Look forward…and dream

A heartfelt poem for the pandemic by our friend @MrsSardines

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When we first heard about it
It seemed so far away.
Gradually it edged closer
Day by cautious day.

We started to get anxious,
They started to decree.
We’d all huddle sharp at 5 o’clock
To hear what how it would be.

As if they were in the dock,
They told us what to look for.
Some took it lightly,
Others seriously more.

Offices started closing
People stayed away.

Gradually the numbers got less
Attendance shrunk each day.

Stay at home they shouted.
Rules must not be flouted.

Work on laptops, phones if you must
Hopefully the country won’t go bust.

School children waited to hear their fate
Whilst people quickly started to berate.

The numbers dying started rising even higher
Was someone being a bit of a liar?

Nurses tended to the sick and poorly.
Things had to ease soon, surely.

Parents had to hold the fort
Remembering back to how they were taught.

Teachers desperate to see their class
This situation wasn’t getting better fast.

Everybody shut up in their houses
The few brave ones still soldiering on.
Gratitude for what people were doing
People started clapping, sharing rainbows
How long would this last? Who knows.

Grandparents missing comforting cuddles
No more friendly, warm huddles.

Masks hide our smiles, hide our faces
Fearful eyes left in their places.

The only winner is the planet
Free to breathe more easily again.
Bluer skies, cleaner waters
Escaping from the damage of men.

As our planet slowly crawls
Away from this murderous beast.
We must come out of this kinder
At the very least.

Enough with blaming others
Enough with saying it’s wrong
Look for all the wonderful
That has been done.

Humans are stronger together
Let’s be a better team.
We will never forget those lost
But we can look forward and dream.

Superstars

A great guest post from our friend Cate Knight @Missymusician81

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Try not to get worried, try not to tune in to, problems that upset you… This is the tune I hum to myself when things start piling up. It’s a little ditty to remind me to take a step back, breathe and tune out some of the anxiety inducing white noise that can come from being a teacher.

As educators, we live in an artificial world where EVERYTHING is deemed urgent, EVERYTHING must be recorded and evidenced and if we fail then it affects young human lives.

It is important to remember: This is NOT reality! Outside of school mistakes are made freely. Priorities are shuffled and little thought is given to whether you used the right pen to mark last weeks homework. There are times when we need to burst the institutional bubble and realise that URGENT for us in school simply isn’t on the same scale as urgent in a hospital saving lives or on the stock exchange trading in billions.

Yes, we are super heroes who make an enormous difference BUT life continues on regardless of whether we have photocopied the sheets for lesson four. So, my little song reminds me to put things in perspective. To think, “this too shall pass” and to do my best without allowing the stress and worry to damage me too much! What will be your reminder?

Covid-19 from a leadership perspective

A guest post from our dear friend Cherryl Drabble @cherrylkd

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During this pandemic I’ve seen several posts for our NHS heroes, articles about our shop workers, delivery drivers and all manner of people who are helping to keep the country going during this crisis. This is quite right too and I personally applaud everyone who is putting themselves out there to help others. I’ve also seen lots of tweets from teachers who are trying to adapt to online teaching and consultants who are now sometimes struggling to find their place in this new educational world we’re all facing. What I haven’t seen much of is a voice from the leadership teams up and down the country who are attempting to lead staff and children with no precedent to work from. This post will tell you a little of how our leadership team is coping with this ever changing educational landscape.

Just like all other schools we had very little time to work out how we were going to work our way through the school closing. We had no instructions and we had to move swiftly. As we are a special school for children with complex medical needs it wasn’t just a case of closing the school and handing over to parents. All of our youngsters have EHCPs and that meant in reality we had to remain open. Our staff numbers were reducing on a daily basis as they had to isolate due to showing symptoms of Covid-19. As a leadership team we were meeting daily, making new bathroom and teaching rotas only to discover that overnight we had lost more staff. We convened a socially distanced meeting and took the decision to close the school. Parents were supportive, after all, we were in lockdown as a country and we didn’t have many key workers amongst our parents luckily.

