Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What could the future of primary education look like? How we can take things from where they are now and improve them to make the situation better for the pupils, for the teachers and for everybody involved in primary education?
In each episode, Ed Finch will be talking to guests within the educational field to talk about how things are, how we want them to be and the actions we can take to get them from here to there.
[00:00:00] Ed Finch: You're listening to the Primary Futures podcast from Hamilton Brookes, a podcast about the big ideas and big questions in primary education, brought to you in partnership with Oxford Brookes University.
How are social and emotional needs driving what we're seeing in our schools today and what actions can we take to address them? These are the big questions that my guest Dr Jon Reid explores in this episode. Jon is a senior lecturer in special educational needs and disability whose research focuses on topics like teacher's emotional work, wellbeing, and the role of compassion. Let's join the conversation where I asked Jon about what he's seeing in schools now.
[00:00:43] Jon Reid: I mean, I think we're right to be hopeful.
There's so much happening now in terms of a shift in thinking, you know, actually the way that children with this additional needs are understood, this sort of change in, if you like, conceptualisation, which then influences understanding, which informs practice. So this kind of neurodiversity movement, I think is really powerful. You know, this sort of rethinking or sort of re understanding a whole range of individual differences, if you like, and focusing much more on capabilities, focusing much more on strengths, you know, focusing much more on the sort of, I think, the wonderful opportunities for adapting our pedagogy and practice to meet the needs of children with a whole variety of profiles in our education system. So I think that sort of change in thinking, understanding, moving away from this kind of very deficit, sort of problem difficulties based model, which of course is partly informed by the policy context and that we're looking for difficulties and we're looking for problems and we're looking for disorders to be able to then, you know, identify and recognise the kind of additional support needs that need to be put in place. But at the same time, recognising the kind of strengths that come with autism or the strengths that come with ADHD or all these other kind of labels, which currently are identified in the code of practice as being social, emotional, mental health difficulties or problems or disorders. But that shift in language and understanding is really, I think, powerful and positive.
I think the other shift that I'm really hopeful about is this movement away from thinking about children's behaviour as being, again, problematic or difficult and thinking more about sort of needs, you know, I mean, this is old school now, but what needs are the children communicating? I learned a wonderful phrase when I was working at a local therapeutic residential community school, and it really informed my thinking about children and their sort of interaction in the social context of schools. But it was, you know, what problem or difficulty is that child trying to solve with that behavior at that particular time?
[00:02:58] Ed Finch: How does it serve them?
[00:03:00] Jon Reid: How does it serve them? What are they looking for? You know, how can we respond at this particular time? And I think again, this sort of move towards more relational pedagogy, this is really exciting for me. I mean, it's sort of informed by an understanding of, if you like, developmental psychology, attachment theory, you know, trauma informed practice and relational approaches to understanding, I think, to stress.
[00:03:27] Ed Finch: So I really recognise from my experience as a teacher in England, in the UK, that see change from ten years ago to now, our understanding and our recognition of kids who are neurodiverse and adults, colleagues as well, because it's not just that, you know, the colleague who might have been a bit of a strange one or a bit of an outsider in the staff from ten years ago is, I think a lot better understood, more welcome in our school, is that a picture that's true internationally?
[00:03:55] Jon Reid: I mean, I think if you're just going back on that point there, I think actually the teaching profession needs more diversity around neurodiversity and I'm certainly from my perspective as somebody that's involved in initial teacher education, recognising that more and more students feel confident to share their additional needs in terms of our own higher education pedagogy. where adapting our provision, our pedagogy and practice to work with a more diverse student population who are then going on to becoming a more neurodiverse teaching population.
[00:04:26] Ed Finch: models, diverse role models and like people who understand how hard those bits are, yeah, there's a bit of a tension, I think, in England, maybe in the UK, but certainly in England between people who, they're more, just need clear rules, you just need to tell them what to do, to manage thousand people moving around a big building, I understand it. So I'm wondering how we square the circle. How do we, you know, join the dots between the people who just say, no, it's about silent corridors and sitting down and the people who say, no, it's about meeting the child where they are, is there a middle way there?
[00:04:57] Jon Reid: Okay, so I think that's a really interesting, I'm going to call that a professional dilemma, okay and I think something I've explored in my own research is around this sort of, again, I'm going to extend that notion of a professional dilemma into what you might call a therapeutic dilemma, because actually what we're seeing at the moment is a huge increase in the number of children exhibiting mental health needs. Okay, we're seeing a huge, well, in fact, we're seeing increases across the board, we're seeing an increase in the number of children entering the care system, for example, we're seeing now one in five children with a potentially or probable diagnosable mental health need.
[00:05:33] Ed Finch: And this is a picture internationally.
