3 Dads Walking
Andy Airey, Mike Palmer and Tim Owen came together through the most tragic of circumstances: Their daughters, Sophie, Beth and Emily committed suicide. Despite the subsequent suffering and shock, the ‘3 Dads’ have shared their experiences to open up conversation and to campaign so that other families do not have to face the things they have faced and continue to face.
This blog is about the culmination of their latest walk, which was to petition parliament to debate a motion to make the teaching of suicide awareness compulsory as part of the PSHE curriculum. The fathers speak eloquently about their reasons for this addition. With the profession reeling from news of headteacher, Ruth Perry’s suicide, we have all felt the shocking and brutal nature of the word itself. For that reason alone, it is a subject we might be inclined to shy away from.
The point of this blog is to change that, to acknowledge the challenge of facing up to it and inspire us to grow up and do it. This doesn’t mean using the word straight-away but raising children who are okay with asking for help – to actively teach and encourage help-seeking behaviour.
“Better to have a challenging conversation than give the eulogy at your daughter’s funeral,” as Andy Airey so powerfully states.
A culture of honesty
Once upon a time, I was a very young headteacher, often leading schools where staff were older than me. I spent a lot of time trying to construct a persona in response to those situations.
In this blog, director of ‘Leading in the Now’, Dan Edwards discusses the leap of faith needed to become a transparent leader. It’s an honest look at the journey we make as leaders to present outwardly what we perceive makes a ‘leader’, and through it Edwards argues that being authentic is less perilous than the temptation to pretend we are superhuman and have all the answers.
Least among the dangers of that approach is a murky sort of leadership, where the leader isn’t quite sure who they are and neither are their team. Worse by far is a fall from grace. It’s time to take off our capes and be human; anything else is unhealthy and frankly impossible.
Hope after trauma
Connex Education Academy’s After the Bell podcast has been focusing on trauma-informed practice recently, creating a trove of important knowledge on the subject. The latest episode sees its guests, deputy headteacher, Andy Bridge and headteacher and SENDCo, Debbie Davies discuss the latest research into how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect our brains, even in the womb.
It’s another challenging subject, which is also covered with an abundance of hope. Hope, because the findings indicate we can affect change. In short, if the brain responds to adverse childhood experiences, it will respond to the positive ones we create too. Though we can’t take back time or entirely undo harm, this is good news for everybody – especially educators. We owe it to children to help them move forward and thrive despite the challenges they may have faced in the past.
Thinking about primary writing
The latest episode in Kieran Mckle’s Thinking deeply about primary education podcast is a fascinating discussion with guests, Neil Almond and Christopher Such. But don’t let the podcast name or its high-calibre guests trick you into thinking this is somehow too high-brow or too much after a hard day’s teaching. In fact, these experts are expertly interviewed and the result is a highly compelling look at language and learning.
It’s an hour’s discussion that covers an enormous amount of content, from ensuring we highlight suffixes and prefixes to the importance of etymology. Better still, the passion of the participants is a touching reminder of how curious children are about language and how much they can retain if we don’t underestimate them. The example of Wodan’s Day (Wednesday) to demonstrate etymology and ‘unassisted’ to show how learning prefixes can help children unpick new words from their own experience (with a link to an ‘assist’ in football) are perfectly pitched. The result is an hour that doesn’t feel like an hour at all.
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