Transforming Education with Rachel MacFarlane

Host: Alis Rocca

Guest(s): Rachel Macfarlane

Alis Rocca

Hi, and welcome to our podcast episode, Rachel. Thank you so much for joining and for giving us your time today.

Rachel Macfarlane

Thank you for inviting me, I'm really looking forward to it.

Alis Rocca

You're welcome. Let's get going with straight away finding out about your journey. Could you just give us an idea of your journey in education right from the beginning to where you are now?

Rachel Macfarlane

Of course. So after school, I went to university and did a history degree and then I did my teacher training and my teacher training year was really important for me because I've written at various stages in my career that I think that was the best teaching I ever received. I didn't have brilliant teaching at school, but I was just so inspired by my tutor on my PGCE course that when I joined the course, I was sort of 90% certain I wanted to teach by the end of a couple of weeks of training and the Anna Pendry influence, I absolutely knew I wanted to teach. That was what absolutely sort of ignited my passion. So I became a history teacher in London in a secondary school and then a head of department and what was then called a senior teacher would now be called assistant head. I was a deputy head always in London schools, normally in a London or sort of North or East London. I then became a headteacher and I was head for 16 years of three different, quite contrasting schools. So the first was an 11 to 18 mixed school just outside London in St Albans, with a community with very much sort of London features. And then I came into Waltham Forest and became head of Walthamstow School for Girls, an 11 to 16 girls school, community school in Waltham Forest. Absolutely loved my time there.

And then I heard about an opportunity to apply for the headship of a brand new school that was being built in East London in Ilford, Seven Kings, called Isaac Newton Academy. And although when I applied for the headship there, it was going to be an 11 to 18 school growing year by year from year seven upwards, within the set up year before the school opened the DfE gave us the opportunity to bid for a free school primary phase as well. So the school opened with just year sevens in 2012 and then two years later we took our first primary cohort and grew the primary school from reception upwards at the same time as we were growing the secondary school. So I often say to people I came quite late in my teaching career to primary but it was a real epiphany for me and I absolutely loved being head of a three, four, mentoring primary alongside a sixth form entry secondary. And I made it my business to ensure that I spent a lot of time down in the primary, really skilling myself up with the primary curriculum and everything that was different about primary and doing some teaching and running some extracurricular clubs. So you'd always find me on a Friday afternoon running an art club or, you know, reading to the reception children. And I always thought that, you know, however bad an encounter or an event might be at school, it only took a trip into the reception class to sort of have my spirits lifted. You'll recognise that.

Alis Rocca

Yeah, I would definitely jump in there and say, any of my most difficult days as a head, I just think, I just need some time in reception. And you spend some time with those reception children, it's like, oh yeah, now, that sort of filled my tank, I can go back to it all again.

Rachel Macfarlane

Exactly! Yeah, their sort of optimism and sort of zest for life is just so infectious, isn't it? And then in 2018, after seven years of being the head at Isaac Newton, I decided that I needed to do what I was always telling the staff and students they should do, which was push myself out of my comfort zone a bit. I've done, you know, 16 years, as I say, of headship.

And I've been for the last five or six years, I've been quite heavily involved with London Leadership Strategy running programmes and training modules for school leaders. And actually for nine years, I've run a programme called Going for Great, which work with leaders of good and outstanding schools to help them to connect with each other and learn from each other and to move their school on that sort of ever evolving journey from good to outstanding and outstanding to beyond outstanding. Very much sort of arguing that an outstanding judgment is not the end of the journey, that a great school is something far beyond that. And I'd really enjoyed that sort of adult education piece. So I took a role as director of education services for a big school improvement organization called, at that stage, Hearts for Learning, it's now called HFL Education. And that involved leading a team of about 100 advisors and consultants who were working in schools and settings, PVIs, nurseries, primary schools, secondary schools, special schools, and being responsible for their development and the quality assurance of the service that they provided. And so I did that for about five or six years during the COVID pandemic, which was really interesting times, because obviously we had to pivot and work quite differently supporting schools and school leaders when we couldn't physically be on site and when the needs for support were very different.

During that stage I started to do some quite serious writing. I'd done editing of case studies that had been written by the schools that I'd worked with on the London Leadership Strategy. So I had been involved in writing and editing education texts for a number of years, but I'd never written a book on my own. I'd co-authored a book with Guy Claxton and some other school leaders around building learning power. And I'd contributed chapters to volumes that were sort of education books.