[00:05:35] Jon Reid: I mean, this is the UK, the NHS digital carry out longitudinal surveys every year, pre pandemic, through the pandemic, post pandemic. The DfE used to quote one in 10, children with a problem mental health need one in five now up to sort of 23 point something young people between the ages of 17 and 19 now and most of these sort of needs are associated with what you might call emotional disorders. Now, children aren't born with emotional disorders, these are socially experienced and sort of occurring because of circumstances, poverty, deprivation, you know, thinking about destitution, homelessness in families, you know, all these kind of social circumstances, you know, concerns about climate change, war internationally, these are concerns that children globally experience, actually and I think, you know, internationally it's the same children we're thinking about the circumstances might be very different, but England has a very particular policy context, which is very different across the UK, in fact, actually. If you look at the number of exclusions in England, fixed term suspensions or permit exclusions, they've been rising steadily over the years. Permit exclusions in England are off the scale, really quite concerning. If you look at our national neighbours, you know, think about policy and practice in Wales, for example, or Scotland. It's a very different understanding of children. So Scotland, for example, reduced their exclusions to one per exclusion. England, I think, in one term, it was like three thousand, something like that. So there's a real sort of tension that teachers are experiencing at the moment around the policy documentation and guidance, behaviour in schools, as it's now called, rather than behaviour in disciplinary schools and the other DfE policy, mental health and behaviour in schools, they couldn't be more different really in terms of the guidance that's happening and when I talk about this therapeutic dilemma in education, teachers are not therapists, I appreciate that, you know, they may or may not have a sort of background in developmental psychology or, you know and so on. But teaching, I think, is a relational profession. It's about relationships and so I think we can work in ways that are therapeutically informed with our children, but we're working in a particular professional context, which is very different. The sort of educational experiences for many teachers in England at the moment is a system of kind of, if you like, competition and comparison and compliance and control. You know, once you introduce sort of comparison and competition, then we get inspections, which have a sort of impact on teachers. We have this sort of performativity, accountability that teachers are working around and so on and there was a very interesting paper written by a sociologist a number of years around the sort of impact of these kind of performative cultures, leaving no room to care, you know and I think that's interesting sometimes to think about that kind of dilemma.
[00:08:33] Ed Finch: Because I think people go into teaching because they're interested in young people. But I think if the structures around them tell them it really is about the GCSE results or it really is about the school's place on the performance table, it can change the focus just sufficient percent to make a big difference to the young people in their care.
[00:08:53] Jon Reid: I think so, yeah and I think something else I'm really interested in as well is that this understanding of what teachers do in their daily interactions with children and young people. Now my background, my sort of professional background is really working in the special education area. So I've worked in schools that cater for children and their labels usually around complex learning needs, communication difficulties and challenging behavior, whatever, you know,
whatever that...
might look like. Yeah, so these are children often that have experienced quite a significant adversity or, you know, have a variety of different conditions that would be recognised under the SEMH label.
[00:09:30] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:09:30] Jon Reid: And what I became very interested in is understanding the attributes of teachers that work most effectively with children that are quite often distressed, disengaged
[00:09:44] Ed Finch: Yeah. disaffected.
So, so What did he find, you know, in, in our terms? What...
[00:09:49] Jon Reid: Well.
[00:09:50] Ed Finch: What are the magic bullets.
[00:09:51] Jon Reid: Well, the magic bullets, I mean this is all part of, I suppose it's part of my doctoral journey, which took ten years. It was a long old journey and possibly around my professional reflection of having worked in these settings. Teaching is an intellectually demanding profession. There's lots of planning, preparation, there's thinking about how to ensure that the learning is engaging, that you're meeting the needs of thirty, thirty three children, many of which might be, you know, having additional learning needs and so on, cognitively demanding profession. Physically demanding as well, often you know, you're on your feet all day, you're, you might be joining the children at break time, you're engaging in activities, PE, dance, drama and all that sort of stuff.
Something I think which is neglected in policy discourse and I think the research content as well, is the emotional work of teachers. Now, for me, the emotional work of teachers is different to the intellectual and the physical demands of the role. It's because we work with children, young people, parents, carers, colleagues, external visitors. We're constantly trying to create a certain climate in our classroom where the young people and children that we work with feel cared about, respected, understood. We're trying to ensure that the learning is genuinely engaging, that we can be empathetic, we can be sensitive. That is another form of thinking, very complex thinking. Moment to moment, is that child engaged? What's happening with that child? What's this child going home to? What have they come from? This is what I think around emotional work and I wonder around whether some of these sort of issues that we're seeing around the stress and distress experience in the teaching profession is created by the emotional demands of the work. I mean the Education to Support Partnership Annual Teacher Wellbeing Index, it's not happy reading. Seventy Eight percent of all education staff identify as being stressed, rising to ninety five percent of headteachers feeling stressed actually. High numbers experiencing burnout and burnout can be to do with workload. The language of responding to teacher well being from DfE is often around reducing workload and it's about working smarter and it's about you know, all this kind of stuff. There's no recognition of the emotional impact of the work and if we're recognising that the sort of emotional, social and emotional needs of our children and young people are increasing, there are quite big concerns about the well being of children because teachers care, and because they're trying to work in ways that are sensitively and authentically attuned to the children's experiences, then this emotional work has an impact on them.
