Apart from That, How's It Going?

I was, and still am in some ways, a teacher. I gather I was pretty good at what I did, I became a young (for the time) Headteacher and I wouldn't last a term now.

The above, snapped this morning, featured on BBC's "Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg" (she was born in the year I started teaching!) in an interview with Bridget Phillipson MP (Shadow Education). And, although the figure is a shock, it's not a surprise.

I'm unsurprised because I'm still pretty close to my profession as a mentor/coach and have listened to too many stories of "constriction by accountability." I have coached teachers at most professional levels, listed to their account of the obstacles they face, the judgements made of them and the impacts of their job on their families. I have had sneior managers cancell their sessions with me because they "couldn't find time," to have a 50 minute coaching session. And these sessions were important; a space to express frustration and to dig into their personal resources, sometimes only to find that the very resourcefulness the led them to their profession has now dwindled to a point of irrelevance and having "found the emptiness," they know they no longer want to effectively self harm by hanging around much longer.

When the summation of your team's efforts is encapsulated in one word, as per OFSTED reporting. it'd better be a positive one. The devestating impacts of de-contextualised reporting made their way into this year's news headlines with the devastating suicide of a Headteacher as one word, one, branded her and her school as "inadequate."

It's a brutal, shocking, heart-breaking end to the life of a caring professional, partner, mom and friend: a whole person gone. Perhaps a number of colleagues, feeling broken by a "run faster, jump higher," approach to development have taken account of their sleep patterns, tiredness, the use of prescription medication and possible self medication to decide eventually that they've "just had enough."

Do I still coach and mentor the education workforce? Yes, I do and sadly I find myself too often close to expressing the following:

"What you are feeling isn't abnormal, it is a normal response to an abnormal situation and our coping resources are finite."

There will be attendant factors: I'm not certain that we've recovered from the more deeply felt impacts of the pandemic nor do I believe that we are havng the best conversations about the purpose of education and its role in helping us to share a just and democratic society that lives its espoused values: something we should take pride in being part of.