But I decided I wanted to write a book around creating high performance cultures. So I wrote a book called Obstetrics for Schools that came out sort of during the pandemic. And that really got me into the writing bug. So about two years ago, I decided I wanted more time for writing. I'd written a couple more books by that stage. And I wanted a bit more space to be able to do keynotes and school improvement work across the country and with a range of different trusts and schools and local authorities, not just in my region of Hertfordshire. So I took an interesting career change and moved from being the director of the team to being a member of the team, which is actually a real joy. And I became lead advisor for underserved learners because at that stage I was very much focusing on underserved groups and minoritised groups and supporting schools and school leaders to really believe and have the strategies to ensure that those children achieve just as well as their more advantaged counterparts. And now, just in the last few months, I've stepped back from working for anybody and I'm completely self-employed, so I'm an independent education consultant and advisor. I'm working on another book and I'm doing a lot of work with a whole range of dioceses, trusts, local authorities, schools around high performance cultures, around learning power, around race equity, around inclusive education, around developing belonging, self-efficacy and also making school unmissable. So I've had a really full career and I feel so blessed and so sort of fortunate to have been able to change, and pivot my work at different stages of my career.

Alis Rocca

And I was going to say, really full, and you've been able to do so many different aspects of what makes up a good education for a child. What do you think have been your main drivers to stay in the education system and to approach it from so many different lenses?

Rachel Macfarlane

Well, I talked a few minutes ago about how powerful my teacher training was. I've never lost that absolute sort of excitement about education and the power of educators. And I've worked with some absolutely brilliant teachers and professionals. And some of the best educators I've worked with haven't been qualified teachers. They've been teaching assistants or operational staff. I've had some great, great teams in the various schools that I've worked in and led and that's just kept me sort of motivated and you know bursting for sort of more. And I suppose as my work has become very much around how you unswervingly focus on high performance for everybody at a time when societal inequity seems to be getting more and more stark and more and more entrenched and poverty levels are rising and all the metrics suggest that the gaps that have existed stubbornly for years and years aren't closing, aren't going away. That absolutely keeps my feet to the fire because there's still a huge job of work to be done and we know that it's possible to close gaps. We know it's possible to create cultures where everybody succeeds, but it's tricky, it's difficult. And as resources become more scarce and budgets reduce and pupil numbers reduce, which cause even greater financial challenges, one has to just keep chipping away, but also keep reviving strategies, looking at things differently, searching out what might be really effective strategies that can be transposed and transported from one setting to another. So I think it's that sense that there's an awful lot that can be done that really would transform the lives of particular youngsters who are currently underserved, underserved by society, underserved by external agencies, underserved perhaps, we have to admit, even though it's a hard fact, by schools because of the fact that we're so hard pressed.

Alis Rocca

You've done a lot and written about disadvantage and looking through the lens of economic and ethnic disadvantage. Why do you think that education is important through that lens? How will it make the changes that you're talking about changing that gap? And why is it important to you?

Rachel Macfarlane

Perhaps if I take the two parts of that question in the opposite order and start with why it's important to me. I had an awful lot of advantages as a child. So I grew up in a really comfortable, lower middle class family. My parents were both teachers. So if I happen to have a bit of a dud experience in school, maybe, you know, a supply teacher for a year, I can remember, you know, my GCSE year, I didn't have a full time English teacher for a year so my dad just stepped in and read the set text with me and helped me and educated me at home. When I found things difficult or I needed help with independent learning or my homework, my mum or dad would step in and help. And although we weren't sort of flush with money and resources and we weren't sort of super well off, my parents didn't struggle to provide the things that would really help me to have a good education and to have that cultural capital and social capital.

