The Trust Revolution in Schools

How to Create a High Performance and Collaborative Culture

Jeanie Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000074499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Teachers are some of the kindest, most altruistic and smartest people on the planet yet despite the best of intentions, fearful atmospheres can arise organically within schools, leaving people feeling disempowered, anxious, isolated and frustrated. Why is this? What are the impacts? And, crucially, how do we resolve it?

Ofsted, accountability, funding, workload and societal difficulties have led to a response in many schools that is fear based, generating staff cultures that affect teacher wellbeing and are leading to large numbers leaving the profession. This impacts not only staff morale and wellbeing but also has a highly detrimental effect on teacher performance and the outcomes for pupils and students. This book examines what underpins these patterns and sets out a practical model for embedding a trust-based culture in all schools.

Drawing together four key psychological concepts, the book explores what a trust-based culture looks like and the conditions that are needed for this to develop. It looks at the paradoxes that lie in how staff create harmonious and collaborative cultures and the practical steps that are needed to create a culture where staff that crave and give open, robust feedback are pro-active, learn from failure and have the ability to thrive through challenging questions.

Providing a comprehensive blueprint for schools to follow, this is essential reading for school leaders and thinkers who want to create a rich, healthy environment where collaboration, creativity and excellence in teaching and learning can flourish.

1Fear versus trust cultures: The need for a revolution

You know the glossy adverts for teaching, the ones where children’s hair statically stands on end as they clasp a Van der Graaf generator, surrounded by Bunsen burners, bantering with the teacher? Well, they don’t tell the whole story. But you probably know this already and that’s why you have picked up this book.

Those adverts don’t show the crying in the toilets, the sulking in meetings, the lying awake at 2am, the stomach dropping as the door opens for a spot check or some ‘feedback’, being ignored by a member of staff, passive aggressive reception of new ideas, the frustration of seeing the vision but people just not getting into line, hours spent with five different colours for the fourth marking policy in two years or the panicked breakdown when a teaching assistant is sick and you are told at 8.53am.

Of course, they also don’t fully convey the unbelievable joy of being with the children, moulding the minds of the next generation, holding an audience, working as a team and profoundly enabling human development.

But one side of this experience of working in education is winning at the moment. Unfortunately, the grinding stress created in schools is outweighing the hilarious moments of Callum flossing or Martha being able to explain conscientious objection, and the crumbling around the edges is turning into a mudslide.

Here come the statistics!

According to the February 2019 briefing paper from the House of Commons (Foster, 2019) on teacher recruitment and retention in England, in the twelve months to November 2017:

∎42,830 full-time equivalent qualified teachers left the state sector, a ‘wastage rate’(interesting term!) of 9.9%.

∎This wastage rate had increased by 9% in six years.

∎Of these 42,830 teachers, 35,800 teachers left for reasons other than retirement, an increase of 31% in six years.

∎In 2017 the number of teachers leaving the profession was higher than the number entering.

This final problematic statistic is partly due to the difficulty in teacher recruitment. Since 2012, overall teacher recruitment has been below target each year and when we look at retention of these new entrants it looks bleaker still:

∎22% of newly qualified teachers in 2015 were not recorded as working in the state sector in 2017.

∎40% of newly qualified teachers in 2008 were out-of-service¹ ten years later.

Whilst we are at peak misery I just want to add in one more piece of information and then I promise this book gets more hopeful.

According to the Education Support Partnership’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2018 (Education Support, 2018), 57% of teachers have considered leaving the profession in the past two years due to health issues, mainly linked to mental health. This rise has been particularly noticeable amongst school leaders. That is over half of teachers thinking of escape. Just imagine if we could retain these people, those 35,800 teachers who left in 2017? These skilled, expensively trained staff who at one time dreamed of making the world a better place through teaching children.

The system is in flux and keeping teachers in the profession is certainly on the radar. For example, the Department for Education are trying to tackle this and at the time of writing have a considerable amount of money that they are disseminating to schools to aid retention. So, I suppose the next question is, if you were in charge, how would you spend it?

More supply cover to give teachers more time? More teaching assistants to provide greater flexibility in the classroom? More support for children with complex or challenging needs? Coaching for resilience? Counselling for Ofsted? Gym memberships? Spa days? Gong bath therapy? Yoga? An IT technician constantly on hand? Salary hikes? Free doughnuts?

I like all of these ideas; who wouldn’t? But none of these speak to the root cause. They provide sticking plasters for issues that, if tackled differently, would not exist. If we could feel differently about the schools we are in, then we wouldn’t need doughnuts at breaktime to cheer us up. I invite you to see these sticking plasters as reactionary and buying into a narrative that keeps us imprisoned. A narrative that thinks of toxicity as coming from something structural, from the system, from something beyond which we can control; and this can leave us incarcerated as victims. Our reaction to the current system is one of fear.

That’s what this book is about. Not about changing the system but instead our reaction to it. Not in a buck up, sort it out, be less afraid way, but by providing a different model of being with each other in our schools: one that enables trust and relationships to flourish, rather than fear and a need to escape.

