start in their schooling, or can be the result of an exam focused Y6. You can tell the same story in the Y11/Y12 transition too.

Where did it go wrong? When did we start putting so much pressure at every transition of key stage to see if that phase was a success? It wasn’t when I was a child. I never was hot housed for an exam, I never knew what my grade was at that point or able to articulate how I could move up to the next grade. I just needed to know my next steps. The scale of my performance until I did my GCSEs didn’t matter and I felt no pressure from it. My two teenage sons felt the pressure of KS2 SATs, not from me, from their school. Extra boosters, ‘breakfast clubs’ in April and May…… In my opinion at the expense of a broader educational experience. 11 years being taught to the test is not a broad education. It’s not inspiring. The late Sir Ken Robinson was right in so many ways. Creativity is not prioritised, but that is a whole different blog and this piece of work is about the purpose of education, not the content.

By its very nature Education is an infinite game. It existed before we were born and will continue after our lives end. When people started to play education as a finite game, imbalance entered. Egos entered. The focus moved off the child and on to the results. This is wrong. This is what accountability has done to us, and I don’t think this was the aim of it. The purpose of watchdogs such as Ofsted is (and I may be being naively idealistic here) to improve education, but it has somehow become twisted into being the goal, the metric by which the success of leadership is measured. This is incorrect.

Who made Education a finite game? The Government? Ofsted? Leaders? This is a nuanced debate but it’s ultimately fairly irrelevant. We are where we are.

Simon states ‘schools have a corporate leadership model…..The headmaster is not responsible for the results, they are responsible for the people who are responsible for the curriculum and the people responsible for the children’. When leaders take care of the staff things change. I’ve heard very effective leaders talk about investing and developing staff. This is where sustainable improvement in schools comes from. The focus shifts to the longer term not shallow instant fixes.

Simon enforces that it cannot be forgotten that exam results still count; ‘There is nothing wrong with teaching children that they have to do well at school. Reality still exists.’ Of course they do, of course they should, for the child. For their life prospects.

Simon discusses the importance of having a worthy cause. With Education, we all fundamentally understand how deeply worthwhile the cause is. Not Ofsted ratings, not summative accountability measures. Your worthy cause should be the development of young people to be their absolute best versions of themselves, and to grow your staff be the same. This should be the aim of our education system across the country. This should be the same across the world.

The vast majority things I do are not for Ofsted, they are for children. Every leader in every school will tell you they aren’t doing things for Ofsted (whilst a large proportion completely doing the majority of things for Ofsted), I however, mean it. Not to say I won’t do some things for Ofsted (such as having a file with some easily interpreted snapshots of data to show the journey we are on) but I will acknowledge them as such. I don’t do what I believe that Ofsted want to see to influence what I do on a day to day basis I do what I think will improve the education of children- and believe me when I say I spend a lot of time thinking, reading and writing about it. This blog is where my writing began: https://mrsmsteachertalk.school.blog/2019/10/20/12/

I recently read that a schools primary function is to improve what happens in the classroom and that if leaders are doing anything that isn’t to this effect, then it is not a good use of their time. I think there is a lot to be said for this, it certainly is a worthy cause. Improving what happens in the class covers a whole lot, but it doesn’t cover everything, and some leaders could be seduced into believing this at the expense of their budgets. Being in the black is really important. How can you build a sustainable workforce and grow your staff if you can’t afford them? My point is that while it is an important focus, school leadership just is not that simple and that as a Senior Leader I do have understanding beyond my idealistic views.

How can we move towards being of an infinite mindset? I work in a certain type of school. It’s a demographic where I know my skill set adds value. My purpose, my infinite game is to improve social mobility for students in schools with high levels of disadvantage by giving them the tools to be successful in education. For me, in the schools I work in this has particularly been to improve literacy. Even more specifically, reading and vocabulary, to give students the skills to access the curriculum and stand the chance of a better life. This exposure to a wider world through reading will open the minds of students and make them see beyond their current life experiences. This works in the type of schools I work in but, as with everything in education, probably wouldn’t work everywhere. If students already read widely, have a broad wider knowledge of life and understanding of the world, then this focus adds very little. I have no experience of how to improve schools in such situations. I worked for 6 months in such a school, realised I could add nothing and so left. You need to decide for your school your ‘why’ and once you have done that, then look at your how.

I really identified with this article. https://www.tes.com/news/key-headship-find-your-happy-place. Throughout my career I see a lot of people (through my jobs, training and through connections on social media) leave working in education who perhaps are just working in the wrong type of setting. If you are struggling with your vision, or your worthy cause, consider whether you are in the right school.

Simply being in the right school does not answer the ‘how do we make education an infinite game?’ Though it would certainly help if our skill set progresses the vision of the school leaders in the places we work. Recruiting is a challenge. Being astute about the roles you apply for and leaders selecting who is right for the school is a bit like getting engaged on the first date. I would like to see school recruitment becoming a longer process. It’s probably not practical but when did practically become a limitation on holistic improvement of education? That was a bit tongue in cheek but change is necessary. The quote ‘if you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got’ is fairly accurate. Simon discusses the need for ‘existential flexibility’.

In education perhaps we should increase our capacity for existential flexibility – blow up what you’re doing in order to do what is right? We do see this in some aspects of education, the move from where we were with respect to pedagogy to where we are. Permission to do so because it’s ‘research informed’, even though to the vast majority it is just blatant common sense. Perhaps lessons learned from 2020 will provide us with a capacity for existential flexibility? For us, to close the disadvantage gap the need for existential flex is about closing the reading gap? Other areas of the sector I don’t have enough experience to comment but I know that change requires courage.

Courage is needed because everything right now forces us to fixate on the finite game, this year’s exams, the next Ofsted, to consider the short term over the long term.

When you apply game theory to education, you move away from the idea of winners or losers. You move towards the idea that the playing is more important. It removes the competition for this year’s performance measures, it changes the game to focus on maintaining the play. The net result will likely be your performance measures will improve. Why? Because you focus on what is really important, not what is for Ofsted but what children need to be successful in life, like the ability to be literate and numerate, you be healthy in their minds and bodies and to have values that make them good citizens. If all schools played this game, not just pretend to play this game then progress would be made.

Successful school leaders, I mean really successful, are those who keep the game in play. They are infinite players (but may not necessarily realise this to be the case). They might act as they do because of their values and intent to do ‘the right thing’. My Head is one of those. Willing to grow and develop staff, even at the risk they move on. Holding others to account, with the emphasis about doing what is right for students – this is ethical leadership, this is strengthening education in this country, as a whole, and not an individual part. This is playing an infinite game.

This is a sphere of influence beyond a single organisation. Whether it’s intentional or not, it works. I’ve written about this before. I’m not suggesting that you encourage all of your best staff to leave, but if you train them and take care of their ambitions, then the reality is that they will be more likely to be loyal and stay, but this should not be the reason for doing it. The purpose is to do what is right.

Finite players obsess about results, what they got. Success in schools like this rewards those whose goals are entirely focused on the metric. Careers being over after the 3rd Thursday in August. You’re only as good as your last set of results, irrelevant of the trajectory. This is not where we want education to be. It is my hope that we are moving beyond this.

If the judgment of a successful leader is merely the exam results, or the current Ofsted grading, then it’s no wonder that education hasn’t moved on as much as it could have. Remember performance measures are a zero sum game. You only move up when there are enough people moving down. This is wrong. I don’t have a better solution but at some point will spend time pondering about it.

In a zero sum game you cannot truly measure if education is improving as it solely relies on bell shaped curves and norm referencing. This results focus makes education a finite game. The Ofsted gradings that arise from these metrics make education a finite game and for schools on the downward slide, the results perhaps become more important than the individual children, and this pressure is entirely understandable.

With poor results and a poor grading it can be hard to recruit staff. When it’s hard to recruit enough staff it can be difficult to have specialist teachers in front of students. The spiral descends. The number of students decreases, budgets get squeezed. Schools with high levels of disadvantaged students need teachers who specialise in improving the outcomes for students in these schools. Teachers who focus on the endemic needs of the cohort and not the Y11 push. It has been widely discussed on #edutwitter over the years that working in schools like these can be career suicide, and I guess for some, this is correct. But there are teachers who, like the tes article suggests, are specialists at working in schools like these. The students in these schools deserve superb practitioners. These schools need to in some respects perhaps have to make up for a gap in parenting, that children from more affluent and well educated areas aren’t exposed to, I will discuss this a little more later.

I genuinely think that norm referencing and a system that is held in a zero sum game cannot truly measure progression in education and I feel it encourages playing a finite game. Ultimately assessment needs to be criterion based, but this so much harder to standardise and moderate which is why we don’t do it. In assessments students performance is judged relative to their peers. It has all the hallmarks of being a finite game. In an infinite game using a criterion approach, exceeding a threshold of a grade is only competing against yourself and achieving that score, you results wouldn’t be influenced by the number of people also getting that grade.