But I was very aware at the secondary school that I went to, perhaps more than the primary school because I was older and saw things a little bit more objectively, that there were haves and have nots and that some people really weren't getting a fair crack at the whip. And I was also aware that some of the staff in my school viewed children from different backgrounds differently, perhaps had different levels of aspiration for them, perhaps pushed them differing amounts, perhaps gave them different amounts of attention, perhaps were more interested in some than others. And I had a friend who came from a particularly disadvantaged background and it used to really incense me that teachers didn't expect as much of her as they did from me. And this had been a friend that I'd gone through a little village primary school with and I knew she was really smart, I knew she was better probably at maths and English than I was and she had huge potential and yet she got a little bit marginalised and was allowed to slip under the radar at secondary and I can remember feeling the inequitability of that. I think now I look back that my parents were a huge influence on my thinking around education and around politics with a small P, just around the role that education can play and adult educators can play in helping to create a more equitable playing field for people. My father also wrote quite a lot. My father recently died about four months ago and I've gone back and reread a lot of his work and inevitably in organizing his funeral and sorting his affairs, I've spoken to a lot of the friends and colleagues that he worked with and were influenced by him over the years and they have just reminded me just how passionate he was about fighting the cause of the underdog. And I suspect that, whether I was aware of that or not, that influence has really rubbed off on me. And I just, I think we see, don't we, once you've been in education for a number of years and you've seen the power of a great teacher or a great adult champion to really build the sense of status and self-belief of a child, to really support a family in need, to be able to co-educate a child really effectively. We see the power of education to transform lives. So, yeah, I think that's really been what has got me interested in supporting those that have less and ensuring that great schools are great schools for everybody.

Alis Rocca

Brilliant, thank you. And I love that you sort of ended that by saying how education can transform lives. And I think it's recognising how transformative it can be. And as an educator, as a parent making sure that we have the highest quality education that we can provide. You know, we all have the ability to teach and it's just, you know, do we understand the importance of that? Do we understand the importance of sharing even just a book at home with a child and just seeing that that can make such a difference. It can just create that spark. You talked about learning powers and I think, you know, I love the work of Guy Claxton and curiosity being one that is so important because again walk down to the reception class and it's full of curious children that are just born curious you know and it's about us not getting in the way of that curiosity.

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah, not allowing that to sort of dim. Ken Robinson spoke and wrote really powerfully, didn't he, about how just society tends to squash that sort of imagination and curiosity and almost sort of idle mind wandering that young people are so brilliant at.

Alis Rocca

And we almost teach them that that's wrong in some of our classrooms. We're teaching that idle mind wandering can be, you know, just bring it back to the curriculum. This is what we should be doing.

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah, yeah, there's a right or a wrong answer. You didn't tell me what I wanted to hear.

Alis Rocca

Let's move on to another intersection. So SEND, so Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and Economic Disadvantage. Why do you feel that that's an important intersection to recognise and for educators in schools to be discussing and be putting in place strategies that are going to support children that fall into both of those brackets?

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah. So my most recent book was called The A to Z of Diversity and Inclusion and it looked at diversity and inclusion in lots of areas. But I found that time and time again, I was coming back to ethnicity, economic circumstance and special educational needs and disability. And the intersection between the three of those, I think is really important for us to understand because we see a lot of children that will fall into two or three of those categories and therefore have sort of multiple potential disadvantages. And I think there are various sort of commonalities. I think it's really important that when we're thinking about economic disadvantage and SEND as educators, we are really conscious of our own biases, preconceptions, ideas, and that we're constantly sort of challenging our assumptions, our expectations, our language, our goals, our strategies, and keeping ourselves as literate as we can be around those issues and areas. I also think that if you are a parent of a child with SEND and you're also living in poverty or you're economically disadvantaged, you really are disadvantaged in two significant ways. I've worked quite closely with a number of special schools and when I talk to special school leaders about how they spend their pupil premium money, they are often supporting families with education aids and resources for their child at home just to sort of give them a fighting start so that their education is not something that is confined to things that are happening during school hours. So I just think that for parents who are fortunate enough to have money, time, agency, connections with sort of important groups, it's possible to fast track resource and support for a child with a range of SEND that it just isn't if you're a parent who doesn't know who to go to or how to advocate for your child or doesn't have the money to get a sort of private EHCP assessment or to push for SALP intervention or whatever it might be. So I think that we see, unfortunately, a large number of children who present with SEND in school also having multiple complex sort of challenges with perhaps living arrangements, economic circumstance, space, mental health worries, which just puts more and more sort of potential barriers in the way.

Alis Rocca

So what should schools do? Recognising that, understanding that intersectionality, understanding the vulnerability, but also on the flip side, understanding that education can be transformative, like we said. What are your recommendations for schools and educators?