Safeguarding

With the school closed we now had the headache of ensuring that safeguarding remained a priority. Out of sight definitely does not equal out of mind. As a leadership team we took the decision that we would need to hear from, speak to, or see all of our children once per week. More frequently than that wasn’t practical and any less wouldn’t be acceptable. For parental engagement we use Seesaw. This was introduced by one of our SLT over the last 12 months. We’ve always been fans of it but during this pandemic it has really come into its own. Teachers in each class were asked to put activities on there for the children to give them access to online learning. We stressed that it wasn’t compulsory and that parents should not feel obliged to complete it with their child but the work was there if they wanted it. Some children do the work, some children post pictures of what they’re doing during the lockdown and others write messages to their teachers. The beauty is that we can see who has been on the app and that eliminates a large number from our self imposed safeguarding list.

During the first week we delivered Easter eggs to every single child in school. That was a mammoth task to organise by SLT as we needed 3 staff for each of our 3 mini buses. Routes needed to be planned, PPE sought and distributed and all with staff decreasing daily. We were very lucky, we had enough staff volunteering to complete this job. We also delivered food to all our families to help them adjust to not being able to get out. This gave us access to all our children and they were very happy to see staff even though it had only been a week. As time has gone on SLT continue to arrange for our families to have food if necessary and we are also continuing to help with free school meals. Not everyone has access to the Internet and therefore can’t access the vouchers.

When Friday comes around any children who have not received food, not needed to call school, not been on Seesaw or not been seen or heard from in any other way receives a call from one of our SLT. This means that every single week we have checked that all our families are safe and as well as can be.

I happen to be DSL and from my point of view I’ve been kept very busy with all the new documents. Everyone is learning as we go on this one and it’s no different for safeguarding leads. The Child Protection policy needed an addendum to take account of the new way of working and we then had to ensure everyone had read the document. Each child with an EHCP now needs a risk assessment, for us that means every child in school. As a leadership team we convened a meeting via Zoom to work out how to ensure all children had a risk assessment. This is now well underway.

Staff wellbeing.

High on the priority list for us as SLT is staff wellbeing. We always do our best to ensure the staff are happy in their work whenever possible. This current crisis means we need to keep a closer eye on our staff than usual. One of our SLT has set up a Facebook private message group for all staff and all have been encouraged to join. It isn’t used for anything official, it’s simply there for the staff to keep in touch with each other. They are loving the group. They are managing to keep each other’s spirits up and are having a laugh and a joke. They can instantly see if anyone is quiet and can be there for each other.

At the end of last week during our Zoom meeting we found that a few staff were struggling in one way or another. Thankfully, no one actually has Covid-19 but they still have other troubles to contend with. Our Head Teacher then spent his afternoon ringing those staff members to see if he could help in any way. I like that personal, caring approach and it helps all staff to feel like we are part of a large family.

At the start of the pandemic all staff were treated to bacon butties, or a sandwich of their choice for the vegetarians just to keep everyone happy. Small gestures like that go a long way towards helping staff to feel appreciated.

Planning ahead

Now that we as a leadership team have a routine in place for each week we feel a little more like we have the situation under control. On Mondays we discuss any new safeguarding issues that have arisen over the weekend and the food deliveries also go out to our families. Seesaw is constantly checked by our teachers and SLT are making phone calls as needed. The risk assessments are underway and we have SLT meetings through Zoom.

Our next task is to plan ahead. We aren’t speculating about when we will return to school at all but we do need to give it some thought. We know that children will not be able to go straight into lessons because there will be much work needed around their mental health before we can think of education. In the blink of an eye many of our children had their whole world turned upside down and they have no idea why. We will need to spend a great deal of time working through attachment issues that will have resulted from being at home for several months.

From next week we are going to start looking ahead to the new school year whenever that may be. It will happen sometime though and we want to be prepared when it comes so that we can concentrate on the children’s mental health when they return.

I’ve given a little peak into what we as a leadership team have been doing for the last few weeks. I haven’t done my colleagues justice because I know they’ve had sleepless nights with worry over what will happen for our children. My SLT friends have worked exceptionally hard throughout all of this and I’m hoping that it’s over soon so that we can relax a little.

What I know for sure is that I’ve never worked so hard and not even been in school. That said, I work within a very supportive team and that makes all the difference!