Yet, before we look at our reaction to our education system we first must explore and challenge the realities of this system and the beliefs we hold about it. For this we’ll use the metaphor of a cage.

Behind bars?

It could be argued that, in the main, our cage is made up of the following bars:

1.Government.

2.Ofsted and accountability.

3.Funding.

4.Society and its expectations.

These are the pre-occupations, conversations and workload of education leaders and teachers all over the country; the daily tasks that stare them in the face and mould mood, meetings, interactions and constraints. They are real and legitimate, and I recently saw all these bars imprisoning a headteacher in one meeting.

The school leader was talking about her frustrations around the current government ideology that led to the move away from coursework to an emphasis on exams and the barriers this was creating for some of her most disadvantaged children. From this macro-level thinking we then zoomed into a conversation about a Year 7 WhatsApp stream gone wrong and a boy being removed from his parental home due to neglect (how will he now perform in his GCSEs?). That, combined with a squeeze on budgets meaning a departing teacher would not be replaced, had left the head of science sobbing in the office that morning. In this meeting the cage didn’t feel metaphorical; it felt very real.

And, of course, this tangible cage impacts how we feel, act and behave. It triggers us, shapes our thinking and creates corners and traps for us to get mentally stuck in. How do we avoid becoming incarcerated in our thinking and captive in our actions when these pressures are very real?

To answer this, we need to take a closer look at these bars and indeed the space between them: the air where it is possible to reach out, connect, rethink and feel free. Perhaps if we look at this cage through another template, we might explore this enclosure differently, see the freedom of the space rather than feel the fear of the bars and find that the door has been left more open than we think…

Government

The Elementary Education Act of 1870 introduced a framework of education for children between the ages of five and thirteen (and the beginnings of a system of fining parents if they didn’t attend). Since then, every decade has seen new initiatives around education moulded to the ideology of the governing party and its perception of what is needed, at that particular snapshot in history.

Victorian governments prized empire and structure and had interestingly progressive attitudes to educating girls, but of course only for 4% of the population of secondary school-age children (BBC, 2019). The Edwardians decided that all this mixing of the sexes nonsense needed to be quashed and firmly engendered role-specific education (guess who got to learn how to make the beds?). And the lead up to World War One meant that the boys’ curriculum was interwoven with fighting the enemy and handling muskets.

The interwar governments had a drive for peace and a preoccupation with health and harmony directives around napping, cod-liver oil, Esperanto and experimenting with outdoor learning and forest schools.

Post-war governments grappling with the huge societal shifts brought in a much more state-directed approach to education. It was the vehicle to improve children’s health and nutrition, peaking at 1,500 calorie school lunches, and by bringing in the 11+ they began to segregate and create hierarchies for the 100% of children now expected to be in education until their fifteenth birthday. The 1970s peaked (or troughed, depending on your viewpoint) with a more progressive attitude to education, freedom reigning supreme, to be snapped back into the roots of standardisation of teaching and centralised control in the 1980s.

The 1990s saw an increase of centralised control: Ofsted, accountability and teaching by numbers into the early noughties. It was at this point that it became an expectation for 50% of the school-leaving population to attend university. The government also started to dismantle centralised control and dish it out to the market forces of academies, gurus, think tanks, entrepreneurs and some snake oil salesmen (and women). We currently seem to be in a Wild West phase where personality drives agenda and control is handed back to schools with a big dollop of accountability. Grammar and roman numerals are important and revolution is in the air.

Government has always and will always aim to create a climate and paradigm. In the main this is driven by the best of intentions, and usually the schooling experience of the current minister. The chances of your ideological outlook being matched by that of the governing party is slim, and therefore becoming preoccupied with thinking at this macro level can only lead to frustration. Don’t get me wrong: trying to have an influence at this level is important, but government isn’t to blame for the toxic system (although I’m not saying they always get it right!). The contamination comes from how we react to what the government is handing down and the school cultures we create.

Ofsted and accountability

Scrutiny, monitoring, accountability, deep-dive, judgement, data, robust regulation, inspection. Some of the words often linked to Ofsted. Sounds like fun eh! I imagine those are the phrases you popped on to your teaching application form to excitedly get cracking changing lives. Or perhaps not!

Ofsted was established under John Major’s government, although the history of school inspection dates back to 1833. With a remit to drive school efficacy (a broad and controversial term), it has in many schools become a menacing presence (Teacher Support Network, 2014) with a ‘work harder and smarter’ mantra. There is a mixed picture as to what extent standards have been raised: significantly in some p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Fear versus trust cultures: The need for a revolution
• 2 So, why are trust and fear so important?
• 3 Indicators of fear versus trust-based cultures
• 4 The model:: Everyone loves a plan!
• 5 The preconditions
• 6 The catalysts
• 7 Is your paradigm shifting?: Here’s the roadmap
• 8 You are the revolution: What type of leader do you need to be?
• References
• Index