[00:12:26] Ed Finch: They end up carrying some, of that load and if you've got 300 children in your primary school, that's a lot of load and then the families and I think that headteachers themselves are not always skilled at recognising that's where their work has come from. So they will externalise, they say, you know, I'm struggling because of Ofsted is often identified and I don't deny that Ofsted's a stressor, but I think it's an easy one to pin it on when in actual fact what's really happening is you're carrying too much.
[00:12:56] Jon Reid: Who supports the headteachers? You know, this is the other interesting dilemma here, isn't it? The headteachers recognise the children that they're supporting in their local community and their needs. They recognise the needs of the teachers that are supporting the children and the families and I wonder then, what's that level of support for the head teachers? Because actually, I mean, I think if we were thinking about the role of social care or the role of psychologists and therapists and so on, they all have regular spaces to talk about.
[00:13:23] Ed Finch: They have supervision. I don't think I know very many heads at all, if any, who have regular supervision. I know SENCOs who do, and I think the SENCOs need the supervision, but I think it's extraordinary that it's provided for SENCOs, but it is not expected or normal. It should be a national expectation that the head teachers are having regular supervision,
[00:13:42] Jon Reid: so. I think so and again, from my sort of background, working in special schools, these were all, if you like, SEMH special
[00:13:48] Ed Finch: schools, Mm-Hmm.
[00:13:49] Jon Reid: there were some, you know, schools that had regular reflective spaces. You can call them reflective spaces or you can call them supervision. Some had supervision, some had these other spaces, but these were non judgmental, regular opportunities to talk about how the work impacts the adults emotionally and I think that was really positive in terms of teachers having the space to talk about the impact of the work. You know, actually this child, you know, I'm really concerned because this is happening, or, the holidays are coming up, I know this child is particularly vulnerable and at risk of so and so. I'm not sure how to respond when this child does this, but you can engage then in these kind of really important professional conversations that are informed by teachers other expertise, these sort of professional conversations, it's not performance management, it's not about other aspects of the work, it's just about the relational experiences that are happening. Having looked at what worked effectively in these schools as part of my own research, it really did boil down to time and space to talk.
[00:14:48] Ed Finch: So it's emotional safety, because interestingly, when we talked to Patrick Alexander, he was talking about the need of teachers to feel that they have a professional space in which they have agency and they're creating their own understandings and their own practice and that seems to be very important. But that plays of emotional safety where you can go, do you know what, he's a hard job. It gets to me, I don't know what I'm going to do with this kid because either he's doing my nut in, because his behaviours, which I recognise stem from a certain need and I respect that, but it also makes it very hard for me to teach my class, you know, I need to be able to do that safely and I need to say, and I'm so worried because he's going to be at home for six weeks over the summer and I don't know what that's going to look like for him.
[00:15:28] Jon Reid: And to know that your colleague feels the same. Actually, I feel like this, you know, this child really moves me in a way that I'm struggling to understand. Or actually, you know, how is it that you supported this young person last year? You worked with them, you developed a good rapport and relationship with them, what worked for you? You know, actually with parents and carers, what's working at home, these sort of...
[00:15:48] Ed Finch: And often that conversation comes down to the person saying, I was trying my best. I was floundering, I was, I felt I was struggling and go, Oh, but you seemed so confident. I looked at you and I thought this person knows what they're doing. That bit where we all go, do you know what? It's a messy human business. None of us know what we're doing!
[00:16:03] Jon Reid: And sometimes it works there and sometimes it doesn't. But actually, I think that's really important. As teachers, we are very, in fact, it's part of our kind of professional expectations that we're critically reflective practitioners. You know, actually that's what we often, we think about our practice. We think about actually, well, that worked, that didn't work, you know, I need to, you know, I need to change that, or that didn't work because, but that critical reflective element of our practice can become quite debilitating, actually, if it becomes self criticism and actually it's then associated with sort of...
[00:16:33] Ed Finch: Genuinely, it's a fine line, isn't it? Because we need to be vulnerable as teachers so that we're aware to what we're doing, what we're doing well, and what we're not doing well and that's a really small clip from there, which might happen because of something else in our wellbeing, where that turns from a useful process to a toxic process.
[00:16:49] Jon Reid: Yeah. You used the word sort of emotional safe spaces, these sort of non judgmental spaces where you can authentically talk about the difficulties you're experiencing, without it then becoming something like, well, this teacher's not coping or actually this now a performance management concern. Actually, this is part of professional conversations that I found this really difficult and it's okay that I found this difficult, how can we then collaborate together to resolve this?
[00:17:13] Ed Finch: I think that's really hard in today's teaching. I mean, there are schools which are fabulous. I get to visit a lot of schools and I love it. I go to schools where I could just feel the joy in the building and I know these people are happy to be here, they feel safe, they know supported, they can do mad things because they think they might work and sometimes they do, you know? I love that and when I visit those schools, so it's, not system wide in the sense that it's everywhere, but you do visit a lot of schools where you know it doesn't feel like that and where the pressures are applying onto the head teacher and then being passed down, I think, is
[00:17:44] Jon Reid: that, that, I think is the ethos and culture, the feel of the school, isn't it? As you say, you visit schools often, you can walk into a school and you feel this sort of vibe, don't you? You feel this sort of connection between the adults and you, see it in their conversations, their relational experiences and all that sort of stuff and again, that's really interesting because around teacher well being, I mean, there's lots of kind of initiatives that can happen that can support teacher well being that's really important. A lot of it's around actually professional self care, if you like, you know, the sort of looking at knowing that you're looking after yourself. But the other element, I think, comes from your feeling thought about this was a phrase that came from one of the participants from our research, actually there was sort of caring concern for others in your school and I think that feeling thought about is really powerful, that actually if somebody's just checking in with you occasionally, how's it going this morning? Or, you know, I noticed you might be feeling like this. The same way we talk to the children, young people, where they might be experiencing their own emotional needs.