#Covid19WellbeingEdumeet: Staff Wellbeing

 

I have said this before, but never has this been more relevant; staff wellbeing needs to be values led, proactively planned for and embraced by everyone. The days before schools shutdown were incredibly stressful and upsetting for everyone in schools as the realities of what this virus might do became stark. Teachers were worried about themselves, their families and the children they teach. Schools which engage in an empathetic approach to wellbeing will have minimised the exposure their staff and children have to each other, maintain social distancing with their few remaining pupils and will also have been aware that a switch over to online and digital learning doesn’t need an online presence from 9 to 3 or beyond, but a recognition that time away from a screen is essential to the digital wellbeing of all parties.

Four weeks into the shutdown there seems to be, from certain sections of the press, a lack of awareness that schools are actually still open for our vulnerable children and the children of our key workers and that many schools have opened for some or all of the Easter ‘holiday’ including on Good Friday and Easter Monday. There has been over the last week at least one story a day in the press, including the education press, of schools reopening. Such speculation is damaging. Safe behind their laptop screens, quoting unreliable -or perhaps non-existent- sources, this standard of journalism only serves to worry teachers already struggling with their mental health in an unprecedented situation. Our staff are now facing harsh reality that members of their school community, colleagues, parents and sadly some children, are losing their lives to this high risk disease. To read that they are now potentially being sent back to face the risks that NHS Staff do on a daily basis but without adequate personal protection equipment, will send anxieties through the roof.

Perhaps the Fourth Estate needs to read what the Department of Education has tweeted: “No decision has been made on a timetable for re-opening schools. Schools remain closed until further notice, except for children of critical workers and the most vulnerable children. Schools will only re-open when the scientific advice indicates it is the right time to do so.”

History will tell the story of who kept society together in this crisis: the talkers or the doers. I would rather ‘do’ than ‘say’ as would any school leader with wellbeing as the beating heart of their school.

Journalists have papers to sell; school leaders have staff and children to keep alive. Moral high ground? No contest.

A Moment in History: how will history remember you?

We are living through a moment in history, an extended moment without a current end point in sight, but one nevertheless which will be marked in time as one where the wellbeing of our nation and the global community came under more strain that at any point in the previous one hundred years. This is historic not merely because of the unprecedented level of state intervention, necessary to save lives and support the NHS, but because this could be a trigger of lasting societal change, much more significant to our future than events such as the death Of Princess Diana or the 9/11 attacks caused.

Any student of history would point to two previous pandemics. The Black Death wiped out one in three of the population of the areas it reached in the late 1340s, and the inaccurately titled ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-20 killed anywhere between 20 and 50 million people; 100 million according to some estimates. The first changed society by its impact on feudal life, but the stories of the era were told only by the small minority of literate people. The second, most likely originating from US Army bases or the British base at Etaples, went largely unreported at the time. Wartime censorship kept it out of American, British and German press, and its poplar name is derived from the illness, recovery and subsequent humanitarian work of the Spanish King Alphonso XIII.

This is a moment in history which will be recorded by the people. The headlines will point to the fact that the heir to the British throne, the Prime Minister, Health Secretary and Chief Medical Officer for England all demonstrated that the current virus is not selective in who it strikes. YouTube statistics will show the number of hits on the work of Joe Wicks, David Walliams and the like. However the true documentation of this outbreak will lie in the social media usage of the people, in their use of the internet and the whole gamut of platforms contained therein, in the tracking of our movements on our mobile phones and in the record of our children in their online and written work that accompanies the current school closure.

So….how do you want to be remembered?

As the person who stood up to be counted, or the one that ran away to avoid facing the music?

As one who filled their timelines with empty platitudes or one who filled it with genuine offers of support for your community?

As the person who continued a pointless social media feud when quite frankly there are more important issues to consider?

As someone who took the vague outlines of initial government guidance as an opportunity to ‘push the envelope’ or one who instinctively knew that despite what you thought of this administration ‘we have got to do what they say’ because they are our government whether you voted for them or not?

As someone who is kind, compassionate and dependable?

As someone who is empathetic and recognises that we are in this as a team and that everyone in that team, whatever their role, plays a part in that team success?

As the person who punched a fellow shopper over the last packet of sausages or who recognised the despair of someone finding the situation overwhelming and stressful and offered to share?

As the school which put paramount importance on the wellbeing of your staff, children and parents?

