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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. What does LGBTQIA plus representation and inclusion look like in education today? Where are we now and how did we get here? And how can we move forward to build greater inclusion in primary schools? These are big questions that my guest Ian Eagleton explores in this episode. Ian's a former teacher and author who's passionate about motivating children to read and write, to become reflective writers, and he's written many children's books such as Glitter Boy, Nen and the Lonely Fisherman, and The Boy Who Cried Ghost, to mention just a few. Let's join the conversation where I asked Ian about positive trends that he's seeing in the primary schools that he visits.
[00:00:57] Ian Eagleton: First of all, I'm always encouraged by the fact that they're inviting me in, I think. They usually invite me in for two reasons. One is because I'm an author and the other I think a lot of the time and they ask me to share my story is because I'm an openly gay man who's a dad and happy to talk about my experiences in school. So that's the first thing I'm always very excited when they sort of contact me and, you know, there's a lot of times I get invited in for sort of a pride event or something like that they might be having. Sometimes they'll talk to me and say like, you know, we have same sex parents and we just really want to make sure that they feel included and that their families are reflected in the work we do and the people we bring in, which is lovely. I was in a school yesterday and they had some fabulous books out on display and fabulous sort of display of all the different books you could read about the LGBTQ plus community that were up to date as well, which was lovely to see. So yeah, I think those three things really, a really well stocked library full of diverse books. The fact that they're inviting me in, they're often asking me to talk about homophobic bullying or just to sort of drop in the fact that we're a two dad family with a child, you know, that sort of thing, and often I'll go into year six classes and talk to them about LGBTQ+ history as well, that they're sort of interested in learning about or threading through their curriculum. So I would say schools that are doing well are really trying to include, in a natural way, the LGBTQ+ community in their curriculum, in their ethos, in who they invite in, in how they speak to each other, how they address parents and yeah, lots of wonderful things going on really and it is just more than a display, it's more than having a flag up.
[00:02:59] Ed Finch: So that's a leadership team or a head or maybe an English coordinator, maybe who goes, the school needs to do this, the school's ready to do this and we're going to spend a little bit of money cause I don't suppose you do these visits for free either. So they're putting a little bit of money where their mouth is because they want the children to know that this can be talked about at school. It's not a, it's not a secret.
[00:03:24] Ian Eagleton: Yeah, it's not a secret, it's not a huge deal, it's not something to be embarrassed or sort of gasp about. Very often a deputy head or a head teacher will say to us, you know, our children are lovely, but they live quite a sheltered life and they haven't come across a two dad family before or someone who's gay and talking about sort of adoption or bullying or their books and you know, very often they will choose, you know, Nell and the Lonely Fishman, for me to go in and talk to the children about fairy tales and the history of fairy tales and representation in fairy tales. So yeah, it's often a decision made by the senior leadership team that we either want to improve our practice or we're doing really well and we want to further and develop it even more.
[00:04:15] Ed Finch: I mean, it's so good to hear that it's happening. To me, it's just moving to know that schools are making those good decisions. But I'm guessing that for every school that you are invited into, there's a number who haven't got close to thinking about this issue yet.
[00:04:29] Ian Eagleton: Yeah, or there are sometimes schools that are perhaps prepared to explore this issue, but perhaps the wider community, perhaps parents aren't quite behind that decision and aren't quite understanding what exactly it is that's being taught. I've had schools before say to me, when I've done a Nell and the Lonely Fisherman workshop, I've had them say to me, Oh, you're not going to talk about the trans community, are you? Or you're not going to talk about non binary children, are you? And I say, well, no, it wouldn't come up anyway within the context of what I'm doing and they'll say, oh, you know, parents are a little uncomfortable about that, or we've had some kickback about inviting you in and interestingly, I've also spoken to people who have invited me in and they've said, we've sent a letter out to parents to say that you're coming in and that you write LGBTQ+ inclusive books and these are what the books are about, just to give the parents a heads up as well. So it's interesting all the, I suppose, all the different stakeholders involved.