Year on year we look at the relative progress that is being made in education. I was trying to think of a good anecdote but the only one I can think of is this one. If several people jump out of an aeroplane they fall towards the ground (make progress towards the goal of landing). One opens their parachute early and their progress rapidly slows. That person is still moving towards the ground but relative to the others who are moving faster you can look like they are going backwards. That is to say in a zero sum game, all may be making progress based on their prior position but if that progress isn’t rapid their progress is reported in negative terms, even though they have done better than they had done so previously. The emphasis here is on rapid improvement and genuine improvement is not rapid. It is slower and sustained but we live in an education system that isn’t patient and measures progress in a way that encourages finite games.

Even over 10 years on, I still fundamentally disagree with the sly privatisation of education through the advent of academies but I am aware of some academy chains with a far more infinite mindset than some of the old LA approaches. I do however disagree with inadvertently forcing the hands of schools to compete for students. Smaller budgets and accountability has made this the situation we are in today.

My values have changed considerably in the last 10 years. The old me was interested in Ofsted gradings and in results being achieved rapidly. Shallow quick wins. I now have the stance that we are better than needing to do this, and if we are not yet there, then we should be aiming to be moving towards this as an ideal.

How does money spent promoting schools and advertising schools improve education? It doesn’t. When I was a child this didn’t happen. Maybe it started with the sports/arts/technology statuses that were used to attract students in the 00’s?? Tax payers money to encourage schools compete against each other under the guise of giving children and parents choices and specialist facilities. School funding is now the issue. The number of students = the revenue stream for the school. Schools need to promote their schools to get students in. Valuable time and money is spent doing this. This does not improve the quality of teaching but is a necessary evil because parents have become accustomed to having the choice of schools in their area. Schools need bums on seats and if you’re over subscribed then that is wonderful for you in lots of respects, but if you’re not then it’s a constant state of flux with making ends meet.

Schools recognise the pressure that filters from leadership down to individual staff. It’s why as a tag on we now try to incorporate ‘well being’. There is so much talk of staff well being – perhaps without any idea of what this is.

Well being isn’t ignoring the fact that some people don’t work the number of hours they are paid to do. Well being is not choosing not to quality assure staff – the most frustrated I have ever been in a post, was one when for several years I didn’t get properly observed, or get any feedback and no one looked at my books – it didn’t remove a source of stress, it made me feel like they didn’t care enough about my work to check it. I want to be better at my job, giving me an evaluation, feedback and training improves my well being.

Well being isn’t giving everyone time off on a specified occasion but not changing the expectations of the bureaucratic nonsense evidencing things you do to prove you are doing it (even worse when doing so for Ofsted). Well being is taking something off the ‘to do list’ when other stuff gets added on. Surely 2 reviews of a faculties data a year is sufficient. One a reflection and target setting at the start of the academic year and one half way through to discuss progress. Middle leaders can drown in this nonsense. SLT should empower them through conversations and standardise discussions on agendas as opposed to generating pointless paper work that goes unchecked. These professional conversations are far more valuable and supportive.

Well being is showing people how they can improve their practice, leading by example. Credibility is lost when people don’t do the things they expect you to do. Well being is recognising and appreciating the work people do. It’s not thanking everyone globally, it’s thanking individuals for specific things they’ve done. Well being is developing people and caring about their own individual ambitions and career hopes.

So back to game theory. Imagine if you have 2 options:

Option 1 – you could take a school with a P8 of -0.5 and top load the best teachers and purchase the best quality interventions for Y11 and after a year get to 0 would you do it? Bear in mind that this situation of needing to perpetually focus on Y11 will remain and may limit results moving up above a certain point because essentially you are only improving one year group at a time.

Option 2 – accept that for several (maybe 3 or 4 years) that you might not get 0 but that after this your P8 is steadily improving and consistently rising after that…. which would you choose? Playing the long game takes a huge amount of belief and patience. It also requires some valid affirmation to show that you are moving in the right direction even if summative outcomes don’t move much in the first instance. Most schools would not pick one option over the other but understandably try to do both.

I was asked in the summer how long until the impact of my work is seen. I answered it that ultimately it maybe years. The reality is that if I fix the problem I came to fix then it will take years, but it’s a permanent change, a permanent improvement and I won’t need to be there forever to keep it having an impact. I can go somewhere else and do the same there and thus the sphere of my influence widens. Schools may struggle to justify the wait. I understand this but we need to move the balance more off short term quick wins to permanent changes in culture.

It is also tempting to be drawn into the practices of schools who show very rapid improvement. Turnaround schools exist. I’ve seen it where schools that were generally coasting, with no great pressure to improve, get put in a category by Ofsted. This triggers a change of leadership, high accountability for staff, top load efforts at KS4, results go up, this perpetuates the need for the focus and pressure to stay at KS4 permanently. The ‘surgical’ senior leaders move on having ‘fixed’ the school. Teaching is weaker lower down so for the next few years results dip because of the top heavy emphasis, school get set in a vicious cycle of having to continue KS4 push.

What I like about the Greenshaw trust is their willingness to reach out and support others, even local ‘competitors’ – this trust is playing an infinite game. The work done by this trust has turned around the hardest school I ever worked in (16 years after I left there). Their generosity with their Covid resources and their sharing of CPD is the approach of an infinite game leadership philosophy (whether they are aware of it or not). I could list many many others from Edutwitter who do the same. There are definitely green shoots of infinite leadership in education, but we also need to recognise our jobs will become more challenging because our intakes are changing.

There is a big problem in society looming, a massive one. The smart phone generation. I’m not sure it relates to either parental income or education. It comes from a change in how children are parented. The result seems to be that children now know less about the world. Their interactions verbally and in writing are shallow and the majority of conversations are instructions – ‘brush your teeth’, ‘find your shoes’. The art of conversations is dying. The gap between students who receive engaged parenting and non engaged parenting (irrespective of social class, disadvantage etc.) is widening. Even if we steer our ‘why’ in Education towards the need to be infinite, we will then need to focus our ‘how’ and ‘what’ towards improving this new problem.

Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the challenges we faced in 2020?? Innovation can come from disruption. 2020 has been nothing but disruptive!! The move to existential flexibility may be possible in the fallout? Hopefully the silver lining of 2020 is that it provides us with the disruption needed to change the landscape of short term wins and focus on the long term improvement? Perhaps with COVID-19 there are useful take aways? The 2020 results did not get used in league tables. It will surely be impossible to use the results for 2021, 2025 and 2026 for the same reason? Maybe this will be the catalyst we need?

Use these breaks in accountability to do the right thing and move towards playing the infinite game. Use this time to evaluate what your students need to succeed? It’s time to focus on the old adage ‘look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves’. If your school does the right thing then, in time, results will follow. It’s not a quick win but it will lead to long term stability and will move education towards.

Be courageous enough to be patient. To change the culture in the school to improve the single biggest individual issues that really do hold back students. Everything else is nothing but ‘band aid leadership’, sticking a plaster over the issue. Be courageous enough to focus on what you need in the long term, and not what you want in the short term. I know my views are idealistic, naive and may lack realism. I know I don’t have all of the answers, but I want to ask questions that make people think. You may well have some of the answers, you might have the capability and capacity to do some of these things, to move away from being finite.

Let’s make the next decade in education about truly becoming an infinite game. How can you be a part of it?

As a runner, whenever you step up in distance or pace it takes a while to adjust. It’s hard work. Once your fitness improves, you physically and mentally move into this new comfort zone of higher performance.

As a first time parent, your first baby changes your life so considerably that you wonder how people ever have more than one. Then things get easier, you become accustomed to your new life and you become comfortable. Then you go back to work, or have another child, and life becomes more challenging once again.

There are certain elements of life that are able to be moderated so that any life changes can be incremental. Then there are aspects of life that are outside of your control. Much that has happened in 2020 fits into this box.

When we think of our idols, of the strongest people we know, their strength may come from their character or it may come from their life experiences. Having a tough and challenging life may ultimately lead to strength, but it is equally likely to make you feel weak and out of control as you endure the waves of hardship. These strong people you think of, are not always strong, do not always have their shit together, but their journey has provided them with adversity and the opportunity to gain strength and resilience. This only happens if the difficulty is within moderation of what that person can endure. Everyone has a breaking point, everyone.

The trick with strength is to reread my first two paragraphs. You see, you never have to be strong all of the time. You only need to be strong enough to get through this next bit. To get to the point where your baby sleeps through, to get to the point when you can run 5k in a given time, to get to the point of grief following the death of a loved one that allows you to function, to get to wherever from that point of difficulty that things get easier.

Christalla Jamil has this pinned to her Twitter feed:

This totally resonates with me. 2020 has been an extremely challenging year for everyone. We have all had our wobbles because so much of what is happening around us is outside of our control. Take a moment to think where we now are. On the verge of another lockdown?? Think back to where we were in March and how fearful that prospect was and how much strength and resilience we have gained. School leaders all over the country have been hit with wave after wave of change. It is no wonder that we are so mentally and physically exhausted. Part of this tiredness comes from not knowing when it will end, when normal life will resume, and this makes my ‘only needing to be strong for short periods of time as we adjust’ a bit of a fallacy. Or at least as it may appear.

I don’t have a solution for this, but my advice is perhaps just take small steps, gain strength from the collective networks you have so that you know that you are not alone on this journey, and take a moment every so often to look back and see how far you have come. Let’s hope that as we move into 2021, life will become easier and we will all have grown in strength as part of the journey.