Rachel Macfarlane

That's a massive question because of course every individual family or child and circumstance will be different. But I think as an absolute starting point, building a relationship, building a really deep relationship of respect and understanding and connection with any child that has that sort of intersectionality and the parent or carer or responsible adult for that child, making it abundantly clear to the child in an age appropriate way and to the family that your expectations of them are no different from your expectations of anybody else. Your aspirations for them, your determination to give them the best possible education are second to none and that you will do everything you can to give them an equitable education which means that you will do more, different, better, extra for them because they need more support. And then thinking creatively and in a solution-focused way about what it is that is needed to make the difference. Not assuming that a label means that there will be certain challenges or barriers, really going in in a sort of evidence-informed rather than assumptions-laden sort of way. Recognising that it's going to need to be a piece of work that involves a large number of people both in the school but ideally also out of school. So being open to working in a really connected and joined up way with external agencies but also skilling up and empowering family members and other important adults in the child's life to play a part too. But making sure that every adult in the school sees them as a child with potential rather than a child with a label or a child that can be put into a sort of box or a category and whose barriers or struggles can be sort of explained and used as a justification for them being kept on the outside or marginalised or not included in the same activities or having adaptations to make them really sort of involved.

Alis Rocca

Do you think there's ever an excuse for not doing that, for not taking the time to really build those relationships with the individual child, with the family?

Rachel Macfarlane

I don't think there's an excuse for not doing it. I think there are reasons why that can happen which are not about people being uncaring or bad people and I'm not saying it's easy but I often think that. And I would say particularly at secondary here, I think it's less of an issue at primary. But I think that when educators are sort of time poor, they often feel that building the relationship is something they just don't have the luxury of the space or capacity to do. But to me, that's just a massive time saver. So when I was a head, I was an absolute sort of convert to home visits, home visits before a child joined reception, home visits before a child joined year seven. And I'm always amazed at how few schools do routine home visits for every single child joining the school, particularly at that transition from primary to secondary. People will often look at me in kind of absolute amazement and say, what, you did 270 home visits a year in your school, because we had 90 in primary and 180 in secondary. How on earth did you find the time to do that? And my answer would always be, well, we didn't have the time to not do it because we absolutely had to understand those families and ideally to see the home context and to get to have a really honest and deep conversation with the family about their hopes and aspirations, also their anxieties and their fears, their interests, their passions, their challenges, the things that they need to support with. And by spending 40 minutes, half an hour in a family home, doing that, the very beginning of the relationship with the family, it just saved so much time. It built up such a sort of speed of trust that then if something went a bit awry on the seven or 14 year journey through their school education, which inevitably it would do at some point, and somebody had to pick up a phone and have a potentially difficult conversation with someone at home, it wasn't such a difficult conversation because the person at home knew that the school and the staff really had the back of them and their family and also understood their circumstance and their lived experience.

I think we often feel that because we have limited money, limited time, limited resource, we can't do some of these things that are just fundamentally important. And that by taking the time to build relationships and really appraise ourselves of the lived experience of the families that we're working with and the youngsters that we've got in our schools, that really helps us to manage on kind of meager resources.

Alis Rocca

I completely agree and as a head was exactly the same. I think those initial weeks at the beginning of every academic year, not just the home visit, but every transition that you're doing, the beginning of the new year, regardless of the age, it's okay to step away from the curriculum, step away from some of those other things that you're thinking, I've got to pile this in and build the relationships and get that sense of trust and get the children, whatever age, into a place of learning before you then start expecting them to learn and it does pay dividends. You might think well now I'm three weeks behind my curriculum but that catches up because you've put those foundations in. So I suppose it's about prioritising them and where your school puts those priorities so as school leaders we need to be getting that message out that actually relationship building is still a high priority at the beginning of every academic year.

Rachel Macfarlane

Absolutely, a young person has to be in the right emotional space to be receptive to learn, don't they? If you don't create the environment and the climate first, you can't hook some knowledge or content onto that. I think it was Andy Clark who said the job of teachers is to grow bigger and better brains. Well, you have to make sure that your soil is well fertilised and has all the right kind of nutrients before your plant's going to grow, right?

Alis Rocca

Mm, mm. Yeah, I like that, that's lovely.

Let's have a bit of a focus on ethnic minorities and racial equity now. I know that you've done some work around that. What do you think that schools need to do more of to ensure, beyond the relationship building, but to ensure that there is that equity and maybe start answering that question from a leadership point of view and then we'll move more into the classroom.

