Independent Thinking on Emotional Literacy

A passport to increased confidence, engagement and learning

Richard Evans

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781781353790
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written by Richard Evans, Independent Thinking on Emotional Literacy: A passport to increased confidence, engagement and learning shares an approach that will help educators boost their pupils' emotional literacy, with the broader aim of nurturing a more grounded, engaged and intrinsically motivated child.

Foreword by Ian Gilbert.

Do teachers truly understand their pupils? And do the pupils themselves really understand their own needs?

In Independent Thinking on Emotional Literacy, Richard Evans reminds every school educator that behind every child is a set of circumstances so entwined - and within them a set of emotions so involved - that to ignore them is to be complicit in any educational failings experienced by that child.

Richard equips educators with a collaborative 'passport' template designed to improve pupils' emotional literacy and promote discussion of the often-unspoken issues that prevent children from making progress at school. It enables staff to steer young people to greater emotional understanding of themselves, so that they can better manage their route through the school system.

Furthermore, Richard provides a detailed tutorial as he walks you through the subtleties and wide-ranging possibilities of its use. Colour copies of the passport are also made available for free download as a complimentary feature of the book.

If the passport is aimed at anyone, adult or child, it's those not altogether happy with the system; those not convinced it provides as much breadth and meaning as it could; and who sense that education is as much about the acquisition of self-knowledge as it is about that of knowledge per se.

Ultimately, the result of the enterprise is deeper understanding - whether it's of the girl who falls asleep at the back, the boy who needs constant support, or those pupils who need extra careful attention at parents' evening.

Suitable for all educators in both primary and secondary settings.

5

CHAPTER 1

WHIRLWIND

You’ve got your new uniform but the trousers don’t fit. The jacket’s too big and your tie’s askew. And a foot too long. One of hundreds, you are, seeping in through the gates of your new learning centre. Self-conscious, anxious, directionless, but for the tide of uniform that carries you forward towards, well, wherever it is you’re meant to start. Desperately looking for anyone who might constitute a new friend, someone assigned to the same place you’ve been assigned to, wherever that is. Someone of similar height, look, fear, confusion.

Were there space, last night would be replaying its familiar sequences in your head. How many times was it you awoke? Older brother next door, younger sister next bed, phone ping, worry dream, covers off, covers on, knees up, knees down, face plant. Do you need a PE kit? Did dad remember to pick up the tie? Whose house do you go to this weekend? And why have you started making odd vocal noises out loud for no reason, skipping slightly before each stride, tapping your leg repeatedly on the table?

But your head doesn’t have space. This is too all-consuming. Teachers are barking out instructions, kids falling in and out of line, voices booming, silences, racket, then silence again. And then at some point, you end up in a room with a load of other lost souls, barely listening to a word that is being projected by the figure at the front. Instead, you fidget with your bag, your pencil, your desk, your hands, with anything in fact that you can lay those same hands on, to somehow stop the worry and the fear and the 6confusion, the loneliness and the conundrum that is, right now, the thoroughly unwelcome institution of school.

Fast forward a month, a term, and some of this anxiety has eased: your timetable is either scribbled in your planner or etched on your memory – or you’ve just become good at following people. Your trousers still don’t fit but you’ve semi-grown into your jacket; teachers scare you less; you have a friend or two; your tie now stops at your trousers.

Only to be replaced, however, by a wealth of supplementary worries, of unexpected stresses – such as homework and deadlines; seating and equipment; concentration and behaviour.

How to steer your way through it? Teachers, of course, are the ones charged with that task. And, by and large, they do their utmost to do so. With whichever tools are available. In whatever time. While juggling the known and unknown quantities of their own daily realities – you know, the meetings, the targets, the marking, the behaviour, the last-minute cover lessons, the marriage breakdowns, the photocopier. Regardless, you’ll likely have at least one story about one teacher who did the steering, the caring and the inspiring so well that it still resounds years later; a teacher to whom you feel you owe so much. The one who realised something the others didn’t, who picked you out of the crowd to make your business their business. The one who did something you had no idea at the time would echo for years to come. The one who helped make you you: your Mr Al-Hawi, my Mrs Whiting; your Mrs Yun, my Mr Keats.

We’ve all watched those teachers. The ones in control but not dominating, listening but not paying lip service; the ones praising but not patronising, reprimanding but not humiliating; the ones teaching but not lecturing, loving but not spoiling. And we’ve all watched their students – 7those learning, not idling; growing, not stagnating; those feeling inspired, not bored.

Behind many good teachers are, of course, good schools. Not Ofsted-good necessarily – whatever that means at the time of writing – but good good. Those varying their curriculum; those coaching staff to provide it; those counselling and mentoring, advising and strategising; those opening early and closing late, informing and preparing, alerting and reminding, smiling and staying positive; those who know that to care about the parent and carer is to care about the child.

And behind every good school is a wealth of adults throwing their all behind the cause: the teachers and teaching assistants; the office staff and estates people; the IT gurus and technicians; the kitchen staff, cleaners and caretakers; the governors and parent volunteers. Every single contributing adult whose delirious dedication and slagheap of paid and unpaid hours (12.1 hours a week at last count – the highest of all UK workers1) means that at least some of the above can be achieved on behalf of the pupils. Whatever the success rate, effectiveness or overall value of a school, whatever anyone makes of any individual place of education, that incontrovertible reality of every educational institution is simply not to be sniffed at: schools exist, and sometimes even prosper, because the adults who work within them do so because they care. And some.