This is a short reflective blog on why standing together is important:

One year ago today I received this message:

For the previous year I had been helping another lady who was doing a PhD on women leading in education. I had been a case study, and had volunteered to do a series of hour long interviews over a period of a year. I had/have never met the researcher. I volunteer for things that I would want other people to volunteer for if I was in their shoes. What I mean is, if I was doing a PhD, then I would like people to give their time to help me, so I did. I volunteer to do lots of things on this basis; my involvement in #WomenEd, the #MTPTproject etc. I always thought I was doing it altruistically, but I have found that I have benefited from my involvement in these organisations in ways beyond my hopes and in totally unexpected ways.

2016-2019 were very difficult years for me professionally. I had 2 very young children (plus 2 secondary aged) and was a classroom teacher trying to move back into school leadership. On reflection now, if I could go back in time, I would tell myself to keep believing and keep working towards that goal, but by 2019 I had been so lost in limbo land that I had reached the end of the line.

Over the summer holidays I had spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how I could move and survive outside of teaching. I had spoken to a couple of people about how to get into writing educational resources and had various other thoughts on what I could do. In September 2019 I had spoken to a trusted colleague at work and had told him that I was at this point. I wanted advice, but he made me realise that only I could decide what happened next. He suggested I seek independent coaching. I then did my last interview for the PhD research.

The last question was about where I saw myself in 5 years. I didn’t know, I had no idea, probably not in education. I said so. It was not the answer that I expected to say, or that the researcher had expected to hear because I am normally a very ambitious and driven person, but I was lost. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, I had been lost for too long, and had been frustrated on a daily basis, and had found this exhausting. Well meaning advice about how to get back to middle leadership first only served to add to my frustration and disappointment. I was now years behind my life plans, with extra years now being added in front of me, and I just wasn’t sure if it was what I wanted.

I woke up a couple of days later with this message in my email inbox. I was glad that I had helped the researcher, but hadn’t considered the help it would be to me. I clicked the link to Jill Berry’s https://jillberry102.blog/2019/10/08/get-the-job-you-dream-of/ and from this point, slowly, things started to change.

I started to realise that opportunities for career advancement was largely luck dependent. I have always taken rejection very personally. If I haven’t been appointed I am very critical on my self that it is because I’m not good enough. Jill Berry’s work has made me see this entirely differently. Months later I blogged on this https://mrsmsteachertalk.school.blog/2020/06/06/knowing-when-its-time-to-move-on-and-the-reality-of-making-it-happen/

When I started to accept this idea, in October 2019, I then wrote my first educational blog. This blog was a game changer, as well as being viewed by 1000’s of people it then contributed to the #WomenEd ‘pledge for change 20’ blogs published on the #WomenEd website. https://mrsmsteachertalk.school.blog/2019/10/20/12/

The comments I had as feedback for this blog started to change how I was feeling about my career. I realised I had a voice. The #10%braver push by #WomenEd helped. I could have just accepted my quiet exit from education, but I realised I had nothing to lose by giving it one last try. So I did.

A combination of stubborn pigheadedness and a dose of arrogance that I could do the job, made me apply for an AHT post. It has been a constant source of great annoyance to me that over the years people had been judging me (and some case overtly telling me) that being pregnant, or having a few week old baby, or having 4 children meant it was not the right time for me to be considering progressing my career. My involvement with #MTPTproject helped me to realise this. This is where unconscious bias enters. My husband has never had this, so why should I? Having children impacts no more on my ability to do the job as is does his. Again though, my help to members of the #MTPTproject helped me more than I had considered ever possible. On applying for the job (I subsequently got) I was able to callout ridiculous comments by ‘well meaning’ people that might otherwise have sidelined my ambition. It is a challenge having two school senior leaders with 4 children (especially if you have a crazy toddler like our youngest) in the same house, but it’s absolutely a workable possibility if it’s what you want.

By luck, and I assure you, it was luck, I got a job as an Assistant Headteacher in January 2020. I am grateful for this because it must have taken a leap of faith for my school to appoint someone who wasn’t even a middle leader to a senior leadership post. I didn’t have much right sitting in that group of people on interview that day, and as the candidates went around all stating their names and current roles, I could see that they seriously outclassed me (and there were about 8 or 9 of them). I had a sinking feeling that I was wasting my time, but I was grateful for having been given the chance to interview because I knew that colleagues at my school had not expected me to get that far. I know this because some of them even told me!! My former Head, before my second AHT interview (which I ultimately didn’t get) told me that she was surprised I got an interview, but she assumed I must have written ‘a really good letter’ to get my foot in the door! WHEN (not if) I am a Headteacher, I pledge that I will never do this to any staff in my team. It was really no wonder that I came so close to leaving education with the cumulative effect of these micro aggressions.

So right now, one year on, I am sitting here in a role I never expected to get, with ambitions I never thought would be possible, all thanks to the support of networks and people that I thought I was helping. It wasn’t what I expected, thought, hoped to get out, but it is a lovely side effect, and thus I extend my gratitude to them all. I thoroughly advocate that you participate in networks to give and get support, and will leave this here as a reminder to you all that you CAN achieve your goals:

I’ve been reflecting on a few Twitter conversations about the timing of when people know that they’re ready to start applying for Senior Leadership roles. Having recently ‘made the leap’ myself I just want to share some of my thoughts on the subject:

Firstly, I would stress that there is a distinct difference between being or feeling ready, and being able to secure a leadership post. A huge amount of luck is required to actually achieve that promotion, and frustratingly, you have absolutely no control over a really large part of this process.

The bits you can influence: So you think you can do the job? This bit you can largely affect. Knowing what you are good at, what interests you and what you need to do to develop your knowledge, experience and skills. If you are in a good school whom care about staff development, then they will provide opportunities for you to build elements of your practice so that you can have a broad base from which to move on.

Be honest with your line managers / Senior Leadership team about your ambitions, and then plan with them how you can move forward. They may offer opportunities to shadow SLT or gain a short term ‘Associate SLT’ role. I was really fortunate to be on an Extended SLT for 2 years, and while this was a very long time ago, it has been the most relevant experience that I had now that I am an AHT. Being involved in SLT meetings and genuinely being a part of school development at that this level is excellent CPD. As a school I would suggest you provide such experiences, it demonstrates genuine investment in people for very little / no financial cost.

My advice to those who don’t get the professional development (or CPD that they feel is adequate), then I suggest that you are proactive about doing (perhaps evening self funding) your own CPD in your own time. It is a fantastic way to demonstrate to potential new employers that you are serious about your own professional development.

Some schools are afraid that this will result in them losing good staff members and only offer CPD up to the middle leadership opportunities that they can provide within their school. If you are at the start of your career (or even being appointed as a middle leader) AND you are ambitious, then ask the school about how many of their staff get supported and promoted beyond middle leadership. If you are ambitious and you go to a school that doesn’t provide this training then these will be the most frustrating years of your career. Schools that value loyalty over staff development and growing talent will never achieve the strongest staff force that is possible.

The great majority of schools are proud of the people they grow. John Tomsett quoted on a recent Naylors Natters podcast that ‘the best measure of leadership is the leadership you inspire in others’. In the podcast John discussed the 9 box model. This is a grid with 9 boxes built around the x axis of increasing leadership capacity and on the y-axis performance (teaching ability). He described that in the top right are the staff whom are a flight risk. He talked about schools deciding if you want to / or are in a position to keep them, or if there is nothing more you can offer them, then the right thing to do is helping them to move on to a promotion.

Ultimately a good school with genuinely ethical leadership will grow the talent that lies within it. This is the right thing to do – without exception. If school leaders genuinely think that it is too soon for someone to be thinking of promotion, then work together to lay out a professional development road map that will enable the member of staff to get there.

Stay and wait or looking elsewhere? Sometimes opportunities come up within your own school and this is a really nice way to be promoted. It means the school believes in you and believes that you are right for a particular role. Having been fortunate on a few occasions for internal promotion there are some distinct benefits; it’s relatively low risk, you will be well supported with respective to training and you don’t need to go through the upheaval of changing schools.

The downside is that, in some respects, it can be easier to make a mark in a new school where staff have no preconceived ideas about you.

Applying for jobs (internally and externally) can be a really stressful and draining process. You can spend a considerable amount of time and effort with no reward. You can come away feeling much worse than you did before you applied. School recruitment is a bizarre process. Before COVID-19, you would spend the day WITH those whom you are ‘competing’ against for the role. Typically there is always one or two large characters who try to intimidate their competitors throughout the day – you know the type. You are all sitting their sizing each other up, ‘falsely’ (lets be honest) wishing each other luck! In a way I hope that the recruitment process this summer can teach us about a better approach in the future.

The stuff you can’t control, the luck factor:

– Luck that the right type of school, in an area you are happy to work in has a post at the right time. How many times have people been appointed for a role only to find that a school that is a better match is then looking for a post that is more suitable?

– Luck that your letter and references impress the shortlisting panel (arguably this one is not just luck).

– Luck that you perform well on the day.

– Luck that your values and skill set are aligned with the school and role you are interviewing for.

– Luck that you are ‘better’ than the other candidates on the day, and that the panel agree this is the case.