[00:05:37] Ed Finch: That's good. I mean, it's good practice, surely, for them to say, we have an author coming in, the book's on this topic, these are the sort of conversations we're going to have and these are the sort of conversations that you might continue at home, that's healthy. If they had a wildlife artist in, say they had Jill Lewis come in, we've got an author coming in, she writes about wildlife, we'll be talking about looking after our planet, when they come home, the children might talk about actions they can take at home to promote recycling. They could be doing that, I wonder if they are, I wonder if people are still a bit scared because quite apart from any other issues, people in the LGBTQ+ community, you know, we're protected within the 2010 Equalities Act, plenty of high profile people who are celebrities and in the news. Does it feel like this is still news? That this is still groundbreaking in primary schools? Are you increasingly feeling this is part and parcel of what we do.
[00:06:35] Ian Eagleton: I think it's becoming part and parcel about what we do. I always assumed up until a few years ago that there was absolutely nothing new or interesting about it and that we'd reached quite a great level of acceptance and I was doing a podcast actually and talking about Andrew Moffat and his No Outsiders and then there were suddenly a lot of protests about it in certain areas of the country and it really pulled me up short and made me evaluate my own experiences as a white middle class gay guy. You know, perhaps my experiences were not in line with the rest of the LGBTQ+ community and perhaps we hadn't reached this level of acceptance that I thought we had. So I think a lot of schools are doing a brilliant job at it, you know, where it becomes a real inclusive atmosphere and there's a real ethos to the whole school running through of inclusion and diversity and respect. But I still think we've got quite a long way to go.
[00:07:48] Ed Finch: people listening to this may not know your story and they also may not have read your wonderful book, Glitter Boy and I wondered if thinking a little bit about Glitter Boy might be a way of reflecting what really negative experiences can be. In Glitter Boy the wonderful main character, James is brilliant kids in so many ways and you know, you can talk about it a little bit, but he's experiencing really nasty homophobic bullying in his classroom, which is making him a very sad child at the same time as other stuff's going on in his life, which is really damaging for him. You know, it breaks my heart to think that this is an experience that kids are having in my classroom or in a colleague's classroom. Do you get insights on your visits as to, you know, what this is like for young people, whether this is happening. I don't know if you've got children who are able to disclose to you what's happening or whether you're hearing stories in staff rooms.
[00:08:43] Ian Eagleton: I hear lots of stories from teachers saying there's a child in our class who's struggling with a similar sort of thing and we don't know what to do, is a lot of the sort of feedback I get. I mean, I personally dealt with it as a teacher in year six. I had an incident of another child being bullied and being called gay and also just children throwing around really sort of casual homophobic language without a care in the world of you know, oh that's so gay, you know, the homework was so gay wasn't it? And you know, I think I even remember hearing something about oh this pencil's so gay because it had snapped or something while they were writing and it was a real, again a real shock for me to hear that sort of language thrown around without a thought, you know, as to who it might affect, what message it sends out. So I think that's an interesting one that happens in primary school and I do hear that a lot about the casual use of homophobic language that...
[00:09:49] Ed Finch: Without a doubt that is still going on and I think people who, if adults go and read Glitter Boy, they'll be able to see the impact of that language on James, who doesn't have a clear picture of his own sexuality or his identity at all. But hearing the word gay being used over and over as a pejorative or negative term, it's really troubling to him because he doesn't quite know what he is and he's thinking this thing is a bad thing. It's a really powerful insight that you give in the book, Ian. I think you've done it incredibly well and another thing that I think is really powerful in the book is the impact on James's teacher, Mr. Hamilton. Who is so upset when he learns that this behaviour is going on in his classroom.
[00:10:32] Ian Eagleton: Yeah, it's...
[00:10:33] Ed Finch: It's a really moving depiction that he tries to deal with it and then he really can't, and he has to take a sit down and get someone else to take the class for a bit, which felt to me like maybe he was revisiting trauma from his childhood.
[00:10:45] Ian Eagleton: Yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of historical trauma for, certainly for people my age and older and Mr. Hamilton's outburst in the book is based entirely on my own.
