By our Education Correspondent.
When summer ends, its time for inservices… another meeting, another PowerPoint. The senior management team stands at the front of the staff room, clicking through slides filled with “inspirational” Brene Brown quotes about daring to lead and leaning into vulnerability. It is hard to feel vulnerable when mid November, the leaking roof plops grey water into the all winter -semi-permanent- buckets placed around the classroom, or when I am standing in the visibly damp corridor of a building thrown up in the seventies at a budget, by an architect who based the design on the windowless office they sit in… crumbling around us… worrying that my photocopy allowance is going to be questioned, while budgets are slashed to the bone. They speak about emotional literacy as if it will fix the fact that we struggle for staff to cover absences and our worries about resources are non-existent.
​The language they use suggests that if we just had more courage, our exhaustion would vanish. It shifts the burden of systemic failure onto our shoulders. We are told to engage in these very positive, enlightening workshops (with the sting in the tail of another new piece of senseless paperwork or barely useable spreadsheet), yet the fundamental way our schools operate is never up for debate. They treat the school like a private business with a rigid chain of command, acting like bosses, when in reality we are all public servants with different remits. We are paid for specific roles rather than for subservience, yet any attempt to challenge the hierarchy is met with that same tired jargon on a presentation, or a quote on a noticeboard about psychological safety and “positivity.”
Noone seems to question – who is actually allowed to be vulnerable? It is all well and good for a head teacher who worked through the paperwork and demonstrative lessons for their secure pension, to talk about “rumbling with vulnerability,” but try telling that to the young teacher on their fourth consecutive temporary contract. For them, speaking out is not an act of bravery. It is a career-ending move. They are terrified to put a foot wrong because they know their contract might not be renewed next term. Their vulnerability is not a leadership skill. It is a survival mechanism in an environment that treats them as disposable.
​It is the same for so many others in the building. When the management asks us to have open conversations, they ignore the fact that the setting is entirely unequal. You cannot have an honest discussion about the state of our education system when one person holds the power to fill the shit sandwich post-observation documentation with more demoralising shit and the other is just trying to make it to the end of the week. The focus on individual resilience is just a way to avoid confronting the rotting structure we are all forced to work in. It is a way to make us feel like we are the problem, not the cuts, not the building, and not the top-down management that refuses to listen- and worse still, discourages real systems that should be encouraged and welcomed, ie Union representation and meetings without SMT present in order to allow real discussion leading to presentation of ideas through a representative who has legal status and protections.
​We do not need more Brene Brown quotes about empathy. We need collective action and level plsying fields where discussion and negotiations are concerned. Leadership can surely put into plaxe their love of Brene Brown and show vulnerability in front of trained union reps who meet them on a level playing field of professional knowledge and legal protections? Brene Brown in action!
We need democratic management where decisions are made by the people actually doing the work, rather than managers obsessed with corporate self-help books. If they truly wanted to support us, they would fight -along with us- for better resources, for permanent contracts for our young staff, and for an environment that is fit for the current century rather than a crumbling relic of the seventies. We do not need better emotional regulation. We need a system that actually serves the children and the staff instead of crushing us both in the name of efficiency.
New teachers- contact a teacher’s union over the Summer. Join. And find out how to access training that will ensure you meet managers with the confidence and equality that only knowing your terms, conditions and rights brings. Brene Brown’s name is candied about by people who don’t understand Brene Brown- and sometimes who by those who don’t want you to know that its not YOUR fault.