– Luck that those wider elements of recruitment (not just your skills, but perhaps a bias to your subject to strengthen a particular area of the school, or your personality traits) are needed at that school.

There is a temptation to apply for anything and everything, particularly when your self esteem is low because you become a bit desperate to secure a post as you believe it’s the only way that you will ‘feel’ better. The downside of this is that it opens up a vast range of posts that aren’t really ideal and because they aren’t right you are less likely to be suitable candidate and more likely to get into that negative spiral of rejection and feeling worse about yourself. I would suggest a more healthy approach would be that, instead of saying ‘this academic year I want to get an SLT post’, to say ‘in the next 3 years I want to gain the correct knowledge, skills and experience that I would make a strong candidate if a suitable post comes up and I apply for it’.

Sam Strickland talks about being self aware in his book, you need to understand yourself. This is important because you need to be aware of who you are so that you can apply for roles that really suit you.

If I have learned anything, it is that it pays to be really picky. I’ve worked at a couple of schools that really didn’t suit me and spent a large proportion of time living with the consequences of not really feeling like I fit in.

Do yourself research about the school. Visit if you can – in fact I suggest this is very important. There is no harm in walking away from a visit and not applying. The schools I was appointed at that I didn’t really like were the ones I hadn’t visited first. The visit is a fact finding mission, not an interview – but their impressions of you WILL count. Read everything there is to read, website, letters, newsletters, Ofsted reports….

Dealing with rejection. Most people at some point are unsuccessful, may it be at the letter of application or the interview stage. In her book ‘Making the Leap’ Jill Berry talks about being unsuccessful. She says that it doesn’t mean you couldn’t have the job- just you weren’t the best fit on the day and that a leadership team needs to have personalities that compliment one another. I know of some teachers who have cruised through their careers and have got every job they have ever applied for. Chances are they are rather good at their jobs, but also it is very likely that they have also been really lucky, and that means that they might not be the best person to advise you on preparing you to apply for or interview for a new post. They are unfamiliar with the abject disappointment of rejection and therefore will potentially be of little support if you are unsuccessful.

Some schools are excellent at providing good feedback for both successful and unsuccessful candidates, however some aren’t. Listen carefully to the feedback but if you feel that it is not constructive and helpful for the next role you apply for, simply move on. I have found that the best advice and coaching comes from people outside of my life and work. Perhaps a former colleague or line manager or someone who is an experienced coach can advise you. For me, the confidence I needed largely came from my #WomenEd and #MTPTproject network.

It’s really hard to judge whether you have made good or bad decisions at the time. It genuinely takes a lot of courage to go through the process of changing jobs. As I reflect on my first term in a SLT post in the midst of lockdown, I am increasingly confident that I made the right choice to move onwards and upwards. I have learnt so much in an incredibly short period of time and am coached / mentored very effectively on my way through this.

Finally, if you think that you are nearing the point of being ready to ‘make the leap’ then use this time during school closure / partial closure to really plan out how over the next year or so that you are going to look to move your career forward. What CPD could you be doing right now? Volunteer to take on extra responsibility and in the spirit of the #WomenEd be #10percentbraver.

2020 has been a really tough year so far. Tragically many people have lost their lives. Many people have lost loved ones. Not a single person is living their normal life, and we are not anywhere near to seeing any light at the end of the tunnel. A scary time, a time when mental health issues may be exacerbated, a time where fragile relationships may become more fragmented. A time when a hug from a good friend or parent is not going to be possible.

Suppose you had been waiting for something, hoping for the new decade to be ‘your time’. Imagine you had suffered for several years, unable to do something that you had spent your childhood dreaming of, and assuming, would just happen. Imagine if all of those questions from well meaning people about ‘the patter of tiny feet’ had been something that you had been obsessing about for more years than you care to admit. Imagine if your name had come to the top of the list and you had finally been given your appointment with a fertility specialist. Imagine if, just at that moment, the country went into lockdown, and imagine the devastation of having to wait even longer.

You only have to look at social media during spring 2020 and it’s littered with jokey posts about the quarantine baby boom and posts about how many ‘first babies’ will be made in lockdown etc etc. Imagine if every one of those broke your heart in two.

As IVF advocate for the #MTPTproject, I regularly have people DM me and talk with me about their fertility journey. I’m not a doctor, I’m not an expert, but I am a survivor of difficult fertility journey which I will give you an insight into a little later.

I really feel for the people who have had their treatment postponed during COVID-19. I have heard that whilst egg collections are still happening, that fresh transfers are not. That embryos are being frozen for a time when it is safer and when there is less uncertainty. For anyone on a fertility journey, uncertainty is a given, you become a master of uncertainty.

I have to clarify, this blog is not about me, but it is to offer a little support for those who are currently in the situation that I have just described. I will however share with you my story and in doing so I hope that it helps others.

My name is Nicola, and I’m an over sharer. It is something I have used as a coping mechanism but I know that most people aren’t like me. For a great many people, infertility is a painful and private journey. I’m not sure whether talking about it is better, or if being private is preferable, but it is really important to remember that you do whatever is right for you. If you decide to talk about it, then the downside is that people will constantly ask questions and this can be extremely painful at times of disappointment (my advice is pick well who you chose to tell). If you decide not to talk about it, then be aware that there will be times that you need a bit of space and emotional support, that you might not get because they are not aware what you are going through.

My fertility journey started in early 2012. I was a divorced mother of two boys (aged 4 and 6) living with a new partner. I had fallen pregnant in January 2012 whilst on the pill, in-spite of this we were over the moon. My partner (now husband) had no children of his own. We decided not to tell anyone. One morning I started to bleed. I was obviously worried but went to school because I didn’t really know what else to do. That evening I took another test and the line was fainter than it had been before. As I lost the pregnancy I continued to take tests, watching the line get fainter day by day. I didn’t process the loss. We didn’t tell anyone and I didn’t take time off work. We decided to try for another baby but my cycle didn’t return….. at all. About 9 months later I saw my doctor and was prescribed provera. This drug changed my personality. In addition to significant weight gain, it made me very angry and emotional.

I was diagnosed as having PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) and then started a horrific year of using provera and clomid. This combination was really hard. The change in personality, living life in two week chunks, the hundreds of ovulation tests, the hundreds of pregnancy tests (this is not an exaggeration I bought packs of 100 from eBay). I would use them daily. I would do them very early in the morning, during the day and in the evening. I would use a filter on the phone to convert photos of the sticks into negatives to see if there were lines. There weren’t, it never happened.

I had not had any problems with fertility in my 20’s. I unknowingly had PCOS but it hadn’t affected me when I was young. My diagnosis was secondary infertility linked to PCOS. I knew I was lucky to already have two children, and at times felt guilty about wanting more, but also desperately wanted to have a baby with my new husband.

Over the next year life got considerably harder. I got a job in a new school in September 2013. We broke up from the school we worked at together at the end of July 2013. The following Monday my mother in law died suddenly. My own mother was undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer and by Christmas 2013 we knew she was not going to survive either. In the November 2013 I had an operation to burn the cysts off my ovaries (ovarian drilling), and just after my mum died in March 2014, we were sent our appointment to start IVF. I missed my mum and having her support.

It probably hadn’t been a good time to move jobs but the funny thing about infertility is that you really don’t know if you are ever going to get pregnant so I took the view that I would carry on with my career assuming that I wouldn’t conceive, while desperately hoping that I would.

It’s a really hard decision whether to tell your employers that you are undergoing fertility treatment. People don’t tell their employers when they are trying to conceive naturally, and statistically someone undergoing fertility treatment is less likely to get pregnant. Some employers are very supportive, but others aren’t. I wished that someone understood what I was going through. I felt isolated and desperate. I have heard of lots of examples where this has been exacerbated by insensitive comments/ treatment by employers. I have also had senior leaders contact me to find out more about how to support staff undergoing treatment and this is fantastic, I actively encourage this be happen.

It fell that my egg collection and transfer coincided with May half term so I didn’t have any days off school. I had a few later starts for 8.30am scans but it impacted very little on my work which was just as well because around that time we had an Ofsted monitoring visit and then a full section 5 inspection.

Interestingly, stress is a factor with infertility and in the 18 months leading up to having IVF I went through five section 8 Ofsted inspections and one section 5 (across two schools). I also moved house, my divorce went through, lost my mum and my partners mum, all whilst on a cocktail of medication that made me neurotic and yet, I guarantee that none of this showed in my work. While happy to talk about the mechanics of my fertility journey, I hid how I felt. I hid the cyclical waves of optimism, followed by crushing disappointment. I really did live my life two weeks at a time. They say life is what is happening whilst you are planning something else and it’s true, I lost 3 years of my life where I constantly lived in the future, planning for the future.

We were really lucky that our first round of IVF was a success. Our son was born the following January. We had only planned to have one baby and we had finally achieved that. I had two spare frozen embryos that I had planned to give away. We then found out I was too old (by 5 weeks) at conception to have this option – so they stayed frozen.

After 2 years of paying for the embryos to remain frozen we decided to implant both on a natural cycle. I had got to the point of being quite adverse to the thought of defrosting them and knew they would be destroyed if they were used for research. We wanted to give them a chance of life.