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah. So every school is going to be different and every school will comprise a different makeup of pupils and staff. And I spent the first part of my career, you know, working in London, working in very pluralistic environments where children from racially minoritised groups in the country were often the majority group within the school.

So I worked in a school in Tower Hamlets that was I think 97% Bengali and had sort of two or three white children. But then I've also worked in recent years in and supporting schools that are predominantly white where perhaps there are no members of staff who are from racially minoritised groups at all, where perhaps there are very few children of colour in each year group or even in the entire school. So the context is really different. But the reality is that we live in a country and we have a society and we are all fed by and influenced by a media that has racist tropes and that is structurally, racially inequitable. And that's quite a challenge, it's obviously a challenging reality, but it's sometimes for some people quite an uncomfortable sort of truth to accept and internalise.

The very first thing I think we have to do as school leaders is to recognise that race inequity is a reality in our country, in our society. And that it's too simplistic to think that racism is just the behaviour and the language of a few sort of bad apples and unpleasant people that you might encounter on the football terraces or at a demonstration or something.

I read a really powerful quote the other day that said, you know, racism isn't the shark, it's the water. And all around us there are structures, institutions, modes of doing things, systems, policies that aren't necessarily intentionally creating race inequities. But the result is that people of different racial groups are advantaged or disadvantaged by them. So school leaders, I think, need to absolutely understand and believe that point. And that might involve going away and doing some really deep reading or some work with a coach or some training to sort of grow racial literacy. And I found as a leader, although I've worked in the area of sort of race equity in various different roles as an equal opportunities coordinator at one point, you know, as a curriculum leader, as a head teacher, in my recent role, I've needed to constantly go back and make sure my reading and my research and my discussions are sort of updated because it's something that if you're not constantly revisiting it, your muscles go flabby. And then I think it's really important that a leader is brave in communicating that they know that it is their role to ensure that the school they run is striving to be racially equitable and that they know there's a job of work to do and that it doesn't mean that your school is a bad place if you acknowledge that there are structural inequities that need addressing and that probably this is a piece of work that you're never going to get to the end of, that you're never going to be able to say 'I'm a leader of a school where there's no racist attitudes or tropes or assumptions or behaviours or policies. I'm working really hard at it and I'm constantly looking at things through a race equity lens. But I appreciate that in my lifetime, in the next 20, 30 years, we may not get to a position where we can say, you know, racism is a thing of the past.' We can sort of put that to bed and work on something else. And that's uncomfortable as a leader because I think we feel as leaders, if we take on a challenge or we make something a strategic priority for a year, we want to see at the end that the job's been done, we've knocked that off, we've achieved that, we can move on to a different priority. So I think it's important for leaders to, as I say, make this a lens through which they are questioning and interrogating everything, always on the lookout to compare data around children or adults or families from different ethnic groups just to see what that shows and it may show no difference at all which is great or it may just show some interesting trends, it may show blips that happen one year and not another or it may show entrenched patterns. I think leaders need to ensure that the voice of minoritised groups including racially minoritised groups is constantly sought and heard and listened to and responded to and that means sometimes saying you know around this particular policy or this initiative we're particularly interested in hearing from our Pakistani community or from our East Asian community or from our Black Caribbean parents and feeling comfortable with seeking the feedback and the views of particular groups just as you might say you know around this piece of work we really want to hear from our parents of children with SEND or parents of children who are recent arrivals to the country or to the school. So I think it's really crucially important, if a school is serious about striving for race equity, it's crucially important that the leaders are on board and that they are vocal about the fact that they are making that a priority and that they are open to hearing stories and seeing data which might show them and reveal sort of uncomfortable truths and difficult to hear evidence.

Alis Rocca

Can I just pause you there? How does that work with that school you described where it is mainly white with only a few families of color? How do you look at that data? So if you've got one Chinese family, one Bengali family, one Afro-Caribbean family, what does the data tell you? What do the stories tell you? And how would you feel that you should respond as a head or as a leader?