[00:18:39] Ed Finch: And this is important to us because we care about our colleagues wellbeing, you know, we have to take that seriously. So how, if I can't bring my best self to work, how can I deliver for the young people?
[00:18:49] Jon Reid: I mean this is really interesting as well, this is again nothing new around, this sort of Professor Catherine Weir, who did a lot of work around the social emotional aspects of learning materials, you know, this is sort of, not long after I started teaching, we had excellent enjoyment, you know, we had sort of...
[00:19:04] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:19:05] Jon Reid: Actually I really like the SEAL resources, used well in a primary context, talking about social emotional aspects of learning is really, I think, important and so Professor Catherine Weir says, you know, well being starts with the staff and I think this is one of our biggest sort of concerns presently in education is actually, probably nothing more important, really, than the well being of our teachers in terms of the broadest educational professional community working in our schools because it's so important. I mean, okay, what we're teaching is important, how we're teaching is important, you know, why we're teaching is important. But it's not as important as those doing the teaching.
[00:19:43] Ed Finch: No, because you could have the best curriculum resources in the world. But if the teacher who's delivering them doesn't feel valued, doesn't feel they'd have a voice. Doesn't feel emotionally safe.
[00:19:53] Jon Reid: Is tired, is exhausted.
[00:19:54] Ed Finch: Ain't going to come over, are they?
[00:19:55] Jon Reid: Is anxious, is fearful, you know, these emotions, they interrupt the sort of, we know for children, you know, children aren't learning if they're emotionally distressed, you know, if they're hungry, if they're tired. It's, why are we not thinking in this way about our teachers? You know, it's sort of, then I think there's something that must change, I think these stats around teacher well being, retention, recruitment of teachers is concerning. It's not all about workload. I mean, you join teaching knowing that it's professionally demanding, you know, by the time you become a teacher, you know, actually, that all those kind of pedagogic decisions you're making every day and all the kind of professional demands, if you like, I mean, I think teachers love teaching. I love teaching, I'm a teacher, I love teaching. As soon as I'm in the classroom, whether it's with primary school children, secondary school children, adults in higher education, as soon as my doors close and I'm teaching and I'm interacting, that's the joy of the sort of relational experiences, it's the sort of seeing my undergrads now arrive, let's say, concerned about talking in public, worried they're going to get things wrong, you know, not sure how to write an academic essay, to see them graduate and I'm very proud, coming out with a first some of these young people. I mean, it's absolutely amazing all the bureaucracy and everything else I find very tedious all the admin I find very tedious.
[00:21:14] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:21:14] Jon Reid: If that could be reduced brilliant, but I think it's you know Teachers love teaching. It's everything else around them that we need to be better at supporting them from.
[00:21:21] Ed Finch: Well, I'll tell you what, when we come back after the break, we'll get into how we can make things better then. But right now, let's think about that, teachers love teaching, let's see if we can lift some of the barriers and let them crack on. Let's take a break and come back afterwards talk about Primary Futures.
So Jon, before the break we were talking about, well we were talking about a lot of things, but it came down to teachers love teaching and when a teacher feels safe and happy in their classroom they can do a better job for the children they're caring for and there's a lot of stuff that gets in the way. So should we imagine that we've got not quite a magic wand, but we've got our hands on the tiller of government and we can co opt public opinion and we can make SLTs feel empowered to do the right thing. What do we want them to do? Five years from now, what are we going to see?
[00:22:13] Jon Reid: I think a continuation of this journey towards sort of developing teacher professional understanding, I think this sort of current focus on cognitive aspects of learning is important. To learn, we have to retain information. There are certain ways of memorising information.
[00:22:31] Ed Finch: We can make that more effectively.
[00:22:33] Jon Reid: This is again, nothing new, going back to sort of, you know, excellence and enjoyment, all that sort of stuff. That was the first time I'd come across the sort of notion of metacognition. Learning how to learn, you know, actually. So we've had a long history of supporting children's ability to You know, remember and recall information so that the focus on cognitive psychology and all those sort of COGPSY approaches are valuable, will continue to be valuable because... but for me, I think learning is more than just being able to retain information in memory and I think we need to be encouraging more professional understanding about the social and emotional aspects of the learning experiences. I think, you know, actually becoming more a sort of physiologically informed professional would be useful, understanding the biology of distress. I think we're moving in the right direction with things like, you know, trauma informed practice and so on. Something I'm particularly interested in is Stephen Porger's work around polyvagal theory. So how it is that the body responds to essentially cues within the environment, risk and safety and I think if we can, we go back to your, the importance of connection, belonging, you know, those kind of experiences of safety are really physiologically important for our children, young people, particularly those with additional needs. So actually creating emotionally sort of safe spaces and they can, you know, can be informed by sort of all these approaches that tend to be additional interventions, like nurture group approaches, for example, attachment aware schools, you know, trauma informed practice, they're all underpinned by, you know, very sound sort of ideas for developmental psychology about relational connection experiences, care, compassion, all that sort of stuff. So I think, you know, cognitive aspects of learning are important, more focus on the social emotional aspects of learning, I think, would be really beneficial to children and to the adults.