Again I didn’t need any time off work because the clinic was able to do the transfer on a weekend. Two weeks later I had a positive pregnancy test. On the last day of term I went for a scan and found out that both had implanted. As it was a 6 week scan it was very early but the one had a little flickering heart beat. The other didn’t but it could have just been a bit early. Sadly, the 9, 12 and 16 week scans showed that that little one didn’t make it and eventually was gone by the 20 week scan.

My fourth (and final) son was born February 2018. I know I was lucky. Lots of people aren’t. Many people carry on with heartbreak, the physical and mental drain of multiple rounds. Many people accumulate considerable debt, and for many relationships this can all be an enormous strain. For me the years preceding the IVF were hardest. The daily injections during IVF were much easier than the provera and clomid cocktail I had experienced prior to this. During IVF my care was in the hands of experts.

If you are a school leader then having compassion beats knowledge of fertility treatments, but having an understanding of the processes within different treatments would make put you in a better position to be compassionate.

If you are aware of an employee going through fertility treatment then understand that it is an incredibly difficult and painful process that people deal with in different ways. Be respectful but compassionate, and be willing to listen. There is help out there if you want to know how to support them*. Everyone’s journey is different, some struggle throughout and will need a lot of support, some will be very private and chose not to discuss it, some will want you to understand the process. Ask them how they want to be supported.

So that was my journey. For any of you currently in the midst of this, my best wishes are with you and my DMs are always open. If you are going through fertility treatments then I would recommend you join forums on Facebook or elsewhere. Sharing your journey with a group of strangers can be daunting but if nothing else, you can lurk and gain solace in knowing you are not alone. You are not alone.

* Through the #MTPTproject we want employers to become more aware of fertility treatments and how to support staff. A large number of the teaching profession are affected by infertility. Please contact us if this is something you would like to know more about.

IVF Policies

This wasn’t really intended to be a serious blog, but today I am harbouring a subtle sense of melancholy when I write this. I apologise if this comes across.

Having, for whatever reason (or in reality a combination of many reasons), been 5 years late in completing my 5 year plan set back in 2010, I now move to a Senior Leadership post in the midst of the greatest global disaster of our time.

I am currently trying to manage the lead in time as I’m due to start after Easter. When I was offered the post back in January, I had imagined a smooth and event free move to my new school- that is in as much as this kind of upheaval can be smooth and event free. I am genuinely so excited to start. If you are forced to take 5 years longer than intended in achieving a life goal, you can be forgiven for starting to doubt it will ever happen, and that was where I had got to. I had thought 2010-2020 had been a really challenging decade. By the end of January 2020 I was floating on air, this decade was different, better……but then corona hit.

Like watching the start of some sort of disaster movie, our life now, here, today on 29th March 2020 is so very different to that that I had ever imagined. I had envisaged the next week of my life being in my current school, finishing up with Year 11, sorting my Lit Co and teaching group handover, saying goodbye to my adorable (if a little noisy) form group… but this wasn’t to be. I am leaving a school that I went to back in 2013 without even a collective goodbye, and while this makes me a little sad, I know so many people have, and will be, losing so much more.

Six months ago if you had told me that our daily conversations would be about ‘social distancing’, ‘flattening curves’. If you had told me that the ExCel Centre in London was being converted into a 4000 bed emergency hospital or that people were dying of a global pandemic in their 1000’s, then 2020 is not a place that I would have wanted to go.

In 1997 Baz Luhrmann released a track called ‘everbody’s free to wear sunscreen’, as well as being right about appreciating the beauty of your youth (and not being as fat as you think you are), he also talked about worry. We all have had many sleepless nights worrying about things that never happened. On the track Baz talked about the real troubles in your life not being things that you would imagine, that they are the things that blindside you at 4pm on an idle Tuesday. Well today is our idle Tuesday. No one expected this situation, it is…… ‘unprecedented’.

Edutwitter is one of my favourite ways to waste time. It’s obviously never actually a waste of time. If you want a thousand different perspectives on a situation, then post on Twitter and ask people for their opinions. I find myself strongly agreeing with exceptionally well reasoned, polar opposite views. Sometimes we forget on Twitter how context is key with people’s views and opinions. As a comparison; what is right for my two year old son, in practice is not what’s right for my son in Year 10, but my values and desires in wanting the best for them are the same. So if your school is really successfully achieving live teaching and a tight routine at this time, or if your school understands that your students are best focusing on managing mental health by encouraging family time – or anywhere in the middle, then that’s ok. Don’t argue about it. Don’t share an email written by a stressed teacher just hoping that their students don’t fall behind. The reality is that right now there is NO best way. In a few years we might be better able to make a call on what ‘should’ have been the right way, but not now.

Everyone wants the best in this the most dire of situations. In my own family my eldest two sons have really coped well with their mornings of directed study and the contact they have still had with their teachers and peers. With my reception aged son we have had no choice but just to do what we can, punctuating his day with bits of work, screen time and outside time. He may get a bit behind, it can’t be helped.

I try to be respectful of other people’s views but at this time have found myself actively disagreeing with people on social media. Parents at my sons school being critical of teachers being 5 minutes late to register their online class. Who’s to say they don’t have a toddler at home who needed a nappy change, who’s to say the teacher isn’t ill, who’s to say a million other things…… please don’t get at teachers. We are doing our best at a time, and I will repeat myself here, we DO NOT know what is best. One thing is for sure, it’s a marathon not a sprint.

Some of us need to keep our minds busy, to remain occupied, others need some down time to concentrate on their own coping mechanisms. I imagine that some teachers will lose their lives trying to support children of key workers. This is our reality. We don’t have many options. A rota of any sorts makes it essential for us to put our lives and the lives of our families at risk, this is a sobering thought. I have not left the house in nearly a week. Wednesday is my turn on the rota, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about going in. Who knows what is best here?? There probably is a best way, but different best ways depending on who you are. We are making a collective sacrifice to keep the vital cogs turning. Everything has been stripped back to necessity.

So this blog has turned into a COVID-19 blog more than a making the leap blog. I’m afraid that is because in making this leap the corona virus has totally changed the landscape in which I exist. After Easter my husband becomes a joint Acting Headteacher at his school (in addition to me moving school). As a family unit when you try and plan ahead it is always best to deal with small incremental steps well spread out. It probably isn’t advisable to have 2 significant role changes in the middle of a global pandemic but it is where we are. As long as we are healthy I have every confidence that we will do ok. If we are not healthy we will have to accept that things might not be ok but we are not alone in this.

I am currently healthy so I am trying my best to work ahead in my new role, just in case I become ill. I have made lots of phone calls to my new colleagues and have more planned for tomorrow. I am trying to plan to put in place an infrastructure in a school context I am not fully familiar with and so am reliant on the expertise of those who are. These are only things that are reactive to the current situation, but the focus I suppose is damage limitation, with a sprinkling of foresight – keeping an eye on how this might all play out. All while being mindful that there is no best way…

Our absolute priority is trying to keep people safe and if whatever we do each day does something to achieve this (even if it is by doing nothing), then this might be the best way?? Please stay safe and be kind.

I was reading through Twitter posts the other day about the possibility of holding down a full time teaching (or even leadership) post and winning at the parenting thing. It got me thinking about the sentence ‘having it all’ – as if managing to do both brings some sort of glorified sense of satisfaction that you can get from having a career and having a bunch of mini me’s running around……. and maybe there is. But on an entirely practical level, the reality is that the sentence is slightly cut short. The sentence should say ‘having to do it all’ and sadly that isn’t as glamorous, but is much closer to the truth. And yes, while working you aren’t parenting. There are some elements where you aren’t doing it all, but you certainly need to be in charge of organising it all and micromanaging each day so that the wheels don’t fall off.

So this leads me on to how to do this. At some point you kind of need to expect that you, at times, perhaps won’t do either roles well. For a perfectionist this might be a step too far, and for someone who desperately wants to saviour every second of your little ones existence, this may perhaps be emotionally too much of a compromise on what you are prepared to accept- and that is fine.

We all entered teaching for different reasons (mine, genuinely – when I started nearly 20 years ago, was for the money and good holidays – this isn’t now the reason that I have stayed in the profession, suffice to say I fortunately have grown up and now have a far more altruistic purpose). If really lucky (she says after having several years fertility treatment) you become a parent, this brings with it an absolute minefield of unrealistic expectations, ideals etc etc. One thing is for sure, parenting is not what you were expecting. There are massive highs and massive lows. There is a reality that your life is no longer the same, as all of a sudden, you have these little creatures that you would literally die for. But, doesn’t mean that you should give up your life for. Make this distinction. On any day, I would ‘take a bullet’ or ‘jump in front of a bus’ to protect my child from harm. My love for them is that strong and I fortunately, have not had to do that, but no question, I would. I wouldn’t however, give up my life for them. In my (nearly fifteen year) journey of having my four sons, my views opinions and perspective on this have changed massively, so please bear with me if you at a different stage of this path (or on an entirely different path – I have the utmost respect for people who chose to parent full time over work – I hate the term SAHM it degrades how hard that role is, but some of you people totally rock this, and are the most engaged parents – that I could never be). Truthfully if I didn’t work, then I would actually be a worse parent than I already am. I know this because I really struggled with my maternity leaves. Part of the problem, was my initial total underestimation of how my life would change when I became a parent. At that stage of my life I couldn’t afford more than 4 months maternity leave and that probably worked out well. I’m the kind of person who likes the tight routine that the working week provides. But at home, I have no capacity or drive to have the same level of routine and so felt completely out at sea. I go into full on slob mode, would struggle to tell you what day of the week it is or how many days since I last washed my hair. I envied those yummy mummies who looked amazing and spent their days ‘making memories’, whilst I waited at home, clock watching, punctuated by back to back TV rubbish; homes under the hammer, this morning, loose women and an afternoon waiting for it to be someone else’s turn to look after my precious little person. I’m just not very good at it, and haven’t really got a huge amount better. My youngest son is only one and the difference now for his life experience, is that he gets dragged along to all sorts of different things, not for his own benefit but because our full on life style (that involves us working full time, having to navigate the extra curricular activities of two teenage sons, having a small holding with horses, sheep, pigs, a dog and a cow) his experience is richer but it isn’t entirely by design.