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah. Well, I think in a school like that, it might well be the case that what leaders want to know is what the experience of those children who are, you know, the one child from this background is, how included they feel, how much they see themselves represented in the curriculum, in learning resources, in the stories that are told, in the visits and speakers that come into school and just whether there are any differences. So there it might well be that you're gently sort of just probing, that you ensure in any sort of feedback group you include that parent or that child who might sort of stand out because of their difference. And one of the things you're almost testing is whether they feel invisible, that they just don't ever see or experience anything that pertains to their culture or what they would do out of school or what they eat or where they go at the weekend or their heritage. But equally you might be testing to see whether they feel hyper-visible. And I write in the A to Z that both of those sort of concepts are really key in race equity. It's really important that nobody feels invisible because it's really difficult to feel like you've got status or a sense of belonging to an organisation if you feel like, you know, if you weren't there nobody would mind or that your story isn't told or your life experience isn't usualised. But sometimes in efforts to achieve race equity it's possible to make people feel hyper-visible, isn't it? And that applies to children with a physical disability, for example, or, you know, anybody who is just different and a new arrival to the country and we want people to feel included and safe and that they belong but also that they're understood and that their life experience and their heritage is valued and included. Does that answer the question?

Alis Rocca

So that does really help and that leads me into the second part of the question which was really around what can we do in the classroom and I think that talks to curriculum and making sure that our curriculum has the visibility that we need and the broad understanding that we're looking at humans from around the globe and their own particular version of living and culture and everything else that comes with that. What would you suggest curriculum should look like and also what would you suggest teachers should be doing in the class to make sure that people feel both visible, seen and heard, but not hyper visible?

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah. So I think it's really about representation. It's about auditing your subject or your scheme of learning for a term or your programme of study through a key stage and just sort of asking the question who features in this curriculum? Whose stories are told? Who are the heroes? Who are the victims? Who are the aggressors? Who are the oppressed? Who's central to the narrative and who's a bit peripheral? Who has a sort of bit part in this curriculum and who's seen as a sort of key player? Who's usualised and who's a bit sort of potentially exoticised or brought on, as I say, with a sort of bit part? Which societies are depicted as, you know, the fonts of civilisation?

I can remember when I was teaching the history of medicine being fascinated to find that, you know, there was all this sort of focus on the ancient Greeks and Romans in terms of water systems and hygiene. But actually centuries earlier in Indian civilizations, all of those sort of techniques were really usual, you know, in cities. But that sort of Western dominant culture can appear in lots of different subject areas. We need to challenge why it's not common in a maths textbook to hear about mathematicians from the Middle East or from Southeast Asia when there were all sorts of really inspiring mathematicians whose theories and techniques children could sort of learn through. Why is it that often in music education when we talk about the great composers, they're composers from the sort of Western musical traditions. So yes, I think going back and asking are women featured as prominently as men, are civilizations from around the world equally sort of represented. If the national curriculum says we need to study this period or this culture or this society, how do we at the same time say, and while this was happening here, meanwhile elsewhere in another part of the world, this was happening and look how similar that is. So, you know, this tradition of storytelling was happening in ancient Mesopotamia at the same time as this tradition of storytelling was happening in Germany, just really helping to open children's minds to that lovely quote about windows and mirrors — that the curriculum helps you to sort of understand yourself and shines a mirror on yourself, but also opens windows for you to see out into all sorts of different vistas that help you to understand that our world is enriched by people from all over the globe.

Alis Rocca

How far do you think we still have to go in schools in the UK to open those windows, to show those differences, because what you're talking about there is quite a change in our curriculums. And again, we're talking about time poor individuals who might easily just think this is what we do here. This is the way we teach history in year five. We've always done it. We're going to continue doing it. Where do you think we are on that road to change?

Rachel Macfarlane

Yeah, I think it's vastly different in different schools, but I don't think change is as awesome and enormous a job as it perhaps kind of first seems. You can start small, you can start with one subject area in one year group or one new unit. You could start with a unit that you were planning to revamp anyway as opposed to something that you've only just sort of finished polishing, you know, where it would seem like a huge upheaval to amend it and start all over again. You can start it because of an impetus of, you know, perhaps a community that's moved into the area that brings a different perspective to one that's been represented in the school before and thinking, okay, maybe we will involve some of the parents. One of the things that we can do to make them feel connected to our school community is to say, we really like to know whether you've got any favourite nursery rhymes or children's stories that are important to your culture or books that you'd like us to include in our library. So there are ways of almost spreading the load so you're bringing in people from the community or families to help to inform and enrich you. One of the things that teachers often say is, I just don't know where I would start, where would I go to find out about scientists from the Caribbean who ought to be included in my curriculum.