[00:24:21] Ed Finch: In our five year plan and we put, we're putting that into ITT, I think that's a, you know, we'll do that, won't we, but how are we going to backfill this for all our huge numbers of teachers? You know, if it would be really beneficial, wouldn't it?
[00:24:32] Jon Reid: It would be really beneficial, but actually if we could just stick on the ITE model, I think that's really interesting at the moment. There are so many different routes into initial teacher education, presently.
I think we could revise how it is that teachers are educated and I'd like to return to the notion of initial teacher education rather than initial teacher training. I don't think we're training teachers. I think we're educating teachers and our European and international colleagues would be surprised at how quickly teachers can become teachers in England, I think.
[00:25:02] Ed Finch: So my friend Ross Wilson wrote a book, It Takes Five Years to Become a Teacher and I think that's a good rule of thumb, isn't it? At the end of your first year of teaching, you're quite good at delivering some stuff and you can fool yourself that you're there because you're delivering it, it takes quite a while before you get into that flow where you can see everything that's going on. So we should you know by the end of our five years, we'll have a new teacher education framework that says yes, it takes five years to become a teacher and these are the competence you will see developing and here's the resources and the guidance you'll need to get towards them.
[00:25:35] Jon Reid: And I think here's the funding, you know, here's the funding to become a, you know, I would probably think about changing the first three years of initial teacher education to the study of education. I would have a three year undergraduate degree around education studies. What is education internationally, in the UK, in England, how does policy inform practice? What does the research say about, you know, practice? Is the research, you know, aligned with policy? Maybe not. Then how do we critique these ideas?
[00:26:07] Ed Finch: Wouldn't be great if in our first year we're doing, we're not doing teaching practice, we're doing teaching observation, we're doing longitudinal embedded visits into schools where we're seeing, oh that's how it works.
[00:26:18] Jon Reid: That's how it works here. But actually, it's very different over here and that works differently. I mean, yeah, longer term placements in special schools, for example. I think, you know, this sort of collaboration between the expertise in the special school sector and the expertise of course, in the mainstream sector, but working with the same kind of children in different provisions.
[00:26:38] Ed Finch: Wouldn't that be powerful? Wouldn't that be powerful? Yeah, I think colleagues who work in primary don't get to see what life's like in secondary. Secondary teachers don't know what happens in proogs. Proog teachers think that people who work in special schools are some special kind of angel because, you know, we don't know.
[00:26:56] Jon Reid: And that's to do with an education system that is so founded on separation and segregation. I mean, this is my experience of working in the special school sector is that I started off as a mainstream primary school teacher and I developed a particular interest in supporting children that actually, you know, struggled actually at times in their education. So I was really keen to learn more about how to support children with additional needs and then I was lucky enough to work for the local authority. We used to have a Behaviour Advisory Service.
[00:27:24] Ed Finch: I remember that back in the day.
[00:27:26] Jon Reid: Back in the day. So I was one of the behavior support teachers, I got to visit loads of different schools and all that sort of stuff and that really crystallised my ambition to work in, work with children, you know, essentially that would end up being excluded from mainstream school. But what tends to happen is when children move beyond mainstream, the journey continues in a different direction. I mean, it's...
[00:27:46] Ed Finch: Diverged.
[00:27:47] Jon Reid: Yeah, diverged away from the community, away from family, away from the relationships that began to, you know, develop previously and I think, again, the government should be, rather than essentially funding exclusion,
should really be investing more heavily in inclusion.
[00:28:03] Ed Finch: If you were to take what you've learned and go back to a mainstream classroom, surely that would make, you know, life, I would have thought a great deal easier, wouldn't it? Because I could see what's going on here.
[00:28:12] Jon Reid: I mean, again, it's really interesting that the pedagogy and practice in special schools is often innovative and it's often really creative and it's often really responsive. But there's no secrets. There's no, you know, top tips for working with children with special needs or anything like that. It's just really good pedagogy and it's really good practice and it's really good knowledge and understanding of your children. It's knowing about how the environment might impact on particular needs, it's about, you know, our sort of non verbal communication, it's about our verbal communication, it's expert teaching, isn't it?
[00:28:47] Ed Finch: It's not about, well that's fine because you haven't got the expectation of academic qualifications, because in a lot of special schools kids are getting academic qualifications, they're getting their English GCSE and their Maths GCSE You know, that is happening, but it's taking innovative pedagogy to make that...