These are unfamiliar and unusual times. The ‘new normal’ isn’t ‘normal’ and as teachers we are entering a world of distant and digital learning which is new and which we were never trained to deliver. If we recognise that overloading children and parents, and our teaching colleagues, with an overwhelming volume of digital  content and demand in the coming months (not weeks) might trigger anxiety and stress, then we are heading in the right direction. History will record how we felt about this, but history will also record that people are frightened of the unknown and the unfamiliar. We need to keep as much familiarity, normality, decency and empathy at this time….and show this.

Thank you.

Keep well.

Stay safe.

#StayHomeSaveLives

 

 

Happy New Year! Top Blogs of 2019.

Happy New Year! 2019 was a quieter year for our blog as we went into print and also produced a couple of pieces for the Education Support Partnership here and here as well as looking after our own wellbeing and workload.

Nevertheless, the Healthy Toolkit blog has been regularly read and accessed through 2019, and below are the most read blogs of the year.

Tips for wellbeing reading feature twice from the summer and again at Christmas featuring some excellent and practical wellbeing publications, including our own ‘The Wellbeing Toolkit’

“Start as you mean to go on” dates from 2018, but has aged well as readership figures tell.

Cool to be Kind week replaced ‘Anti-bullying Week’ in our parlance; an important message from our friend Adrian Bethune.

And our fifth most read Tea and Talk an initiative already taken up by a number of schools. The value of talk for mental health and wellbeing is crucial.

What is your wellbeing pledge for 2020? Take our blog as a starting point, but make wellbeing real, authentic, ethical, empathetic and fair!

Wellbeing isn’t just for Christmas: strategies and a little reading list

As we sniffle, cough and wheeze our way into the final week of term ensuring we hit deadlines, finish projects and deliver the final Nativity and Carol service, we might also reflect upon our health and wellbeing as the term and the calendar year draws to a close.

So how are you? You may say you are ok just to move on the conversation to something else, or avoid it altogether. What if you are not ok? Is anyone listening? Are you listening? To yourself and others?

Do we ask each other how we are often enough? Are we afraid of the answer?

Christmas can be a tricky time of year for some of our families but also for some of our teachers and support staff too. Who might be departing at the end of the week to a fortnight alone, to family problems, to a relationship under strain, to difficult neighbours or to financial stress?

One easy step schools can take is to make your teachers aware of the work of the Education Support Partnership, particularly in relation to financial hardship and also to staff engagement and wellbeing as well as to their Christmas awareness campaign and helpline 08000 562 561.

Do we thank our staff enough? Regularly and properly?

What are your welbeing strategies? A wellbeing gift bag is a nice thing to do and many will be grateful to receive it, but if your wellbeing strategy is literally the gift bag, but no strategy then the message might be “Sorry for working you so hard; here’s a bathbomb and some Ferrero Rocher.”

Below are a few books that the team at Healthy Toolkit HQ suggest for a wellbeing reading list, maybe  books that might form a wellbeing library on your CPD shelf. This is no ‘bestselllers list’ and they aren’t in any order of preference. Each are different and each promote wellbeing in its very broadest sense.

First up, recently written by our co-founder Andrew Cowley is The Wellbeing Toolkit which builds on the notion that wellbeing needs to be strategic, principled and ingrained in the school culture. Andrew also suggests that wellbeing is universal and that the principles we apply in schools could be used in any workplace.

Tammie Prince, a good friend of Healthy Toolkit, has written Mindfulness in the Classroom in the 100 Ideas range, a practical and highly usable text to enable mindfulness techniques to be employed as part of the class routine. Look out for Tammie’s new book, 50 Fantastic Ideas for Mindfulness. published last summer.

Victoria Hewett writes with passion and refreshing honesty. Making it as a Teacher tells Victoria’s story and how to make it through the first five years- the crucial time for our profession where we are losing so many young teachers to burn out. Tips, anecdotes and practical advice abound in this very readable book.

Adrian Bethune’s Wellbeing in the Primary Classroom is the perfect primary accompaniment the above. With Sir Anthony Seldon  having written the foreword, Adrian draws from his experience and detailed knowledge of child psychology with practical and usable guidance for embedding a wellbeing culture. Your children will love making the class flags!