[00:10:56] Ed Finch: Oh,
[00:10:57] Ian Eagleton: And entirely on my own of dealing with it, you know, this homophobic bullying that I heard about and overheard as I, as a teacher and I remember going to the head teacher and seeing him crying and she said, what's happened? And I was like, I have no idea, I don't know why I'm responding like this. You know, I've subsequently have learned that, you know, when we experience quite terrible trauma in our lives, we often shut it out and forget about it entirely and I, you know, if eight years ago you'd said to me, were you bullied at school? I would have said no, or were you bullied at school? And I would have said, oh, a bit, everyone's bullied at school though, which was my stock phrase. I had no idea about the impact of what I went through and how terrifying it was and how it sort of made me feel like a huge outsider, wherever I went, really. So yeah, Mr. Hamilton is carrying a lot of the repercussions, I think, of Section 28 and for listeners that perhaps don't know much about that, that series of laws brought in from 1988 to 2003, that, yeah, that prevented schools and teachers from talking about the LGBTQ+ community and my favourite phrase from it and I do say this sarcastically, Pretended Family Relationships. Which, and I often say to older children, you know, from year six up to year eight that I talked to, that they're basically describing my family, my husband, my child, as a Pretended Family Relationship and that homosexuals, again, language taken from it, were predators who were going to indoctrinate children. So...
[00:12:52] Ed Finch: That really real wasn't it? And we've got colleagues teaching now, who were teaching, you know, in the late 80s, 90s and still have, you know, the shadow of Section 28 on them, are we allowed to speak to this? Is it okay? Will I get away with talking about this in the classroom? And we've got colleagues who went to school in those times and who therefore, you know, didn't have an opportunity to speak about any of this. So I think the effect of Section 28 is still in our classrooms.
[00:13:23] Ian Eagleton: Absolutely and the fact that no one seems to know a lot about it. Like, I didn't know a huge amount about it until I started writing Glitter Boy. I was sort of reflecting as to why no one helped me at school and why it was allowed to go on, even when I did go and tell a teacher, why they just sort of ignored me and sort of shooed me away. I was like, why? That's strange, like, why did that happen? And I was reflecting on the fact that I knew nothing about LGBTQ+ history until I started writing Glitter Boy a few years ago. I'd heard of Stonewall, obviously, and I knew that some riots and something big had taken place there. But to my shame, I knew nothing about it, I knew nothing about the sort of Marsha P. Johnson or Stormy Day Lavery or any of those people that were involved in it.
[00:14:12] Ed Finch: I mean I was really lucky when I was doing my A Levels when Section 28 came in, so it kind of impacted on me fairly marginally and I had a brilliant drama teacher who was a very proud out gay man and who was definitely not going to disappear into the shadows just because of some ridiculous bit of legislation and I loved him very dearly. He was a teacher I think about a great deal. We helped me become me in lots of ways and he was an out gay man, only out gay man I met, I think and, you know, in my childhood, but then, you know, I think now I think children in my class who I now know were gay, they didn't know, possibly, certainly I didn't know when we were kids. They at least had someone to look to who wasn't a martyr or a freedom fighter, just somebody quite determinedly living their life.
[00:14:59] Ian Eagleton: I think when you talk to a lot of gay men, who grew up under that long shadow of Section 28. The most frequent word that comes up that everyone says, the word is shame, because it just wasn't talked about, it was something that was hidden away and do you know what? Until my late twenties, until I started my relationship with my husband, my only real knowledge of gay people was that they got AIDS and it didn't matter who you were, if you were gay, you just got AIDS, that's all I knew and it's certainly all I knew as a teenager and also that you were some sort of social predator, again, I didn't completely understand it as a teenager, but the, you know, it was understandable that the boys were horrible to me in the changing rooms because I wasn't really allowed to be in there and there was something wrong with me, because I was getting changed at the same time as the other boys. In the end, I used to go and get changed in the toilets on my own, because I just used to think, Oh, I shouldn't look at them or I'm not really allowed to be in here and I don't know why. When we talk about, you know, the impact of things like Queer as Folk and there are a lot of, you know, people my age that remember watching that late at night. It was the only representation we had and Will and Grace as well later on, but there were no positive role models and even when I went to university, I did sociology, we didn't learn anything about the LGBTQ+ community. So it's been a real learning curve for me and I always talk to students and children and say to them, whose histories and whose stories are told and why is that? Why did I never hear these stories? And how does it make groups of people feel when they're excluded from the curriculum, when they're excluded from books? And why would other people want to exclude us from books and the curriculum? And it's a really interesting conversation, but it's astonishing. It astonished me while I was writing Glitter Boy. I had no idea about anything that happened, anything that went on while I was at secondary school under Section 28.