[00:29:02] Jon Reid: Yeah and again, I think, you know, Patrick might again agree on this note, is that it's actually very much around what we expect our children to gain through their schooling experiences. You know, that they need GCSEs, then they need A Levels, then they need a this, then they need that, then they need this. I think we should be, you know, really kind of recognising the wealth of children's experiences and often some of those experiences aren't, there's not a qualification
[00:29:28] Ed Finch: No. You speak to parents and carers in communities, which again I've been lucky enough to do a lot recently, they often talk about life skills and I kind of think sometimes it's a bit of a cargo cult, you know and sometimes you talk about, well, what do you think you mean by life skills? And you get, well, different people mean very different things. But nonetheless that school is beyond that, people say, well the greatest gift you can give to a child is a good set of GCSE results, well, maybe, but not if they can't operate in society.
[00:29:57] Jon Reid: No, I mean, again, not if it leads to sort of limited curriculum opportunities and pressure around, again, this sort of accountability and performativity culture. I mean, more and more now I'm able to see are really ambitious aspirational young people who haven't had the same kind of formal educational experiences and didn't get this, to get the next level, to get the next level, but would do incredibly well in higher education.
[00:30:26] Ed Finch: You see this with home educated children, don't
you? yeah.
[00:30:29] Jon Reid: How is it that we can then recognise the experiences that they've gained actually outside the school context? I mean, I'm just hopeful that I met a young person at a conference recently and he gave a really inspirational 15 minute speech. He was a young person with quite complex disabilities, who felt very let down by the education system. At every opportunity, he'd been promised that he'd get this qualification, so he worked hard for it, and then he found out he hadn't been entered for the GCSEs, for example and then he'd gone on to do this, and they, didn't have the funding to meet his medical needs and therefore and now he's 21, and he gave the most articulate speech to headteachers, you know, SENCOs so on in Oxfordshire recently and concluded by saying my aspiration is to attend Oxford Brookes University and to, I'd like to get a qualification in either film or creative writing and in the absence of being in a formal education context, he's been doing lots of music production, he's been doing lots of youth work and mentoring of other young people, he's been writing poetry, he's been writing music, he's produced an album that's been released somewhere digitally. These are talents that we need to be recognising and it's not going to be coming through the formal, I've got an A Level in this, or I've got two GCSEs in this.
[00:31:51] Ed Finch: But if you had a portfolio of attainment if that was something you could take to Oxford Brookes University and say, okay, I don't have three A levels, but look at this. If that was something that you could accept and then I think this pushes back to schools because to me, and you might not agree with them, one of the greatest limiters on schools is progress aid. If I'm a secondary school head teacher, you know, my school is judged by my Progress 8 score, that doesn't include any art subjects currently. I'm pretty sure that the new government are pledged to change that, but at the moment, my music, my drama, my fine art, that can't count that. So how are they incentivised to give that? But young people thrive on that. A lot of young people, not just kids who are going to go into creative industries, but a lot of young people need that in their lives.
[00:32:34] Jon Reid: And the knock on of that, of course, you see is those are the subjects that are being then reduced in higher education, you know, the sort of arts, the creative subjects, the things that, you know, we need as a culture.
[00:32:44] Ed Finch: A, we haven't got the pipeline coming through of young people who are going to apply for them, and B, it's just clear that our society doesn't really think they value that. We don't value the Beatles, David Hockney, I mean, we could go on forever, couldn't we? You know, the idea that Britain is a powerhouse, creative community, but we don't value it in our progress aid.
[00:33:03] Jon Reid: Or, yeah, or encouraging that creativity all the way through. So, I mean, that, that's interesting, isn't it? But so I think, you know, in terms of moving forward, I think we need an education system that is less about
[00:33:15] Ed Finch: control, Mm hmm.
[00:33:18] Jon Reid: which seems to be fueling quite a lot of the issues for our children, young people and the adults that are working in schools, moving more towards an education system that is actually at the heart of the education system is about sort of care and compassion, collaboration and creativity.
[00:33:34] Ed Finch: So an idea I wanted to try out on you is that we've really worked ourselves into a whole with the term SEND, S E N D, and it comes from my, you know, observation of classes where I've got four children on the same register, one of whom's got profound physical difficulties, but no, you know, intellectual impairment at all, another child who's very able physically, but has significant learning difficulties and two more of some in between and they're batched into the same parcel of data and the school is asked, you know, what are your scores for SEND? You're putting children into a basket who are in no way a group and I think that causes us to look at children as, you know, as a homogenous group who have little to nothing in common and I'm wondering if we just said we need to remove that term, what happens if we remove the term SEND?