Mental Health and Wellbeing on a budget, addressed in a practical handbook written by the inspirational and passionate Clare Erasmus. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Handbook sets out aa practical approach to mental health and wellbeing that any school can adopt to transform their mental health support for students, with a focus on providing staff with practical tools on a limited budget. It sets out a roadmap for staff to create robust mental health support for students without requiring qualifications in psychology or counselling. It covers key areas including staff training, creating safe spaces for wellbeing and how to harness the support of parents and the local community. It also includes practical advice for addressing concerns such as stress, self-harm and body image.

In How to Survive in Teaching Emma Kell relates some tales of the most toxic of school environments, with one particularly harrowing example. There are a number of examples of poor practice that Emma highlights, but the overall mood of the book encourages and demonstrates how to keep positive, flourishing and to keep teaching.

Abigail Mann writes practically and purposefully about self-care in Live Well, Teach Well   Putting your own oxygen mask on first’ is an essential of self-care and Abigail expounds the benefits of a good work-life balance whilst also discussing the wellbeing needs of the whole school community. Abigail’s book sits perfectly alongside the others on our list.

Our final selection is from James Hilton: Ten Traits of Resilience looks at building positivity and purpose through school leadership. In an increasingly complex and ever-changing education landscape, school leadership is a rewarding but multifaceted profession. In order to survive in the job long term, school leaders need to understand how they can lead with positivity and purpose, all the while avoiding stress, coping with adversity, and taking better care of themselves physically and mentally. With teacher wellbeing and retention a growing concern, it is essential school leaders pass on this confidence and optimism to their staff members too.

Maybe Santa might pop one or two of these in your wellbeing bag!

“It’s Cool To Be Kind!”

We are sure that many of us would like an easy ride in life or in work. One of the easiest things to to in life is to be negative and critical. It takes no effort and little emotional intelligence. Pointing a finger; that’s a doddle. Finding a problem in someone’s solution; zero effort required. Cocking a snook at an idea, initiative or project takes seconds and leaves plenty of time for idle cynicism, skepticism and fault finding.

Life isn’t simple, and the easy and lazy option of condemning concepts and thoughts that we don’t like can actually be damaging, especially in the education sector. Tomorrow the Education Support Partnership publishes the Teacher Wellbeing Index and the headlines  are already suggesting increases in ‘burn out’ and psychological problems and teachers not feeling valued.

This week is also ‘Anti-Bullying Week’ and we sincerely hope that school cultures are also addressing issues around the adults in school as much as the children. The term ‘Anti-Bullying Week’ is negative in some ways. ‘Anti’ is obviously negative, ‘bullying’ clearly is and ‘week’- well why just do it for a week and ignore it the rest of the year. Our good friend Adrian Bethune labels it ‘It’s Cool To Be Kind Week’ and Adrian has kindly shared this resource to support teachers in planning such a week.

The Teacher Wellbeing Index will focus more attention on the mental health of our teachers and of our school leaders. Our school cultures, as The Wellbeing Toolkit points out, need to be values and principled driven and leading a school where positivity, kindness and celebration of success is at the heart of the wellbeing strategy, for children and teachers alike.

Kindness needs to be a deliberate act. It needs to be thought through and it needs time to be delivered, because when it does become a purposeful action, the random and instantaneous acts of kindness that we celebrate become a matter of habit. As Adrian points out, kindness pays forward; if another driver lets you through at a busy junction, you will be more inclined to do so.

Our teachers need kindness; not the tokens of chocolate on your laptop or other such acts that masquerade as ‘wellbeing’, but a strategic and conscious decision to make kindness part of our daily conversation and interaction.

A number of us have been discussing ‘fierce kindness’ and anyone familiar with Susan Scott’s ‘Fierce Conversations’ will know that “the conversation is the relationship” so in the same way, kindness needs to become the basis of relationships  in the school workplace. Not the passing comment to make someone feel better (though there is still a place for this) but a long-term, strategic goal to support the mental health of our colleagues and of our children.

‘Cool To Be Kind’ as a simple, yet genius, idea. What are you going to do for it?

It is ok not to be ok

Last weekend, as many a member of the Edutwitter community will attest to, there was an unfortunately and insensitively worded tweet about Twitter at its best and worst. It need not be repeated here, but it was derogatory in its content and tone about teachers using the particular platform to discuss issues relating to their mental health.

