I guess it helped that it was my second session working with the teachers at Bishop Henderson Church of England Primary School.  They were open and honest and working with them was a joy.  I was reminded again that, although every context is different, there are many common themes concerning what gets in the way of teachers looking after themselves. It’s always a challenge to speak openly about what we may regard as our own inadequacies when the boss is in the room, but I was very pleased that Ed (the boss) was there too, making copious notes and modelling that whatever the position in school, everyone has something to learn. He was quiet for most of the session. As often happens, we got on to the subject of choosing how we respond to situations. I stated my position: ‘no one can make you do anything’; I sensed unease in the room. Inviting a challenge, I was told ‘Ed can make us do things’. With a smile and a look of genuine surprise he responded ‘Can I?’ as though someone had just revealed to him magical powers of which he was previously unaware.

At the end of the session, it became apparent how closely he had listened to his staff’s concerns: to how they found it hard to leave things, even though they know the job is never done; how hard it is for them to leave ‘early’ (defined by them as anything over an hour-and-a-half after the end of the school day) because of feelings of guilt; how difficult it is to spend less time marking even when being encouraged to do so by the SLT; how hard it is to say ‘no’, look after yourself and ask for help. At the end of the session, he summarised the learning with 10 Ls of wellbeing. They were unique to that session and that school, yet also highlight a number of experiences which are common to all schools I work with. I share them with you with his blessing.

Ten Ls of Wellbeing – for teachers everywhere

Learn to live with the undone (after all the job will never be finished)
Live and let live (support each other in work and well-being, ‘Have a great evening!’ rather than ‘Leaving early?’ will be so positive to hear)
Leaving buddies (walking out with a friend may make that ‘early’, end of day, departure easier)
Limiting time for tasks helps to create focus (we can achieve more in less time, leading to more time to do less – or different)
Lists (help us when we can prioritise the content and act on it, including the dull things we may choose to avoid)
Let’s say ‘No!’ (sometimes we have to be sensible with what we take-on for others)
Learn something new (maybe a skill, maybe about yourself, maybe to do something differently)
Look for support (before you need it, because it will help you and it can encourage and empower others too)
Look after yourself (because you are worth it and others will benefit)
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, the fruit of the Spirit – our values – let’s live them.

Changing the habits of a lifetime is tough and we will often fail. With support from those around us (and especially leaders who model behaviour they want to see in others) we can change the culture where working hard and working long are regarded as synonymous.

The post How many LLs in WeLLbeing? first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

At the primary school where I’m chair of governors we are planning to recruit a new headteacher.  As you might expect, governors started by clarifying where we want to take the school in the future.  With thanks to my friend and ex-colleague Jim Laing  who prompted this question, I asked: what is the greatest threat to society today?  There were many, so I asked ‘which of those can we address in school?’ I suspect, given long enough, we would have been able to tick them off one by one.  We talked about self-worth, relationships and respect, breakdown of faith, amongst other things.  We might have added critical faculty, confidence,  love of learning, commitment to values and values-based education.  As governors, we have the privilege and the responsibility of setting the strategic direction of the school. If we fulfil our role effectively, what matters to the school will matter to the children.  We talk about primary schools having a role in putting in place the foundations.  Do we know what happens when our children arrive in and leave secondary school?  Not enough, is my answer.  Governors could and should be asking that question.  As the national education agenda demands that we work more closely with other schools, we have the potential to grow that influence: we could work with other primary and secondary schools, so that children have a consistent message from the age of two to 18.

As is often pointed out, we have the children for a very short time, so we need also to work with parents and families.  More importantly, though ‘No-one spends longer with children than they spend with themselves’ was a chance remark by a friend, which has stayed with me.  The new national standards of excellence for headteachers   describe governors as ‘guardians of the nation’s schools’.  By implication then, we are guardians of the nation’s education.  As a board of governors, have you a corporate view of what education is for?

In every school there will be a different balance between the focus on academic results and the pressure to achieve them.  It’s relatively easy for me: it’s not my job on the line if our academic results are not where we expect them to be.  In holding our headteacher to account, perhaps we should also be holding ourselves to account for the impact we are having, not just on this generation of staff and students, but on their children, and their children’s children.

Last month I visited York Minster.  It took 250 years to build. Perhaps those who laid the foundation-stones feared that their work would be in vain. They could not know what their legacy would be.   All we can know today is that over five or six generations the vision was strong enough to overcome all the barriers they faced so that – despite the more recent challenges  – the building still stands.   If we as governors embrace the opportunity to shape a society based on acceptance of difference, perhaps not in my lifetime, nor in my children’s, nor possibly in their children’s, but before the end of time, love will overcome fear.