[00:34:28] Jon Reid: I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because currently we focus on, this is not my term at all, but the dilemma of difference, you know, this sort of notion that actually to get the support for the children, you know, irrespective of whether that's to do with an aspect of learning, whether it's around an aspect of emotional, you know, need or whether it's around a sort of We always try and put them into these categories which don't work terribly well, because many of the children that we're thinking about actually may have more than one need and may meet more than one of these criteria and again, you know, you think about the current SEND code of practice. I mean, the most significant change in 2015 was the change from social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties, now into social, emotional, mental health difficulties. They've only changed one word behaviour, but conceptually that's had a huge impact on the teaching profession. Some might say that's been a positive shift because behaviour, we only look at the observable experience. Now, we're now looking at a socio emotional and potentially mental health need. So that's a different professional expectation on teachers, isn't it? And I wonder whether that will change again, because actually, what we're finding is that, particularly given current and previous global circumstances, children are experiencing distress and emotional needs, but whether they need a label, whether that's helpful or not. So there's interesting things there about, you know, some of these needs is a neurological basis, autism, for example, ADHD and so on, these are, you know, neurodevelopmental differences, if you like and again, I think we're going to see language change over time. I really hope, you know, moving away from this sort of focus on, you know, problems, difficulties, or disorders. If you look at any of the policy documents, that's what we're thinking about with children with additional needs, for example. So the language might change, and that then changes our understanding and our conceptualisation. I mean, I think we have to understand that we're working with individuals, we're working with, you know, human individuals in a hugely diverse world, some of which are going to need additional support and that additional support might be temporary, some of it might be more longer term. But I think we've got to be quite cautious of the kind of labelling debate.
[00:36:42] Ed Finch: It doesn't need to pathologise.
[00:36:43] Jon Reid: No.
[00:36:44] Ed Finch: You are struggling to attend school, you've got issues with anxiety, for you school at the moment does not seem like a safe place be.
[00:36:50] Jon Reid: Exactly, what's happening within the environment?
[00:36:51] Ed Finch: Doesn't mean there's nothing wrong with you, but that does mean we need to figure this out.
[00:36:54] Jon Reid: Yeah and again, you know, things like, you know, ADHD for example, is currently recognised in the sort of mental health category within the Code of Practice. But if I talk to young people with a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, they might not necessarily associate it with being a mental health need or difficulty, it can become.
[00:37:11] Ed Finch: Well it will come, if it's described as such, it
[00:37:15] Jon Reid: also If the support is not in place and children then feel, you know, actually their educational experience or even their experience more generally in society and so on is where they're isolated or they feel, you know, unhappy or that there's no positive attitudes around them, they've experienced a lot of self criticism. So, you know, but really it's a sort of cognitive difference, isn't it? Really ADHD is sort of around concentration or focused attention, all that sort of stuff. So...
[00:37:38] Ed Finch: You and I know people with ADHD who are absolutely flying professionally and personally, and who might describe aspects of their ADHD as helpful in that area. Other aspects they might describe as less helpful.
[00:37:50] Jon Reid: Depends on the context, depends on the expectations, depends on what you're doing in terms of, you know, your role and the way you're understood. I mean, I think actually, I think our next generation of teachers have a greater awareness around the need to adapt their pedagogy and their practice to allow, you know, Children opportunities to move, you know, or to present their learning in a different way. A lot of the barriers that our children experience are in the environment, actually, aren't they? And if we can remove those barriers, I mean, it goes back to the sort of policy context of adaptive teaching, reasonable adjustments, you know. Then actually, you know, it is interesting that our educational system is basically sort of set up around the support only happening when children have experienced quite extreme failure or real difficulties and the problems begin to escalate to the point that we now need to put in an intervention or we now need to support things.
[00:38:39] Ed Finch: So five years from now we're saying we're going to radically change what inspection looks like. Teacher training is going to have far more about child development and then the psychological...
[00:38:48] Jon Reid: Education, interdisciplinary, psychology, philosophy, history, sociology.
[00:38:53] Ed Finch: All going to be there, we're going to have schools which are safe spaces for teachers, safe spaces for children, where we can be truly adaptive and innovative when we know that's the right thing, when we feel empowered to have a go, because we're not so worried about getting it wrong, because we're not going to tumble down the league table or get told off by Ofsted.
[00:39:09] Jon Reid: Experiment in your teaching, you can be much more autonomous, you can be much more free...
[00:39:12] Ed Finch: Oh my lord, it sounds good.
[00:39:13] Jon Reid: ...creative, much more flexible in your pedagogy and practice.
[00:39:17] Ed Finch: Jon, when in five years from now, you and I are both going to be back in the classroom teaching, aren't we? Sounds like it.
[00:39:23] Jon Reid: Yeah, but this is exciting. I mean, this is the teaching that I hope our new generation of teachers still come to do. That they've worked with teachers that are inspirational.
[00:39:31] Ed Finch: Let's say if they're training now, they should be seeing in five years, this should be just like, well, of course it's like this!
[00:39:35] Jon Reid: Yeah, of course, what do you mean about these dark years of
[00:39:37] Ed Finch: be old people in the corner of the club, staff room saying how it used to be and they'll be like, that doesn't sound very convincing. They must've...
[00:39:43] Jon Reid: That doesn't sound great. How did you stay in the job for so long!
[00:39:45] Ed Finch: So what can we do like right now? What can we do on Monday morning to start taking those steps towards professional autonomy, towards that safe space, knowing that we're still within the system we're in?