And often my response is, well, have you got people from that heritage, that culture who you could ask, who you could involve in that conversation? Children are often great at wanting to work with librarians to diversify book stock in libraries. And they're really good at sort of doing reviews and giving feedback about the stock that already exists and new texts that could be purchased.

And where a school perhaps says, I'd like to diversify my geography topic books, I can see that they're populated by lots of images of white people on beaches or on cliffs and there's nothing sort of diverse about this book, but we can't afford a new set of resources, we have to work with these — then I think it's about, and this can happen right down at key stage one, key stage two, if you are using resources that you know aren't as diverse as they should be and you would want them to be, just opening up some curious discussions with the children about what they notice about that text or that resource or that image or that picture book and helping them to notice and articulate, isn't that interesting? We're not seeing any Asian families in that shopping centre scene. That doesn't look like our shopping centre. Wonder why that is. And then perhaps inviting children to write to the publishers and say, you know, we're working from this book and we've noticed that this doesn't look like our community — why is that? Are you planning to do a sort of revamp of the book so it will become more diversified? So you can bring diversity into your curriculum even if the resources you've got aren't necessarily the ones that you would want to be working with, through the activities you do and the curious questions that you ask.

Alis Rocca

Yeah, so lots of work to be done, but as you say, it's small steps. It doesn't have to be this huge gargantuan task that is throwing everything out and starting again. And you've talked about the importance of having a sense of belonging and feeling heard. Whatever vulnerable group you might find yourself in or a cross between them.

Let's have a think now about the downside of that. If you don't feel that you belong, if you don't feel seen, how do you think that plays on children's mental health and wellbeing?

Rachel Macfarlane

Wow. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of my role is that I hear really tragic stories. And from my Race Equity book, I interviewed quite a lot of children and quite a lot of adults, people of colour who spoke to me about their experience in school, who are still in education, maybe as teachers or head teachers or governors. But I've also spoken to a lot of children living in poverty when I've done pupil premium reviews in schools or reviews into eliminating economic exclusion which I've done a lot in the last few years and I think you know whatever the potential sort of vulnerability or difference I think there are common sort of consequences and they are feelings of tiredness, frustration, anger, exhaustion, low self-worth, low status, insecurity, vulnerability and they lead to a number of behaviours, all of which are really unhealthy.

So sometimes they lead to people just sort of withdrawing and trying to make themselves invisible and sort of exist on the periphery because of a fear that, you know, the teacher's going to say, tomorrow I'm going to get you to write about where you went on your summer holiday and they know they didn't have a summer holiday, so what are they going to write? Or, I'd like you to keep a food diary of everything you ate last week and maybe their home diet is very different from everybody else's and they don't want to sort of write about eating dhal and chapati when everyone else is going to write about roast beef dinners or whatever it is. So sometimes it leads to people wanting to sort of disappear into the background, which obviously isn't good for anybody in terms of education because then they're not getting the attention and nurturing they need. Sometimes it leads to masking behaviour. So sometimes it's really difficult for a teacher or educator to know that a child is being disconnected because the child is really sort of masking that.

Going back to that example of the food diary, I spoke to a head teacher who said she was, as a child, given that very task and she completely fabricated what she'd eaten for the last week because she didn't want anybody in her class to read a diary where it was clear that she'd got a kind of South Asian diet. We have children who mask the fact that they're really desperately unhappy when they can't afford to go on a school trip and they sort of say, I didn't want to go or that's going to be boring. And yet, you know, they're the one child in the class that doesn't go out and have that cultural experience that everyone else does. They miss out on the bonding that happens on the trip, but also all the lovely chatter and follow up afterwards. But they feign, you know, disinterest. So sometimes it can lead to sort of masking behaviour. Sometimes it leads to children just not turning up to school. Why would you want to go to school on Christmas jumper day when you can't afford a Christmas jumper? Why would you want to be in school when the children are learning about the transatlantic slave trade when you're the only black child in the class and nobody's sort of set up a safe contextual environment for that to happen. So, you know, unfortunately we see a big intersection between absence from school or sporadic sort of absence and being minoritized in one way or another or coming from a group that is perhaps going to feel, you know, less likely to feel that kind of sense of belonging. And then we just, we know that children aren't in an optimal space to learn and to be able to pick up new concepts and attach them to the schema in their brain if they're worrying about a difference being exposed in class or if they're worrying about what's happening in their family at home or whether there's going to be food on the table or whether they're going to be cold at night, whether there'll be any internet connection at home and whether they'll be able to do their independent learning, whether they'll get into trouble the next day because they couldn't print something out because they didn't have a printer at home. You know, the myriad different ways in which being vulnerable or different can play out to make it harder for you to connect to learning. And I think, you know, we as teachers, we often get excited understandably by children who really thrive at school and learn quickly and make great progress and become really proficient at something, whether they're a really good flautist or really good cricketer or really good at languages. And we can so easily get hoodwinked into thinking these are sort of natural gifts or abilities and actually not stopping and thinking, is the child who's really good at cricket or really good at playing the flute or really good at Italian, really good at those things because they just had the advantages of the conditions and the resources and the time and the money and the support and the home backing? They're no different from the child who isn't yet excelling at those things except that one of them has that sort of entourage or cavalcade of support around them and the other doesn't and really needs that from, you know, professionals at school to stand in and be that sort of cavalcade for them because they're not fortunate enough to have perhaps other adults or other people outside of school to do that for them.