I love working, I love everything about having my life divided into these totally separate parts. I love my family time with our children, but there is the day to day monotony of the husbandry of sorting PE kits, training schedules, cleaning, replacing toilet rolls and washing (oh my god the washing – don’t judge, well actually judge all you like, my major life hack is that everything that is washed, goes in the drier – irrespective of the time of year, I am an environmentally bad person in this respect and I cope with this by remembering the fact that I have approximately 1000 Christmas trees in my field to offset my carbon footprint- but understand this is probably both naive and misjudged). However it saves us an absolute tonne of time. Furthermore, I actually have two washing machines and two driers!!! In your quest to ‘have it all’ you are going to need to be prepared to cut some corners. There is a possibility that your children don’t need to be washed everyday (shock horror), and I retract this statement to say that some of my children definitely need to be washed every day – but as a teenager he can do that himself. Bedtime routines can be notoriously time consuming. If it’s a choice between a daily bath and a daily book, pick the book. I grew up as a child in the 80’s. I had a weekly bath (how disgusting does this sound??), but I survived, and here I am saying that your children possibly don’t need to be washed everyday either. There are times an emergency bath is a must. My youngest two are prolific (for no reason whatsoever) vomiters. At this point we operate ‘the emergency bath and bedding change’ protocol. My husband does the bed (I am rubbish with sick) and I deal with the child.

Batch cook, have a ‘weekly menu’, we do. It might be boring but makes shopping much easier (even though grocery shopping is on my husbands list). Our eldest two cook 3 nights in the week. This helps.

We also have this unwritten child line management structure. In our working memories, along with our things we remember for work, there would be no capacity for both of us to remember everything for all 4 children. Neither is it necessary. My husband line manages my 3rd son – he is 5 and is a bit like the NQT of our brood. When picking up him from after school club any important messages about things happening with him get passed to my husband- he deals with them. He sorts attendance at all birthday parties, things required for school, school clothes, lunch box the lot.

We have the two teenagers. These are our middle leaders. They are actually helpful (cooking, looking after the little ones), but need some sort of guidance and physically need taking places. My role is that I remember the stuff for them. I sort logistics of lifts to training and manage their calendars (all of our family events are on our phones and the 4 of us can view them at any point). My husband line manages me line managing them because I’m sometimes a bit too soft!! This brings us to the youngest one, the ‘wild one’, and my god he’s wild. We tag team on him. I currently have ‘remembering the stuff’ for him on my list but we share actual care of him. This is essential because he is utterly bonkers. He’s about to turn 2 and he can turn the house upside down in seconds!! I’ve even said, that if he had been my first then he would have been an only child! So decide in your family who does what. You probably already do this – but make sure that it is fair.

You need to outsource to others things that you just don’t have time to do. Cleaners, gardeners or whatever you need. You also need to be totally confident that your options of childcare are as good as, if not better, than your ability to parent. This is easy for me because I would probably be RI if my parenting was rated by Ofsted!! I have been really fortunate that my children have had some amazing carers, who have absolutely adored them. These amazing people reduce the ‘mummy guilt’. I still get this. When I miss important things such as school sports days, plays etc.

I wrote this blog back in the autumn. I was at an all time low.

https://mrsaverageblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/when-you-are-a-perfectionist-but-are-so-far-from-perfect-that-you-feel-like-you-are-failing-constantly/

This blog is not my educational blog but on my equestrian blog site (as I mentioned I live my life in separate parts). Last autumn I mentally went on a journey to decide how my career was going to play out. After several years of feeling trapped, I knew I needed to change something – but didn’t know how, what, or when. I had to strip back to the barest of bones what I wanted, who I was and what I needed to do in order to become the person that I believed I could be. You will find that there are times that you equally struggle with the juxtaposition of being hugely ambitious, but also a good parent. Furthermore, I actually think this is important because it helps to lay out the boundaries of what you are prepared to accept. When you know your boundaries then it’s easy to operate within them. As I moved through the autumn, in this deep period of reflection I woke up one Sunday morning at 6am and in 3 hours of typing on my phone I wrote the (approximately 3000 word) blog that, has since, become my gateway to much greater things. It was an entirely cathartic experience but I’ve shared it, and I know that others have benefited because I have been inundated with messages telling me so:

https://mrsmsteachertalk.school.blog/2019/10/20/12/

This recalibration allowed me to move forward. It has since (and is now currently) sited on the #womened website as part of my #pledgeforchange20 :

https://www.womened.org/blog/london-blogs/the-education-roundabout-pledgeforchange

My community on Edutwitter has become a really influential. If it wasn’t for my connections with people like @maternitycpd, lovely people in #WomenEd like Vivienne Porritt and all of you other amazing people, then things could well have turned out differently. They have given me permission and the confidence to be ambitious. Sadly, in some realms, being an ambitious woman is frowned upon. It may not be explicit but it fuels an unconscious bias in some people (of any gender). When they vocalise it to me, I now pull them up on it. Don’t sit and tell me that leadership and parenting is hard. I am fully aware that it can be. I achieved it as a single mother – and that was hard!! I have the utmost respect for any single parent. I appreciate my ability to delegate and share parental responsibilities with my husband and my ex husband. I admire those like @claireprice1 who has professionally achieved so much on top of some top class parenting. The only (tiny) thing I did find slightly easier when I was a single parent, was knowing that I did have to do it all. I couldn’t have discussions over ‘whose turn’ it was. It was always my turn.

So, I’m soon to move forward to taking on an Assistant Headteacher post. I have my eyes open. I know that in the first term I will need to work significantly more hours than thereafter. It is inevitable. I have so much to learn in a short period of time. My family situation will afford me extra time to achieve this. If I work 70 hours a week for a while, then that is ok. It will then regulate. It always does. My boundaries will resume and we will outsource more of the family husbandry (paying for school dinners, cleaner, etc). It comes at a good time of year because we all wear fewer clothes in the summer (back to the washing) – but seriously with six people it does make a difference. We also BBQ more in summer so less to wash up. My dishwasher runs three times a day. This will help. The grass will be growing and my livestock will require less additional feeding, and this will help.

We will always have last minute moments when the wheels fall off. My husband is a DHT. Ofsted visits, forgetting to share events on the family calendar (late night Governor’s meetings, times we both have parents evenings the same night – why always Thursdays?), child sickness etc. But for the majority of the time we do OK. Doing OK is a reasonable expectation of our life. We are raising our sons to be independent, resourceful, good team players, to have a good understanding of currencies (be this financial, time, resources).

We have also hit this lovely point where my husband and I can go out together in the evening and leave my eldest in charge at home. In return for a bottle of Pepsi Max and an extra hour on his phone (before he is electronically kicked off his apps) my eldest will babysit. Be assured, life does get easier when weaving your way through life, work, parenting – but it isn’t always easy.

All I’m really trying to put across is that life is not straightforward, even when people seem like they have their shit together, actually they maybe don’t. Don’t judge where you think you are, by where you perceive others to be. Seek fulfilment not happiness. Accept the rough with the smooth, and sometimes, you only know that you are at rock bottom when you look up, and up is the only direction left to travel.

I am, and will continue to be, fully committed to helping others seek out what is possible in their lives to help them find fulfilment. I will pay forward the support I have had. I don’t ‘have it all’ but I do ‘have a lot’ and for that I am eternally grateful.

This is a short tongue in cheek blog for people like my husband (who is a fantastic teacher but who doesn’t see the need for the constant rebranding of the same thing needlessly). Here are a few translations (broadly speaking) that will help people who have been teaching a long time but not kept up with said research:

‘Low Stakes Quiz’ = back in the day we called this ‘a short test’. Nice because the kids can mark it themselves. Not called a ‘test’ anymore because we don’t want to put any stressful words on it that may cause upset. To go that one stage further, we will say it’s ‘low stakes’ (not that any of them will know what that is) and call it a quiz to make it sound fun!

‘Interleaving’ = think along the lines of ‘cross curricular learning’ or encouraging students to do some thinking related to a similar theme/topic/way of thinking/concepts that has previously been done.

‘Direct instruction’ or ‘Explicit Teaching‘ = chalk and talk or as we used like to think of it ….. teaching!

‘High stake test’ = more marking for you.