The post Terror in Paris: what can schools do? first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

We congratulate ourselves on being able to do fifteen things at once as though one life on its own isn’t sufficient: we need to be living two or three to get our money’s worth.   Media messages have to be instantaneous. According to statistics the average attention span in 2012 was 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000.  Seventeen percent of web users spend 4 seconds or less on a webpage.

In schools, teachers have to be more and more creative and insightful to engage the attention of their students.  If you haven’t caught them in the first 12 seconds, they’re off somewhere else – and that’s only the majority.  If you have students with a shorter-than-average attention span in your class (and who hasn’t?) even if the majority are ready to concentrate for longer than 12 seconds, their attention will be diverted if something or someone distracts them.

Isn’t it time we challenged this ‘faster and more is better’ assumption?  While technology has made it possible for google to find 28,300,000 matches for ‘go slow society’ in only 0.59 seconds, our brains do not equip us to respond to requests so quickly.  I can’t pretend I’ve got this cracked, but I am at least aware of the need to make changes to a life that’s feels as though the only way I can get to the bottom of my list of things to do is not to sleep for 72 hours.

Three things happened in the last week or so that made me question the way we are living our lives.  All of them involve schools.

I decided to take myself in hand and attend a mindfulness course in the hope of improving my concentration, learning to listen to my physical needs and stop living half my life on auto-pilot.  We were being encouraged this week to stop twice or three times during the day to spend two or three minutes just noticing what is happening ‘right here; right now’ as the saying goes.  The idea is to pause and re-centre ourselves, to be aware of everything that is happening, rather than blocking out or fighting the inconvenient thoughts, feelings or sensations.   The teacher in our group was looking uncomfortable.  She really didn’t know how she could fit that in on a work day, and when I remembered my recent visit to a school, I could completely understand her difficulty.  It was lunchtime, and while some teaching staff were in the staff room, others whooshed through the corridor, picking up coats as they went, grabbing a sandwich en route (or not even doing that) and rushing off to supervise a lunchtime club.  Not a second to ‘waste’; not a moment to take stock of their own needs before the start of afternoon school.

The second event was at a recent conference run by AMDIS.  One of the delegates commented that her headteacher had initiated something called (I think) ‘The Calm Option’ on a Wednesday afternoon, designed to give space to those who signed up for it.  What an enlightened headteacher!  Compare her with the one described to me in the third encounter that’s made me stop and think:  a friend who has recently started a new job in the office at a primary school told me ‘It’s really full on. We just don’t stop.  Lunch-hours are for wimps, apparently – that’s what the headteachers says’.

Some schools teach their students resilience.  Mindfulness is also becoming known and practised in schools.   It would be good to think that the practice extends to staff and that their need to refresh mind and body at regular intervals is taken into account, but I fear that the headteacher spoken about at the AMDIS conference is in the minority.  I suspect (and hope) that the ‘lunchtime is for wimps’ head is also in the minority.  I’m also aware how difficult headteachers find it to stop for just 5 minutes at school, rather than darting from one thing to the next, never taking breath.  The new headteacher I encountered on a resilience programme I ran,  told us that her role was not really proving nearly as challenging as she’d imagined.  Only later it emerged that she didn’t stop to  eat during the school day, and when she got home in the evening her usual dinner was a bowl of breakfast cereal.    There was apparently nothing unusual or worth questioning in that practice.

If this sort of behaviour doesn’t seem unusual or unhealthy to headteachers, what message  are they giving to their staff, who have even less opportunity to pause if they are in front of children all day?   What is this frenetic pace modelling to the next generation?  Is this the way we want to educate our children?  Teachers sometimes get frustrated when they discover that students are doing their homework while playing computer games over the internet, chatting to friends on Facebook and setting up a meeting by text.    And yet is it really so different from the way most of us live our lives, rushing from one thing to another without ever stopping to check whether our bodies feel okay about it?  When we finally notice their protest (a suspected heart attack in the case of one headteacher I worked with) how many of us keep going anyway, telling ourselves ‘we just need to get to the end of the day, week, month’ – whatever time span that promises to relieve us from the tyranny of deadlines.  The truth is, that’s never going to happen unless we take control.  We need to stop running so fast.  Running will only get us to our final destination more quickly, and what’s more, we won’t even be aware of what happened on the way.

I’m with Mary Oliver

When it’s over, I don’t want to end up wondering if I have made of my life something particular, and real … I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

The post ‘In schools, lunch-hours are for wimps’ first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.