[00:17:18] Ed Finch: A government making a deliberate decision to keep something secret from young people, which is surely to them, clearly to their detriment. I don't see, there were gay people in parliament, there were MPs, there were advisors and civil servants around that legislation. who must have longed for representation, so he may be scared. Something that, James in the book feels a lot is guilt. There's a huge amount of guilt, he feels that he's responsible for his nan's death and he feels he's responsible for the fact that the other children are creating a horrible social media group to be beastly to him. He thinks it's his fault that he's, as he sees it, his dad doesn't like him. I think, you know, if young Ian had a Mr. Hamilton who could represent himself, you know, it isn't immediately helpful to James. James has quite a long bit of thinking before he can access that support. But I like to think that the young Ian could have seen this teacher who's thriving and living his best life and getting married to the man he loves and gone, okay, that's possible for me maybe one day.
[00:18:24] Ian Eagleton: Absolutely. Yeah, I remember being 13 and on a flight to Tenerife with my family and my little brother said to me, Do you want to get married and have children when you grow up? And I said no and my mum being really upset and saying, like, why don't you want children? Why don't you want a family? Well, because I knew when I was 13 that I was gay and well, gay people don't get married and gay people don't get families. That wasn't an option for me. And that never was for quite a long part of my life and I was really, like, not keen on getting married. I was like, oh, no, this is all going to go wrong, something's going to happen. You know, so that positive representation, I often talk about Mr. Hamilton in the book being wish fulfillment, really. Not only is he open about it, he weaves of fabulous, interesting LGBTQ+ history into their curriculum and into their English writing and their poetry writing and he's also, perhaps maybe, I don't know whether it's to his detriment or not, I often think about how he's coped with it all, but he's brutally honest with them about what's happened to him and he does have to leave the classroom because he's in such an emotional state. But I think that was, that's a real turning point in the story. And...
[00:19:47] Ed Finch: But that's hard for him, isn't it? You know, he has that moment when it all comes down and stuff, but how much harder if he was living his life as a teacher, unable to be who he is in that way, cause I think certainly I had, teachers, I mean, I must have done statistically, I must've had teachers who were LGBT, you know, I must have done and who were not able to be themselves in the classroom and I think that job of being authentically yourself in the primary classroom is really key. So if you can't be authentically a part of yourself, how do you make authentic connections? Do you know what I'm saying? Does that make sense?
[00:20:24] Ian Eagleton: Yeah, it does and it's always a tricky one that I struggled to navigate when I was teaching. I was always sort of thinking, is it appropriate for me to mention that I've got a husband? Is it appropriate for me to mention that I'm getting married? Will parents say something about that? It was always something I really battled with and it wasn't until the last few years that I was teaching when I did get married and the Year Six class, when they found out, all stood up and cheered. which was beyond what I thought, I thought they'd all say like, Yuck, that's disgusting, but they all started cheering and clapping, which was really moving, a really moving thing and I thought, Oh, things, maybe things are changing. But also I do struggle with as well, like, I'd like to go into schools just as a writer and for people to be interested just in my writing, but I'm often there in another capacity, in another role.
[00:21:22] Ed Finch: Sometimes there's a bit of subterfuge in there. We've got an author in, but we're really hoping he's going to help us talk about this thing that we feel we need to talk about.
[00:21:31] Ian Eagleton: Yeah and very often it's, we don't know how to deal with this or talk about it, so I'm sort of invited in, which I love doing, but I think you talk to a lot of writers who write LGBTQ+ inclusive books and we often say, you know, we don't often get asked to talk about our writing, we get asked the question of, so why do you write LGBTQ+ inclusive books? Or why do you think they're important? So we're still having the same conversations. I still regularly talk to people or about, oh, why do you think it's important that children read those sorts of books? So it is, it's fascinating to be, have experience of being a teacher, an author, a gay man and a dad, all these sort of different things sort of pulling and pushing you and it's really important in Glitter Boy as well that Mr. Hamilton talks about his childhood, he talks about his history, he talks about his husband, we see a different side to him outside of school because we all have different parts of our personality and often we're reduced to, oh, this is the gay author, or, and that's all there is to him, really.