Alis Rocca

Brilliant answer and I think it really leads into that notion of us as leaders needing to close the attainment gap. So we're constantly being told, we need to close the attainment gap. You've got these children on pupil premium and these children from this minority group and we need to be closing the attainment gap. And it can be so superficial the way that that is approached. But what you've just said there and what you've said throughout our conversation is it's actually really complex and it starts with getting to know the child really really well so going back to what you said about relationship and understanding where that child's coming from and then not having those assumptions that well they're not going to be good at playing the flute or playing cricket because they just haven't shown that but actually thinking what else can we put in around this child and family importantly that will give them that boost, that step up, that starting on the journey of levelling the playing field so that the gap can close. But it's huge, it's a massive challenge and I think like you said about creating an anti-racist school, it's never going to end and I think with the attainment gap it's never going to be something that as a teacher or as a head teacher you can say well we've done that in our school, it's finished, we can move on because we've put this in and this is how we spend our pupil premium because every time you get a new cohort of children in there's going to be new challenges.

Rachel Macfarlane

Absolutely. And I think because we're time poor and because it's complex, I often read pupil premium strategy statements that identify as the challenges or the barriers quite generic challenges, the things that the media kind of say are the challenges. And when I stop and say, you've said here that, I don't know, let's say children have lower literacy levels on entry and that that's your challenge. And I say, and what's that based on and what is it about literacy? Is it their writing or their spelling or their vocabulary or their reading? Sometimes you realise that actually the detailed analysis hasn't been done. It's the sort of, well we know that in the past these children have tended to have these characteristics or been behind in this aspect of learning.

And it's really easy to sort of just generalise and treat children who have that sort of pupil premium label as a homogenous group, rather than really drilling down and finding for this particular cohort of year six children in my school at the moment or reception children, these are the characteristics and these are the barriers and therefore these need to be the strategies. We're never going to really be successful at addressing barriers if we're not really clear about what the barriers are.

So it is a job of work of really getting to know the individual children, really being data rich and informed and saying, I can see that this is the particular sort of issue. Again, sometimes people say, attendance is not so high. Our pupil premium eligible children or children from this particular group don't attend as well. But without sort of going back and really unpicking what is the barrier to the attendance, you know, is it about not having friends and not feeling sort of socially safe in school? Is it about not having the uniform and not coming into school because you haven't got a clean shirt to wear and you don't want to get into trouble? Is it about children going on extended leave to other parts of the world? What is it that is the barrier?

Alis Rocca

And it's again, it's assumptions, isn't it? And it's just checking your own individual assumptions because we are all constantly bombarded with imagery and with ideas and with generic notions of groups and it's constantly pulling yourself up and thinking would I say that about a group of white middle class children who are doing well, would I expect them all to be exactly the same or am I okay with thin

Topic(s): Diversity, Inclusion, Education .

Resource(s):

• Square Pegs: Inclusivity, compassion and fitting in – a guide for schools
• The A-Z of diversity and inclusion (2024)
• Obstetrics for schools (2021)
• The nine pillars of great schools (2018)
• Unity in diversity (2023)
• Powering Up Your School: The Learning Power Approach to school leadership (The Learning Power series) (2020)
• Gathering Greatness (Going for Great) (2014)
• Great Aspirations (2018)