The Death of Staff

“Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.”

This quote is attributable to Lera BorodIitsky, an associate professor of Cognitive Science whose research is on the relationships between mind, world, and language (or how humans get so smart).

In the education world to which I belong, schools are organisations that have

·???????strong progressive values and behaviours

·???????a deep commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and

·???????an unwavering belief in engagement and collaborative working.

Yet despite this, staff is still the default word used to describe its people.

I say despite this because the origins of the staff, in this context, finds its history in the military, where it is a group of people (officers) that a leader (General) can rely on. Also, staff is a walking stick, or a device used to help the person stand or walk. By combining the two together staff, can be understood as the group of people that hold-up the leader.

?

There may have been a time, forty years ago when staff was the appropriate word as the only people who were not teachers working in the school were cleaners, school keepers or those provided administrative support in the office. The Headteacher was the General and their group of people were the teachers.

Since then the educational landscape and working experience has been transformed with the proliferation of non-teaching roles that support teaching and learning and provide pastoral care. Also, the movement towards greater collaborative working between schools, with the establishment of Multi-Academy Trusts being the best example of this.

One example of how much has changed - forty years ago, there was no safeguarding in schools but there was corporal punishment.

But yet the word staff persists.

?

Edward de Bono, a physician, psychologist, and philosopher who originated the term lateral thinking, stated that "In a sense, words are encyclopaedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better."

Staff is word that has had long since had its moment in history and we should be doing better.

I am proud that last December that, where I work, the LIFE Education Trust made the decision to break with the past by removing the staff word from our vocabulary. Instead of staff we now say employees (in the legal sense), colleagues or teams.

We are finding it a tough habit to break because it is so ingrained within the education system and public sector generally, but using more inclusive terms is changing the way we see our people within the Trust and it also speaks to the values and behaviours that are important to us.

But for us the first step in creating a great employee experience and to be the organisation that we want to be is the death of staff.