[00:22:47] Ed Finch: I enjoyed Glitter Boy so much and I thought a lot of what you do is really clever, you know, I really enjoyed, for example, the way James noticed his hair, you know, we don't need to say very much about it, but that little detail that he notices and comments on everyone's hair, it's this immediately clue into him, you know and I thought that was really well pitched. So, you know, anybody who's listened to this hasn't read the book yet. I hope they will. It's a really well written book that's very emotionally affecting. I think I read the last third of it in tears because it really is and I felt very seen by it, Ian. I felt very seen and I, you know, I haven't turned out to be a gay man, But I certainly, in my childhood school, I didn't quite know what I was, I didn't quite know who I was. I certainly experienced bullying, I, some of that was homophobic because I didn't like football much and I was a bit bookish. Reading that book, I was right back in there. I thought that must have been quite a tough thing to write at times.
[00:23:40] Ian Eagleton: It was, it was brutal and I didn't write anything for five months afterwards. I was completely strung out. Yeah, and the whole, a lot of people talk to me about the story and say, you know, I'm not gay or I don't identify as LGBTQ+, but a lot of people have been bullied and a lot of people have felt different and James, in the book, never comes to a decision about whether he's gay or bisexual, it's not actually what the story is about. The story is actually about a boy that doesn't fit those standards of masculinity, which I think a lot of homophobic bullying is about, it certainly was for me because I didn't actually come out till I was 17, 18, but it was because I was quieter, I liked art, I liked drama, I was terrible at football, absolutely awful and my son was playing football the other day and I was standing on the sideline thinking, please don't let the ball come near me, please don't let the ball come near me, please don't and I was in such a panic about it because those flashbacks of secondary school and primary school where your whole sort of manhood and masculinity is based on can you play football and can you rough and tumble and I was terrible at all of those things, but everything when you're being bullied becomes a marker in as much as one of the things I was bullied about was my eyelashes, my eyelashes were too long. You've got long eyelashes, you're a girl, you're gay, was one of the things. So I think, dismantling sort of that toxic masculinity and those gender stereotypes is very important if we're going to tackle homophobic bullying.
[00:25:28] Ed Finch: And in primary schools, if there's a male teacher, they very often find themselves the PE coordinator, they very often find themselves being portrayed in quite stereotypically masculine ways and a lot of men I know in primary are not very comfortable with that. So it's a question for all of us because we don't know what the kids have got at home, school could be a place where you meet the poetry loving man and the man who's interested in cookery and the sporty man, he's important too, you know, they're all different versions.
[00:25:57] Ian Eagleton: Absolutely and I was never saddled with the P. E. cupboard or anything like that. I was always saddled with art and English, which I was very pleased about, but I did make it very clear that I would be a terrible P. E. coordinator, but I used to do an activity with the children, really simple one. I used to get them to draw a picture of a footballer and a ballerina and then I used, we used to look at what they'd drawn, and the ballerina was always a girl and the footballer was always a boy and we always talked about that. That was always one of the activities I did every year.
[00:26:29] Ed Finch: Then we look at the lionesses and we say, yeah, they're experiencing success unlike that and we look at Carlos Acosta, perhaps, astonishing man. We've talked about how things are at the moment and we're gonna take a flight of fancy and imagine how wonderful we can make things for our young people. But we'll do that just the other side of this break, don't go anywhere.
So before the break we were talking about how things are in our schools and we had some real green shoots of hope but also some, I think, some concerns but right now I'd like to imagine a better future, if that's all right and imagine a time five years down the road from now when we have asked the right questions of the right people, applied pressure on the right doors, managed to, I don't know, change some curriculum documents perhaps, whatever. How could it be, how should it be, what should the experience for young people in our classrooms and for the teachers who are teaching them be? What would you like to see?
[00:27:28] Ian Eagleton: The main word that comes into my mind is safety. A feeling of, classroom should be a feeling of safety. I think that's what every teacher aims for, where children feel free to perhaps discuss gender, sexuality, struggles with their identity and they feel safe to do so. I think that's, I think that's really important. I'd love to see and I think hopefully we will see, an overhaul of the curriculum, especially in terms of history. Not necessarily an overhaul, but perhaps thinking about when we look at Tudor life, whose lives in the Tudor period do we exactly look at? You know, why, when I spoke to secondary school children or students, they were older, last Friday, had none of them still heard of Section 28 or Stonewall? Or any LGBTQ+ trailblazers I mentioned. So I would love for their stories to be part of the fabric of education. In Glitter Boy, Mr. Hamilton sets the kids a history project on forgotten voices, so I'd really love to see all those forgotten voices and groups of marginalised people lifted up, throughout the curriculum and celebrated. I think that would be really powerful for people to see.