[00:39:57] Jon Reid: Yeah, I mean, I think, okay, we can subvert the system. I think it's really important that we do have that sort of professional confidence, if you like, to be informed by the research that actually, you know, really does celebrate diversity. Let's think about the language of additional needs, for example. Move away from the language of, you know, problems, difficulties and disorders. We're seeing that, we can do that tomorrow. Let's think about additional needs, additional learning needs, let's think about differences, let's think about capabilities, you know, let's think about strengths, these are all things that every child that we work with has, irrespective of their SEND, whatever that might be. I mean, I think it's really interesting to think about the language change. If you change the language, it changes our conceptualisation. Even things like getting rid of behaviour policies and replacing them with, like a relational based policy.
[00:40:49] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:40:50] Jon Reid: You know, there's some really innovative headteachers out there that have just got rid of the language of behavior management. I mean, I do think that if we step away from the idea that, as adults, we have to manage children's behaviour, I mean, so much of the evidence suggests that actually it takes a long time to understand feeling and emotion. I still find it quite difficult, but I get supported, you know, we can support each other through, I mean, a new language at the moment is around emotional regulation and co regulation.
[00:41:18] Ed Finch: I think Gareth Morwood's work is great on co regulation, isn't it? I think that's a real way forward, teachers, you could do a bit of reading over the summer.
[00:41:26] Jon Reid: Yeah, Stephen Porges, read about polyvagal theory, read about sort of the human responses to risk and safety.
[00:41:32] Ed Finch: And it's so much more exciting as a teacher and as a professional when you're topping up your understanding and moving on and you feel like you've got some agency in the game then, don't you?
[00:41:40] Jon Reid: You really do and I think I would encourage you to read anything by Professor Paul Gilbert. Professor Paul Gilbert writes about compassion. He actually writes about compassion from a kind of therapeutic perspective, he's developed a branch of psychotherapy, really therapy, called Compassion Focused Therapy. He's developing Compassion Focused Therapy for over 50 years and it's usually been applied in kind of one to one or group context, but much more now is thinking about organisational application of compassion and it led to the some thinking in my own sort of doctrine because it is very much informed by evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, affect the psychology of emotions, draws on Buddhist psychology as well. It's actually a sort of recognition of difficulties and distress in ourselves and others but being motivated to do something about it.
[00:42:33] Ed Finch: Our time's running close, but if we were to underline the word compassion and say we want a system which is compassionate to the adults and the young people in it, be a good way to sum up what we've been talking about this afternoon, wouldn't it!
[00:42:45] Jon Reid: Yeah, reimagining education, read the last couple of pages of my doctoral research where I've conceptualised, because is only a conceptualisation, but compassion focused education. What would education be like if actually it was underpinned by the principle of compassion? That actually everything we do in education is about wellbeing,
[00:43:02] Ed Finch: it's
[00:43:03] Jon Reid: about flourishing, it's about, you know, care for others, empathy, connection, awareness of difficulties, doing something about it, it's about actually facilitating compassion, our interactions with others, parents,
[00:43:16] Ed Finch: errors.
[00:43:17] Jon Reid: senior leaders, you know, community, that sense of belonging and family and so on, where actually caring concern is happening all the time, people feel thought about. It's about sort of putting in place initiatives that promote well being, not just on a one day a year, but every day. What is it we're doing when our children arrive or our colleagues arrive? To use a quote from my doctoral research, it's more than just cupcakes in pigeonholes, which I thought was brilliant. Amplifying what we already do around care for others is loads of really good wellbeing stuff happening in schools, do more of it. Sometimes we need to protect our children and our colleagues from things that are happening, we can subvert the policy context by doing it slightly differently, for example. Actually, if you read policy particularly carefully, there are usually ways that you can say this is our statutory responsibility too, which means I'm going to do more of this. if you're looking at children in care or looking after children, all that sort of stuff. So filtering out some of the stuff that might have a negative impact on well being and engaging in compassionate resistance. I mean, this is it, compassionate non conformity, I think, is the future for teaching. Resisting stuff that we know is going to have a negative impact on ourselves and other people.
[00:44:26] Ed Finch: There we go, friends, you heard it here. Compassionate non conformity. If it ain't gonna do you any good and it ain't gonna do the kids any good...
[00:44:35] Jon Reid: Don't do
[00:44:35] Ed Finch: it.
Don't do it. Thank
[00:44:37] Jon Reid: and it is going to do you good, and it's going to do the kids good, do more of
[00:44:40] Ed Finch: it.
Yeah, do it anyway. Just don't tell their head, it'll be fine. Thank you so much, Jon. What a great, lesson and I, you know, we didn't go in all the places I thought we were going to go, but we went some very interesting places. Thank you very much for sharing your primary futures with us.
[00:44:54] Jon Reid: Very kind. Thank you for your time.
[00:44:58] Ed Finch:
So which ideas would you like to take away from this conversation? Download the Primary Pledge card in the show notes to continue the conversation and note actions that you'd like to take. Share your Primary Pledge card with us and fellow educators by tagging Hamilton Brooks on social media. At Primary Futures, we're on a mission to build a better future for primary education. You can help us to spread the word by leaving a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to help more educators discover us and the inspiring conversations we have with our guests.