After feeling weighed down by the demands of school life in Australia, Yalinie Vigneswaran from Ambition Institute tells how self care is a big part of it’s work to support teaching staff
Yalinie Vigneswaran says while she may look like an education geek, she can deadlift 130 kilos and hip thrust 200 kilos.
The executive director of programme delivery at Ambition Institute describes her love of powerlifting as “absolutely bonkers”, considering that until three years ago she’d never been sporty and was the kid who always made excuses to skip PE.
Vigneswaran was prompted by a lack of self-confidence and control in her personal life to take up the sport, which provided her with a newfound sense of community at her local gym in Clapham, south-west London.
Now, she’s using her “voice in the sector” to tell struggling teachers to take time out from their work and do something “entirely for themselves”, as she learned to do.
Vigneswaran, who leads Ambition’s initial teacher training programme, believes the scheme provides the sort of on-the-job support that she sorely lacked when she was a trainee teacher.
There’s “too much self-sacrifice” in teaching she says, which is driving many to quit. She adds: “They burn out if they don’t feel like they’ve got permission to look after themselves.”
Helping is therapy
Vigneswaran came close to burnout herself while teaching and leading schools in Australia.
She joined Ambition just over a year ago, having led educational programmes for Teach First and the Education Development Trust after returning from Down Under.
Her role, ensuring the 500 teacher trainees who started with Ambition in September are properly supported, is “almost a form of therapy”, she says.
“It’s the closest I can get to going back to [my first year in teaching] and telling myself, ‘you’re doing a good job.It’s OK to make mistakes. There’s help coming in the future’.”
Vigneswaran believes teachers still “really struggle” with the idea of getting things wrong.
She herself was thrown in at the teaching deep end, having moved to Australia and taken a “really theoretical” Master of Teaching degree at the University of Melbourne.
It involved just six weeks of school placements. And the mentoring she received in her first placement “was not of the quality, consistency and compassion required”.
Good Neighbours
Vigneswaran was four when her family moved from Sri Lanka to England and picked up some of her English by watching the iconic Aussie TV show Neighbours.
In a strange twist of fate, while living in Melbourne where the show is set, the only break she took during long days as a new teacher at Northcote High School involved watching the soap.
She experienced all the job roles during her career that Ambition now serves through its programmes. And she’s “always trying with every decision that I make” to think back to what might have made her life easier during challenging times.
“I might have stayed in teaching for longer if there was some resemblance of the type of support out there now,” she tells me.
Supporting teachers
That includes Ambition’s Early Careers Teacher programme, rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted.
A key element is mentoring.
Vigneswaran believes that good mentoring is “key to bringing a teacher training curriculum to life”, but that “the specific number of hours” given to training mentors is “less important than the quality of training”.
Her own biggest mentor was her mother, who was a maths and physics teacher back in Sri Lanka. She remained a “teacher at heart” after they moved to England and took on the role of tutor to Vigneswaran and the children of their Tamil friends.
Vigneswaran’s father “worked his socks off” six days a week in petrol stations and corner shops to “help us survive”.
She experienced a “cathartic, full-circle moment” while working at Teach First and the Education Development Trust when she led programmes for the National Tutoring Programme (NTP).
Reflecting on how her parents couldn’t afford to pay for private tutoring when she was a child, Vigneswaran “really wanted to make sure that the tuition was getting to those who needed it the most”.
Teaching and travelling
Her mum’s tutoring set her up well. Vigneswaran studied pharmacology at London’s King’s College and had a brief stint as a scientist, before turning to teaching while travelling.
She found it “massively humbling” to teach classes of 50 at a high school in Ghana. There was no electricity, “rationed” chalk and the rooms were enclosed by wooden panels through which you could “see out to the rest of the school”.
As well as being a teacher and school nurse, Vigneswaran was asked to train other teachers on lesson planning and building pupil relationships.
After moving to Melbourne and qualifying as a maths and science teacher, within four years she was made leading teacher (equivalent to assistant headteacher for curriculum) at Coburg High School.
But in 2018 her father had a heart attack which prompted the “really hard decision” to come home and “make some memories with my family”.
In England, she became development lead on national professional qualifications at Teach First, working with around 60 middle and senior leaders developing courses.
The role “clarified” that teachers in Australia were “struggling with the same challenges as teachers here”.
Vigneswaran was also head of academic mentoring, in the first iteration of the NTP, which trained mentors and placed them in schools serving disadvantaged communities.
She led the programme between July 2020 and September 2021, during which time Teach First exceeded its 1,000 target by placing 1,124 mentors.
She moved to the Education Development Trust to oversee its NTP programme, but in a “baptism of fire” her role was broadened a year later to also oversee the Early Career Framework and National Professional Qualifications.
These long-running programmes had “very different mindsets” to the “start-up culture” within the NTP, although there was always “political uncertainty” over when the NPT would end.
Education Development Trust led on subsidised tuition delivered via school-led tutoring, developing tutors who were already school employees or members of a school’s community.
She said the funding rules “felt complicated” for school leaders, who “had enough going on at the time”.
The programme delivered 20 hours of online training, and “you couldn’t have the perfect tutor in that time”.
A balance had to be struck between quality and getting tutors to kids “as quickly as reasonably possible” to “take pressure off teachers trying to juggle remote learning and their own personal circumstances”.
Vigneswaran is “confident” the programme “reached a lot of the most disadvantaged kids”.
And she hopes that “what’s left” of the NTP – the funding that tuition partners were given to “scale up” their work – will “carry on its legacy and make sure that tuition improves”.
Showing Ambition
At Ambition, the charity moved into initial teacher training amid the government’s shake-up of the market in 2022.
Some of the 68 providers that lost accreditation were highly experienced, and there were concerns newly-accredited providers – such as Ambition – would struggle with a lack of local knowledge and partnerships.
But Vigneswaran says Ambition had already recruited 20 partners by the time she started, and she’s keen to grow the provision further.
There’s a “real sense of excitement” that “whatever’s happened previously”, they’re “determined to make a success of the programme because it’s really needed”.
Vigneswaran also leads Ambition’s suite of commercial programmes which are “more targeted, either geographically or by a particular learning need” than its big government contracts.
Some pilot projects involve going “really deep into a problem, trying to push the boundaries of what a programme should look like”.
She’s particularly excited about a SEND programme around leading trust improvement and building inclusive practices, which this year involves 25 trust bosses.
The programme, which includes sessions by the government’s lead inclusion adviser Tom Rees and campaigner Elen Jones, is also running next year.
Another pilot, around adaptive teaching, is new territory for Ambition and is “something we see a gap in the market with”.
Last year, Ambition supported nearly 55,000 teachers.
Labour has pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers, and Vigneswaran says Ambition wants to help them achieve that – not just in terms of delivery, but “to potentially make some quality changes”.
The charity is also working closely with the government around “elevating the profession” of teaching, which she sees as crucially important.
“What I want us to do more of now is to show the rest of the world that teaching is a beautiful, joyful, incredibly rewarding thing. I feel privileged in my role that I can do that.”
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