[00:28:53] Ed Finch: And of course in that, it's fictional, but I think quite a lot of us have done something similar to it, yeah, and that exercise he's looking at biography writing, so he's ticking off his literacy objectives, he's not being irresponsible here, he knows he has to make sure nobody can leave year six without knowing how to write a biography, that would be...
[00:29:11] Ian Eagleton: Of course!
[00:29:13] Ed Finch: And he sets a bunch of names, doesn't he? So he's got I'm trying to remember who Ada Lovelace is one of the names, so there's like women who did amazing things, there's some LGBT characters, I think it's Martin Luther King in there, maybe. It's quite, you've done quite carefully, you said, look, it's not about LGBT this, it's about paying attention to forgotten lives.
[00:29:33] Ian Eagleton: Yeah and it's something that was really flagged up when I was teaching year two because we used to do famous people in history and it was always, you know, There was always Florence Nightingale and there was a couple of other white male explorers, I think and then that was it and a parent wrote to me and said, will they be learning about any other people in year two? You know, we always seem to hear these names, are there any other people? And things like that I was always really uncomfortable teaching in Year Two, when we did Explorers and Christopher Columbus. We used to focus on his journey and then suddenly he arrived and that's where we stop the story, children and we don't talk any further about what happened or what went on.
[00:30:23] Ed Finch: It's not hard, is it, to find some alternate stories which are also exciting, fun, interesting and make you think, Oh, I didn't know people like that could also do things like this. Of course, for those young children, it's probably not that moment of realisation because hopefully, for those young children, it's like, of course it could be a woman who was the first computer programmer. That's not an issue for the child unless it's an issue for the adult, presumably.
[00:30:50] Ian Eagleton: On a practical level, we're talking about time management, I think and we're talking about funding, that was the biggest thing that I came up against as a teacher and as a leader. We've always talked about this person, we've got the books on this person, we don't have any money for books about this person, we don't have any time, you know, our staff meeting times are taken up with this and this, you know, when are we meant to plan this and learn about it? So there's a real commitment I think from the senior leadership team to say, you know, I always used to push when I was a literacy leader, can we please have one staff meeting every half term where we just get out a load of books and have time to explore them and look through them. I'll bring in my collection of diverse inclusive books that all link to the curriculum and can we just have some time to look at them and imagine how we could include them in our curriculum. I always think books are a huge way in for inclusivity and it's one of the reasons I started writing, because historically, not to denigrate other books that have come beforehand, but a lot of LGBTQ+ inclusive children's books are told from the point of view of animals, for example, might be quite out of date and usually are told from the point of view of a child telling the reader that their parents are two dads or two mums and I'm still the same as you and that was the whole storyline. So teachers need time to be able to explore new modern books that have changed with the times, I think.
[00:32:37] Ed Finch: It's my opinion that a lot of those books, and we were still using them because they were what we had available, were books in which the only interesting thing was supposedly the sexuality and actually there wasn't a narrative that was moving, there wasn't a story that stood up as a story. I think I probably won't mention any titles, but there's one particular one where a prince has to find a bride and in the end, surprise, surprise, he hooks up with the footman instead and you're like, do you know what the only thing here is the gender and you appear to be playing a gotcha on me and your books, they've got stories which are moving and which are engaging to children and in which it's not that sexuality is only a by feature, it was the story as you say for Glitter Boy, it's about bullying, it's about guilt, it's about shame, it's about identity, it's about all sorts of things, it isn't purely about that. So we need, I mean, one of our things for five years, we need more books, we need more writers writing brilliant books that include representation.
[00:33:35] Ian Eagleton: Absolutely.
[00:33:36] Ed Finch: I don't know if you know of any that you could shout out. I think L. D. Lipinski's Jamie would go on that list. Have you got any more?