In a rare moment of unity, the education community roundly condemned the post which was eventually deleted, sadly with no public apology. What may have passed by the attention of some tweeters were the messages from those people who found this not only offensive but in reading it also found that it triggered some of their own anxieties. This was eloquently expressed in a number of tweets and blogs.

Of course what we do not know are how many people, not just teachers but the wider community, read it and didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t respond because of the impact it had upon them. Though we try to encourage our colleagues to talk about what impacts and upsets them, we know that for every one who does, there will be at least one who doesn’t because they still feel a stigma around the topic of mental health.

Have a read of the Education Support Partnership Teacher Wellbeing Index 2018 and consider some of the statistics in the report:

• 31% of teachers experienced a mental health issue in the past year.
• 76% of education professionals have experienced behavioural, psychological or physical symptoms due to their work, compared with 60% of UK employees.
• 57% have experienced a mental health issue in the past academic year
• More than half of all education professionals have considered leaving the sector over the past two years as a result of health pressures.

The impact upon staff attendance at school and the further impact on schools with budgets stretched to the limit shows that we cannot take the matter of mental health lightly because it affects the whole school community.

Terminology such as ‘snowflake‘, ‘man up‘ or ‘grow a pair‘ is not helpful and is actually discriminatory.

Positive school cultures will allow for concerns, anxieties and stresses to be expressed and discussed without fear of derision, embarrassment or social stigma. Be a talking and a listening workplace, and let your staff know ‘it is ok not to be ok.’

Losing the Dressing Room, or why we need to be more Ole than José.

We like a sporting comparison at Healthy Toolkit HQ. In fact we can learn much, particularly in the leadership of wellbeing in our schools, from sports leadership and sports psychology.

José Mourinho, like Marmite, isn’t to everyone’s taste. His undoubted charm and tactical brilliance can be offset against his self-acknowledged arrogance and somewhat fractious relationship with club chairmen, directors and players.

“We have top players and, sorry if I’m arrogant, we have a top manager”, he announced on joining Chelsea for the first time, before adding, “Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.”

Football managers are of course employed with the anticipation that they will coach winning sides, hopefully with trophies to match.  A league champion eight times in four countries, Champions League winner twice and fifteen other trophies show he is no slouch. Large amounts of money to fund the purchase of quality players at Chelsea, Internazionale, Real Madrid and Manchester United probably helped too. Whether he would have produced the same results at more financially prudent clubs remains a rhetorical question.

Ultimately though did his arrogance, people management skills and sometimes confrontational style cost him his current role? It is suggested that, during a poor start to the current campaign, with players of the quality of Paul Pogba, a World Cup winner six months ago, plus a further ten players costing £400 million,  he ‘lost the dressing room’. ‘Losing the dressing room’ means losing respect from your playing staff. A week before Christmas, he was on his way.

Enter the baby-faced assassin, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, in an interim or caretaker role. Same players, new boss; form transformed overnight. Dismiss the ‘easy sides’ comments, these same players, dispirited a few weeks ago, have won eight games in succession, playing with the flair and confidence that fans of the Red Devils hold dear. Of course the winning run will end at some point but it cannot be dismissed that here are a group of happier players.

The link with school wellbeing? Well, replace ‘lost the dressing room’ with ‘lost the staffroom’ and then the link is less tenuous. Here at Healthy Toolkit HQ we often hear of wellbeing not being a priority, of lip service paid to it or of leadership behaviours which marginalise staff or raise their workload. It is these leaders that may ‘lose the staffroom’ and the trust of their staff to look after their mental and physical wellbeing in school.

The situation at Manchester United this season was about relationships between the manager and his players. Wellbeing is equally about the relationship between school leaders and their staff. Be more like Ole and less like José and the relationships are more likely to thrive.

In May 2019 Healthy Toolkit will be in print: our co-founder Andrew Cowley has written The Wellbeing Toolkit which can be pre-ordered here and in discussing the leadership of wellbeing, there are links to sports psychology and leadership, as well as to effective leadership of wellbeing, unpicking the myths around the subject and challenging leaders to make their workload and wellbeing decisions based on principles and values rather than be reactive.

Keep an eye on our tweets for news about publication.