But for all this, schools still have an uncanny knack of not always working for their pupils. For one, great numbers of 8them are falling short of expected standards. According to the exams regulator Ofqual, in England in 2019, across all subjects taken, nearly one in three GCSE pupils failed to achieve the expected standard of pass, recording Grade 3s or below – a ‘failure’ rate which remains broadly the same year-on-year.2 Of course, this also means that nigh on 70% of exams taken were passed, but try asking for congratulation cards from those who took the 30% that weren’t.

In view of these numbers, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised when we also learn that, underpinning this underachievement (underachievement in the Department of Education’s judgement, at least) is a plethora of unhappy – and, we can surely infer, demotivated – children. As part of a 2017 PISA report, around one in six 15-year-olds said they were ‘not satisfied with life’, ranking UK pupils 38th out of 48 countries from which the data was collected.3 And if that’s a little too 15-year-old-centric, there is plenty of broader evidence of student malcontent from other age sets: according to a 2017 report by the mental health charity Young Minds, every classroom has three children with ‘a diagnosable mental health problem’,4 and the Children Society’s annual Good Childhood report describes as ‘really concerning’ the figures that suggest about a 9quarter of a million children, aged between 10 and 17, ‘could now be unhappy with their lives’ – the worst recorded result since 2009.5

Several steps beyond unhappy, I guess, is not being at school altogether. Government statistics for the 2017–2018 period tell us that one in every thousand pupils (across primary, secondary and special education) were excluded that year – make that two per thousand for secondary miscreants.6 What’s more, where exclusion presumably wouldn’t suit the image of the school in question, there is also now (or perhaps it’s been going on for years) the option of ‘off-rolling’ – recognised by Ofsted as ‘the practice of removing a pupil from the school roll without a formal, permanent exclusion or by encouraging a parent to remove their child from the school roll, when the removal is primarily in the interests of the school rather than in the best interests of the pupil’.7

Despite the government’s noble assertion in 2003 that ‘every child matters’,8 we seem to have realised since that, well, actually, on reflection, they don’t. Or maybe just can’t. In 2017, researchers from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) found that around one in twelve pupils in the UK who were due to sit their GCSEs that year were mysteriously removed from the rolls – no explanation provided. According to the EPI, ‘as many as 8.1 per cent of [Year 11s 10that year] were subject to moves that cannot be accounted for’.9 With the majority of those pupils representing our most vulnerable groups, some commentators have been minded to wonder whether, for some pupils at least, the proximity of their exams and the meagreness of their predicted grades were in any way related to the mystery of their disappearances.

And while we’re talking about students who seem to vanish into thin air – if you’ve worked in a school, you probably know one – the increasingly popular practice of homeschooling might be behind it. The BBC found that 48,000 children were being home educated in 2016–2017, which constituted an increase of around 40% from 2014–2015.10 Regardless of its efficacy as a replacement education, which I imagine ranges on a scale of ‘Thank goodness I got out of that place and can actually work and succeed in peace – thank you’ to ‘Home what?’, we should at least acknowledge that the conventional system is not working for a small but increasingly significant proportion of our young people.

But why on earth, you might wonder, would a system with so much money earnestly poured into it – a cool £91 billion in 2018–2019, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies11 – and so many willing workers and volunteers assigned to it, not expect to produce a more happy, inclusive, attractive 11and grade-attaining education for its young guests? How is it that a system can provide so much but, in far too many cases, yield so little?

Because, I would argue, it doesn’t provide the foundation on which every progressive school education depends: the development of pupils’ emotional intelligence to identify and solve the unspoken issues of school. Why don’t I ever put my hand up? Why do I always call out? Why don’t I do my homework? Why don’t teachers like me? Without the emotional dexterity to solve the age-old problems they experience at school, at best pupils are not in a position to properly benefit from all it has to offer, and at worst they withdraw and are lost.

School life, and all that it entails, demands emotional literacy – it is this that should be pupils’ first piece of equipment, their first item of uniform. Before any staff member has even picked up a whiteboard pen or created a class register, the first item on every school’s agenda should be this: what can we put in place to develop our pupils’ emotional intelligence? And if we can’t help them all (or they don’t all need helping), who should we start with?

Why? Because the reality is that many kids are so caught up in the whirlwind of school, home and all the baggage that resides in-between, that what schools sincerely provide sometimes barely even touches the sides.

How do you even start to master school when you can barely master yourself? When you’ve not yet wor...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• First Thoughts
• Chapter 1: Whirlwind
• Chapter 2: Learning to Listen
• Chapter 3: The Passport
• Chapter 4: Behind the Questions: Confidence and Resilience
• Chapter 5: Behind the Questions: Organisation and Presentation
• Chapter 6: Behind the Questions: Attitude to Learning
• Chapter 7: Setting
• Chapter 8: Outcomes
• Final Thoughts
• References and Further Reading
• Copyright
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