[00:33:42] Ian Eagleton: Thereare so many wonderful books out there and a lot, as a dad in a two dad family with a little chap who's adopted, you know, there's books like My Mummy's Built a Treehouse, My Daddies, Forever Star, Jodie Lancet Grant's, My Pirate Mums. There are lots of books that really do have a storyline, first and foremost and are exciting and funny and thrilling and, also celebrate the LGBTQ+ community as well, because children are very savvy. If a story is boring or doesn't have much to it, they will switch off immediately and they will not pick it again.
[00:34:28] Ed Finch: Or if it exists just to teach them something, they can sniff that out pretty quickly, can't they?
[00:34:32] Ian Eagleton: Oh, absolutely.
[00:34:33] Ed Finch: Five years from now, we're going to have classrooms which are typified by a sense of safety and young people are going to be able to talk about what they need to talk about without fear of, I don't know, judgment or shame or guilt. We're going to flood these classrooms with beautiful books that include representation, but aren't didactic, but may mean that every child can see themselves. But there's still going to be a problem because there's going to be this curriculum issue. I have told all my guests so far that we're going to get rid of the national curriculum, five years from now, there's going to be an independent curriculum commission, formed of experts, not picked by government, so education won't be a political football anymore. I'm just going to tell you that you're going to be called for that commission, I hope that's okay. What recommendations, because we can literally rip up the national curriculum here, what would you do to make sure that we thread this representation through? How are we going to do it?
[00:35:26] Ian Eagleton: My main feelings as a teacher is that it desperately needs to be slimlined. We have an overstuffed curriculum where it's impossible to do anything really, really well. So there are lots of things throughout the English, Maths, Geography, History, that I would get rid of completely. I don't think they're developmentally appropriate for children, so that would be my first one. I also think equipping children teachers with the knowledge that they need to be able to deal with anything that comes up in the classroom in terms of the LGBTQ+ community questions that children have. Teachers still say to me, we don't know how to deal with this or we don't know where to go to get resources for this.
[00:36:16] Ed Finch: This is maybe a good time to pivot this conversation towards those actions that we could be taking in our classrooms or in our staff meetings, you know. So I think that probably happens a lot. It's probably a lot of teachers who just go, I just don't know how to talk about this. What resources would you point them to?
[00:36:34] Ian Eagleton: I mean, when I've had similar thoughts as a teacher, which is always interesting because just because I'm a gay man, it doesn't mean that I know how to deal with this in a classroom setting. I perhaps have a different set of worries and concerns, like if I address this as a gay man, will I be accused of this? Will I be accused of that? So I still had, when I've dealt with homophobic bullying or questions around the LGBTQ+ community, I've still had all sorts of concerns and worries about it and I can only speak from my experience. I emailed Stonewall and they sent me resources, they sent me packs of stickers and posters to put up in the classroom, activities to do with the children, they emailed me backwards and forwards about what I could say, it was such a helpful, lifeline really and they talked to me like, what are you teaching at the moment? And I said, World War II and they sent me information about sort of LGBTQ+ trailblazers throughout history. So Alan Turing ended up being sort of threaded through our history curriculum in year six, for World War II and it was a really powerful sort of few lessons that we did on it.
[00:37:55] Ed Finch: I think Alan Turing is just a fascinating character to study anyway, quite regardless of any question about sexuality. He's a really key character historically. He shows you all the stuff that, you know, the home effort on the war front and code breaking is fascinating, it gets you away from a bombs and guns story of war, which is a partial one and then the fact that he is also a, you know, a gay man who's, well, who dies as a result. Not that we want more hero stories in that way, but, or martyr stories, people will say that sometimes representation is tokenistic and maybe you feel that sometimes. You think, well, I've been invited in as a token gay man because they couldn't produce one of their own. It's still powerful, you still wrote an amazing book, alan Turing is still a key figure. It's not tokenistic if it's done well, if it's done meaningfully.