‘Dual coding’ = annotating/drawing a diagram while teaching.

‘Retrieval practice’ = recall or remembering. Now this is a really good thing but back in the day was only Level 3 – irrespective of however hard the concept was.

‘Spaced learning’ = leaving spaces between learning.

‘Metacognition’ = thinking about learning. In fairness this has always been metacognition.

‘RQT’ = newish teacher, likely to get any TLR 2 type posts that come up.

‘Cognitive load theory’ = think ‘zone of proximal development’ from back in the day when you trained.

‘Building social capital’ = putting effort in to make eye contact and a quick nod whilst walking down the corridor or asking the person at the photocopier how their dog is. In olden days this was deemed as ‘having good manners’.

‘Cold calling’ = picking someone to answer a question to check understanding (or as I do it from time to time, to check they are listening)! We used to call this ‘no hands up’

‘Verbal feedback’ = talking to students about how to improve their work.

‘Written feedback’ = as for above but done with a pen. Used to be called ‘marking’!

‘Pre Public Exam’ (PPE) = a ‘mock’. Pixl schools lead this one. It rolls off the tongue so much better than ‘mock’.

PEx = Permanent exclusion = Expelled.

‘Terms 1-6’ = term 1 is correct in old money, term 2 is the second half of term 1, term 3 is the first half of term 2, term 4 is the second half of term 2, term 5 is the first half of term 3 and term 6 is the fun term 🥳🥳

I’m not mocking any of these techniques, they are all fab!! I wrote this in the first instance to highlight that all of these words that are, essentially, things we have been doing all along but under a different name 🤣🤣🤣. The renewed focus on some of these are both important and powerful.

Disclaimer- I am aware that there is an awful lot more to these techniques than I have given credit to. Please nobody be offended 🙏😁

When I entered teaching I was told that there is never anything new in education, that on a cyclical basis everything goes round again. I have now done a complete cycle.

I’ve read a lot of educational opinions, research and assumptions over the years, but never been brave enough to have a voice on this wider platform to express my own, or to explain the basis from which my views have developed. This blog is based on the progression of my experience and the factors that I (rightly or wrongly) believe have influenced and shaped my views and practice. My suggestions at the end are informed by my limited and narrow experience of comprehensive education, and you may need to bear this in mind when you read my final points.

I did my PGCE in 2001. My lessons were probably boring, but my plans consisted of: starter – elicitation from students about prior knowledge, teach new stuff (using a rolling white board or overhead projector), apply the new learning using a text book for questions and then check understanding at the end. Every so often there would be a practical where relevant (as I am a Science teacher). I remember as I went through my scrolls of acetate on my OHP that if I wrote them in permanent OHP pen then I would have my lessons forever. That and the collection of worksheets and information that been photocopied onto acetate, formed the extent of my planning. As I put them in plastic wallets and placed them in folders I believed I was future proofing my planning so that all that was left to do was my tick and flick marking and dealing with behaviour, homework and pastoral issues. Simple?? On a side note, marking took me ages. I read every word that the students wrote and this took all of the time. My feedback was then the odd tick, sp circled, then an effort grade and attainment grade (A*-G made up and not criteria based). This was a waste of time.

I was doing my NQT year in a very challenging school and following up behaviour incidents took considerable time. I would never have chosen to work in a school like this as a first post had it not been for my subject mentor on my second PGCE placement telling me that I was going to struggle to get a job because I hadn’t been to a Russel Group University. She was a hardened, opinionated lady in her 50’s and I didn’t ever see any joy she got from her role. I didn’t enjoy the placement after her comment, and it knocked my confidence even before I had got started. I applied for my first job in January not really knowing anything about the school, but I was desperate to get a job after this fairly damning comment. I not only got the job, but I also was given an extra £2000 in recruitment and retention points. It didn’t click why this was offered until I started.

I was 22, I remember on the inset day being challenged going into the Science department because the person thought I was a student. Behaviour at the school was appalling. I remember walking passed groups of students smoking openly on the playground. The Head told staff that there were other more important things to tackle than students smoking. I remember the days that I had regretted entering the profession but I knew it was probably the school that was the issue. There was no clear behaviour policy and I remember taking a Y11 student to my Head of Department after he had been seriously disruptive. She turned to me and her words were ‘what do you want me to do about it?’. The walk back to the class with this 6ft boy, who smugly knew where the power balance lay after I was undermined in front of him, was soul destroying. In my second year one of the nice girls in my form petrol bombed the maths block and I decided I had had enough. I got a job at my school that had been my PGCE first placement. I probably would have left teaching at that point but then had a catastrophic road accident, and any other option outside of education at that point became a no go. I had realised however that if I ever became a leader, then I would not be like these two women.

I moved schools and loved my job. I flew. I was valued and was given fantastic opportunities. It was 2004, this was a time when the National Strategies provided us with lots of files of, what I believed to be (and probably still do), useful information and resources. The Science curriculum was mainly knowledge based at KS3, in response to how it was assessed, and while the SC1 aspect (investigation skills) was later assessed using questions in the SATs exam, skills were not the primary focus.

I actually quite liked Y9 SATs. I don’t believe that they stressed the students out too much and they provided us a useful reference point with students as they moved into their GCSEs and they were good practice for the real exams. I believe that you don’t necessarily reduce the stress of exams by doing fewer of them. Key Stage 3 was more meaningful in these days, and by this I mean that it was it’s own entity, not an extension of the GCSE curriculum. The KS3 Science curriculum was taught to all students in all schools across the country and all 14 year olds would have covered the same content in terms of knowledge by the time they started GCSEs, irrespective of their primary school experience.

Education started a seismic shift. I’m not even going to discuss the emergence of Academies, but the for teachers; the pay freezes, performance management that potentially see you moving down the scale, budget cuts etc made education a less appealing option than ever before.

In 2009 Ed Balls scrapped SATs. At the time I was a Second in Science and I lead on Key Stage 3. I understood the reasons behind abolishing SATs, and despite the time it would save me on marking mock SATs papers in February, felt it was a bit of a shame. I totally understand that this is only my personal opinion and that others with justifiable reasons felt strongly that it was the right thing to do. The knowledge / skills pendulum was shifting. APP (assessing pupil progress) was brought in. I loved my job and was enthusiastic about school improvement. I worked with the LA on their APP working party alongside my teaching role. I believed that the development of skills had been overlooked by the previous KS3 curriculum so I wanted APP to be useful in filling this partial void. As I worked with teachers from other schools on this, it occurred to me that APP was only about skills. There was no AF (assessment foci) for knowledge. Fortunately, APP went from the intention of being compulsory, to being optional, but I had developed a range of very good Science resources that did develop this range of skills. These helped plug the holes in skills.

In this time my teaching started to change. I was lucky enough to have a projector and whiteboard. It was a revelation. I could save power points – forever. This was going to future proof my planning and cut down on my time spent redoing things I had previously done. My original plan with the acetates hadn’t worked out because every 2 years we either had major changes to KS3 or KS4. Teachers were in a constant state of flux, adapting to or planning for curriculum changes. It was/is ridiculous. The impact of any change wasn’t even measured before the next change hit us. With power points I could edit my lessons. Editing my permanent pen on acetate required a bottle of ethanol or acetone and a piece of cotton wool!! Editing and adapting power points was considerably easier.

I had taught in a fairly traditional way up to this point. People get very hot under the collar about traditional verses progressive teaching approaches and I understand why. I have been both, I have wholeheartedly advocated both at different points and at different points been very successful with then both. The key to the success of either approach is 1. being in a school that also advocates that approach (unless you like swimming against the tide) and 2. having high expectations.

The combination of the focus on developing skills, and a perception of what Ofsted were looking for changed my teaching. I became that facilitator of knowledge. I was praised by senior leadership for my questioning technique and as well as promotion to acting Head of Science, became extended SLT with a literacy focus. Our APP tasks were literacy based and all involved development of writing. The GCSEs by this point required 6 mark questions in Science and we produced resources to support writing skills. Students liked the progressive lessons. They were more interactive, developed skills, had a hook, allowed extended thinking around rich questioning and creativity and from 2010-2013 it worked superbly because the students we were teaching had a fairly solid knowledge base from their previous Science learning in more traditional lessons.

I moved school in 2013 to a permanent Head of Science post. From 2011-2014 I was involved in 7 Ofsted inspections. My original school had gone into special measures and my new school was also in a category. I got very good at producing Ofsted lessons and talking the talk with inspectors.

Levels were removed from KS3 in 2014 and nothing was given to us in place of them. Schools put in inordinate time and energy trying to work out their own solutions. Removing Levels may have been good idea, and again I know the arguments for their removal, but I’m inclined to think the stress and chaos it left in schools was counterproductive. Particularly because there was such a huge emphasis in lessons on targets, where students are at, where they need to be, measurable progress, progress over time blah blah blah.