[00:38:44] Ian Eagleton: No and I think spending some time as you know, the geography leader in your school or the history leader or maths leader in your school and thinking about how can I diversify my area of the curriculum and obviously I had to go and speak to the history leader and my head teacher and say like, you know, I'm thinking of changing my World War II topic a little bit because of what's happened and luckily they were really on board. They thought, you know, they dealt with this homophobic bullying that was occurring in a really efficient and serious manner, it wasn't something to be swept under the carpet and they realised that we needed to teach about it and we needed to talk about it as well and I think, I suppose that's what my concern is about the curriculum being so overstuffed. Do we still feel as teachers that we have the time to step back and just talk to our children about things that come up, or do we think, Ah, I've got to move on to the next unit, I've got to do this, or I'm only allowed to talk about this or teach this, because I often speak to teachers that say to me, you know, when we're modelling writing, for example, we wouldn't model the use of adverbs because they don't need to know about them until year three and we've got to focus on this and this. So, I would just like to see the pressure taken off children and teachers in terms of what is included in the curriculum because teachers are professionals and they, we, know what we're doing. So if we need to take a lesson or two to deal with something or, you know, go a different route or what have you, I would really like to see more teachers feeling as though they can do that, without any reprimand. It certainly got difficult towards the end of my teaching career, it got difficult to justify, you know, why I hadn't taught certain things at certain times, or why I was behind in a unit, or what have you, because things had cropped up.
[00:40:48] Ed Finch: This is certainly something people worry about from an inspection point of view because the subject deep dive might reveal that they didn't complete the piece on the Tudors because the teacher chose to do a couple of lessons on some aspect of things and I think we need to trust teachers, give them some agency back, give them some time back and say actually that was important for my class, I was dealing with something and we dealt with it well. So I would hope that any SLT or any leadership listening to this. Might take away that they need to give their teachers some agency back, give them some trust, they're professionals, they've got their qualified teacher status, I need them to know they're empowered in their classrooms to do what they need to do what Mr. Hamilton was able to do, and create that space for that valuable talk. Although it, you know, it wasn't easy for James at all there to be, to felt so seen.
[00:41:37] Ian Eagleton: And look, I'm not for one minute saying that teachers don't do that already. I know, again, from my experiences, it always felt as though I had to justify why I'd done that and hopefully things are changing for teachers, I don't know and that they feel empowered to shape the curriculum in a way that's meaningful to them and their children.
[00:42:02] Ed Finch: I hope so Ian, I think in a lot of schools which are part of large multi academy trusts or other structures, they feel they don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of their curriculum and that they're not really empowered to campaign to change it. So I really hope that any leaders listening to this, they might get involved, they might possibly get involved on social media and let us know how they're empowering teachers to make the decisions they need to make. I believe you've got another book coming down the line soon and I don't want to finish this podcast without hearing a tiny bit about it, so you've got a spooky book, am I right?
[00:42:36] Ian Eagleton: It's called The Boy Who Cried Ghost. My mum read a bit of it and said, Ian, this is too scary for children and I was like, perfect! Children love being scared and reading spooky stories. Again, it's actually about a little boy, Richard, with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is what I was diagnosed with when I was 17. Again, I went through my whole life until I was 17, not knowing that I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, until the doctor said to my mum, your son is very poorly and needs help immediately. So mental health and talking about mental health is another passion of mine. But yeah, Richard has very severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the story and it's told through flashbacks of his sort of childhood memories of it, which are based on my own and yeah, hopefully it's just a really fun, exciting, ghost filled story that kids are going to love. But again, there's lots of time spent in the classroom with a new teacher and some new things to write about and learn about. So that was really lovely, visiting a new school in my mind and a new teacher and yeah, I really hope children are going to enjoy it. Cliffhangers galore, mysteries galore and again, and I suppose an area of life that is very misunderstood again, maybe that's what I write about, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you know, the amount of people that say to me, Oh, I've got that. I always clean the kitchen and that's not quite what it is. So yeah, that's the new book. Thank you for asking. I'm, looking forward to it.
[00:44:21] Ed Finch: I have had such a great hour speaking to you and I think I have some clear ideas about what I could be doing back in my classroom to try and help a child like Jamie or like young Ian feel seen, feel welcomed and feel safe. So hopefully listeners will get in touch and let us know what they're doing about that. Thank you again, beautiful work, you have a brilliant day, my friend.
[00:44:42] Ian Eagleton: Thanks so much for having me, Ed. It's been brilliant to talk to you.
[00:44:50] 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 Brookes on social media. At Primary Futures, we're on a mission to build a better future for primary education and 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.