Micheal Gove was making changes to GCSE to increase the rigour at GCSE. Skills were on the way out and a knowledge rich curriculum was in development. GCSEs had already changed and resit options reduced as courses became linear. The government stuck in, with no notice, a change in September 2013 to the first sitting of any exams being the one that counted for the school in their performance tables but subsequent sittings could count for the students. A divide between the moral dilemma of doing what was best for the student and doing what was best for the school ensued. If doing what was best for the school wasn’t taken into consideration then the long term impact (with the potential of getting below a 2 with Ofsted) would be detrimental to a far wider number of people in the school community. Then in 2016 the use of coursework and controlled assessments in courses diminished or disappeared. Vocational courses in subjects like BTEC Science became obsolete basically because they didn’t count in performance measures in the Ebacc bucket.

In this period between 2010 – 2016 I taught in a way that, in hindsight, may not have lead to deep learning. Planning for what I perceived to be effective teaching and marking that required an ongoing dialogue with the student, meant that I ended up putting in more and more hours until I could put in no more. I was a workaholic but I work best under pressure so I just got on with it without question. It distracted me from my reality in my private life that was a journey through fertility treatment.

The recruitment crisis with Science teachers hit hard at this time. Schools struggled to appoint. School budgets were so tight that doing more with less was impossible. The interventions required to fill the holes in student knowledge just lead to the need for more work.

I started to notice how differentiation impacted on students. Giving 3 different ability sheets to the class according to their ability capped their progress and their confidence. Students in my lessons did not necessarily push themselves to do beyond what I expected and my expectations were probably too low. Teaching at a fast pace, with lessons differentiated like this did not allow the learning to stick. We had a different cohort by this point. We had students who had only ever been taught with an emphasis on skills and whom are the ‘smart phone’ generation. A generation of disadvantaged children who know very little about the world. I’m not even shocked anymore when I have conversations with my middle ability Y11’s who think that wind comes from trees waving their branches and that waves come from sharks and whales swimming in the sea. It’s not that they aren’t bright, they just don’t know much. Students, particularly disadvantaged students, know so little about the world or our language that frankly it’s terrifying. We don’t have the time to make up this deficit in Y11. It needs to come by teaching knowledge properly from the beginning (and more involved parenting).

I recognised that if I were to raise expectations in my teaching, that teaching A level would be useful, so I moved schools to a Head of Science in an 11-18 school. I taught a top class prog style lesson in my interview lesson. The panel loved it. I wasn’t even aware of the trad v prog debate at this point. If I had, then in hindsight things would have been different. I would have known I was going to a school that did well with largely traditional teaching methods. I should have noticed the desks in rows. I spent the first month wondering why students didn’t enjoy my methods of drawing information out of them and then giving them information in a variety of different ways to distill and reformulate into their own words. They just wanted to know ‘the stuff’ and I took it very personally that they didn’t like my lessons. Planning the prog style lessons that I taught was incredibly time consuming. My idea of my future proofed power points had not foreseen the need for all of the elements that made my good progressive teaching in my previous schools. Make no mistake, prog style teaching was not perfect, but it worked very well in the more challenging schools I had worked in. The students who had little interest in Science could be made interested by entertaining lessons that allowed them opportunities to think and question and develop ideas. At that point in time I don’t think one teacher teaching in a trad way would have yielded the progress in these schools that we got from the prog methods we used. Students just struggled with developing any deeper understanding and with retaining the information. On the whole they behaved well because the lessons were engaging and they could participate.

So I was on my own in a new school and was unable to reflect on and evaluate in time to adapt to teaching in a didactic way. It seem totally absurd that they would want me to teach like that. I didn’t have the perspective that I have now. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t in any trouble, my capability was not in question, I just didn’t like the fact that students didn’t like how I taught and I took it incredibly personally. If I knew then what I know now, that aspect of the role would have been fine. A couple of family life related things lead me to return to my previous school. I had lost a family member and needed to be around people who believed what I believe.

Returning to a full teaching timetable for the first time since 2006 was really tough. If any leadership staff wonder why staff roll their eyes at new things that require time, then please go and teach an 85-90% teaching timetable for a few weeks and I’m sure you will develop a new found sense of empathy. Teaching is a hard job. I know leadership is also hard, my husband is a deputy head so I’m not entirely ignorant of the other side of the coin. It’s not a game of oneupmanship either. We need to be mindful of everyone’s pressures in education.

Over the last 3 years I have had to adapt my teaching, in the first instance driven because the content did not fit into the time given in the new GCSE Science. It is more challenging, more content driven and in order to teach effectively and make the learning stick, I have become more trad in my lesson delivery. If you told me this in 2016 I would have laughed at you. I have become more research informed and in 2017 whilst on maternity leave I was paid to do research on raising attainment in HPA students. I surveyed nationwide through Twitter and in addition to a small school based research project, found that in some situations teaching in a more traditional way raises student attainment more than prog teaching. This wasn’t even what I wanted to find (given my time in 2016), but I’m a scientist and what I found was what I found and that was what I needed to report upon. I have since spent a lot of time reading, reflecting on best practice and observing what is happening in the schools around me.

Changing from back prog to trad has been gradual for me, it wasn’t entirely intentional, but has been developed around Rosenshine’s principles. I just started to focus on routines I knew were beneficial. There are still good prog style lessons that I use and will continue to do. I am probably a ‘neotrad’ (this isn’t a thing, and when I googled it to see if it was, I just found pictures of tattoos), I am possibly a ‘recovering progressive’ (again not a thing apart from on google where it’s apparently religious thing). Or perhaps I could step away from the labels and just be a teacher who wants to provide the best opportunities for the students she teaches, in the most effective way that fits the curriculum as it is today. If/when (?) it slips back towards skills, then I will probably go more prog, advocate mixed ability groups, encourage creativity and sit students in groups.

One thing that I won’t do is differentiate by task the way I used to, and one thing I will do, is maintain my high expectations. Having spent some time a couple of years ago looking at KS2 when helping local feeder schools alongside my stint teaching A’level, I know where KS3 begins and where KS5 starts in my subject, and this is so helpful.

High expectations need to be a cultural shift across the school. It needs to be lead by SLT and not passed off as a variety of ‘poundland pedagogy’ (I read this term in a blog written by Ruth Walker the other day and have stolen it because I love it!) techniques that puts the responsibility on the heads of teachers.

It needs to be modelled by everyone at every level. It’s about consistency of high expectations, not intensity. How many strategies are started in schools and 5 minutes later abandoned, for whatever reason. Implementation has to be as good as the intent – and some of that is to do with endurance.

So just to finish off I’m going to offer some advice that I think is useful when reflecting on my 18 year journey in Education:

– Nothing ever stays the same. Get good at adapting to change. Some of it will be good, some of it won’t, but change is inevitable. Until it is truly understood that skills and knowledge are both important, we will continue to swing between the two.

– Read about Micheal Young’s Future 3 curriculum model. Ruth Walker blogged about this, explaining in straightforward steps as to how to make the powerful knowledge model work in schools. She explains that it has to start with getting student behaviour right. However, disruption free learning should be a reality for all, irrespective of your pedagogical preferences. Look at the success of Michaela School. Having watched a few interviews with Katherine Birbalsingh, I find myself further convinced that this is a necessity. I have two secondary school aged sons. I want them to be able to learn without others spoiling it for them. I’m certain that most other people would want this for their children too.

– Lead well, support and grow those around you. Don’t be the two ladies I mentioned- even if your time is tight and you are stressed. New teachers leave the profession in droves. Don’t be the reason for that.

-The prog / trad debate is highly charged because we invest so much energy into our teaching that we take any criticism of it incredibly personally. Context is key. If you are a very strong prog, don’t get a job at a school that is very trad and vice versa. Most schools sit as a mix between the two and so do most teachers. Be a professional, respect the opinions of others. Their path is different to yours and they might just be on a different part of the path. Our goal is for our students to achieve the very best they can. Nobody came in to teaching to not give a damn. In a system that only measures the success of schools against the failure of others (and not by some criterion based model), there will always be some at the top, lots in the middle and some at the bottom. Despite the governments efforts, 50% of schools will always be below average. Remember this.

– A generation of students with poor vocabulary are coming through schools now. Parenting has changed. Pressures at home mean that fewer students develop good vocabulary through conversations and reading outside of school. Make provision for this to be addressed. Read Alex Quigley’s brilliant book on the vocabulary gap and address this in every lesson, every day.

– Game theory: Challenges within society that we have no control over will be a constant but we must keep working to reduce any negative impact they have. Concerns about parenting, work life balance, mobile phones and the impact of digital devices on families will sadly continue. I strongly suggest that people in education start to work out which game they are playing. I suggest that we start to view education as an ‘infinite game’ and not a ‘finite game’ in which the schools P8 is the judgement of being a winner or a loser. Please watch this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tye525dkfi8 (in fact watch anything by Simon Sinek, it’s fantastic). The finite players are the schools whose main focus is next years results, the infinite players are those committed to raising the quality of education. Become an infinite organisation based on a commitment to your values.

Just as a final thought. I have, at times, questioned whether education is something that can be fixed to give equality of opportunities for all students, and whether it is possible to achieve an acceptable work life balance in teaching. I have done a complete cycle on the knowledge/skills education roundabout. It has taken nearly 20 years to go around. I suppose we all question ourselves, but I have come to the conclusion that I haven’t come this far, to only come this far. I suspect my views will continue to change and develop as my experience leads me in different directions, but I am ready for it, and I am happy to change to meet the needs of my students whilst delivering the ever changing curriculum in the future.