Cultivating a culture of belonging in schools

Speaker A: So we're able to campaign purely from what education needs rather than from some, uh, politically ideological standpoint, helping you become

Speaker B: the best leader you can be. We really get in touch with a much deeper inner wisdom. And keeping you up to date with the latest news from the world of education. The School Leadership Podcast.

Speaker A: Hello from the School Leadership Podcast. This is John Rose and I'm very pleased to have with me someone who very recently led a workshop session at the Inspiring Leadership Conference called Cultivating a Culture of Belonging in Schools. Hannah Wilson is director and co founder of the Belonging Effect, working as an independent leadership consultant, coach and trainer with a specialism in dei. Hannah's about to talk to me about what belonging should mean to schools and how it's achieved. And begins by highlighting one of the keynote speakers at Inspiring Leadership.

Speaker C: Francesca Martinez did a keynote about diversity and really talked about her own belonging as a woman with a disability. And I've almost finished reading her book and she talks a lot in her book about how she was made to feel by a lot of staff when she was a pupil at school and the difference between primary and secondary. So when we then moved into the keynote panel and I was joined by three other, um, people, Jagdeep, Domini, Jo, we had quite an open discussion about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in schools, which then fed into conversations throughout the two days in the breaks in the lunches at the gala dinner. Ah, and in my own workshop as well. Um, the feedback from my workshop, which is all about cultivating belonging through an intersectional lens, was about the fact that belonging can sometimes be reduced to being quite a surface level conversation. And we went quite deep, I guess, in thinking about belonging through the lens of different identities and different stakeholder groups as well as I was there to, uh, reshape other people's thinking and to influence their thinking, because belonging is at the moment such a fluffy sticker on the problem kind of conversation. So it was more about disrupting that and having more open, challenging conversations with the stakeholders there for them to think about their own sphere of influence in their own settings.

Speaker D: The Belonging Effect, Hannah, is, if I can call it your brand. You know, it's what you do. It's clearly hugely important to. Where did it come from, that sense that belonging is either being undervalued, simplified, underplayed, or all of those things, you know, where did that originate from for you?

Speaker C: So the Belonging Effect is my company. We're a DIB training provider. Uh, we work nationally and internationally. We only rebranded last September. My company used to be called Diverse Educators. So if we go back to where we were conceived, we were part of the diversity grassroots movement. So. So I co founded women ed, um, 10, 11 years ago off the back of Women Ed, really growing quite a lot of traction. BAMED then started looking at the experience of people of color. Then LGBT had started looking at the experience of people who identify as being lesbian and gay and bi. And then Disability ed started. So we had these four grassroots groups for a while, going back like 10, nine, eight years. I moved out of London, moved up to Oxford, became a head teacher, and we were doing the work in our school and we were getting more and more frustrated about how siloed the work was becoming. And it really came to a head with a conversation I had with my deputy head about the fact that she had to cut herself into four to go to four different events because each event only spoke to a part of who she was. So that's why I started diverseed back in 2017. And we held an annual event at our school in South Oculture to create a, uh, cohesive, coherent, joined up conversation about diversity, Equity, inclusion. That was the acronym we were using at the time 10 years ago. The works then evolved and belonging has become a real buzzword in the sector. We adopted the BE onto our acronym, so we use the acronym deib. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging. And with all of the tensions in the world right now and all of the rollback when it comes to DIB activity, a lot of people now just talk about belonging. Our company is called the Belonging Effect and we want people to think about the impact that belonging has on people. But the equation I give to people is that it's D plus E plus I equals B. You can't ignore the D, the E and the I. And that's what I'm seeing more and more, that people are talking belonging and they're almost negating the fact that your belonging is impacted detrimentally if you hold a marginalized identity. And I think it's a lack of awareness about that a lot of the time.

Speaker D: Here we are then, Hannah, on the NAHT's School Leadership Podcast, of which many, uh, of the NHT members are, uh, uh, teaching and leading in primary.

Speaker A: Uh, I want to kind of bring

Speaker D: that holistic sense as you've just defined it there, about belonging. But particularly in primary, is there a possibility, do you think, that there's so much emphasis on pupils being seen, heard, valued, feeling like they belong, et cetera, that we overlook the teachers?

Speaker C: Yes, I think there's definitely a problem like A lot of settings will say to us, can you come and help us work with the pupils? And, uh, my question is always, what work are you doing with the staff? The DIB conversation has to start with the staff. We have got significant issues socially, systemically, structurally, when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, representation, accessibility, when it comes to the staff experience. So we have got to start there. And I have quite a lot of resistance sometimes when I'm working with schools, colleges and trusts about that, that this is about an institution wide cultural commitment to the work. And we can't have this chasm between how the children are experiencing the space and how the adults are experiencing the space. So we always encourage people to start with staff training, staff awareness. We talk about developing the three Cs consciousness, confidence and competence, awareness of self and our own identity and our own lived experience. Experience, but consciousness around other people's identities. Reality's been very different. Confidence around what we do, how we do it differently, how we challenge it, how we question it, how we have a go, make a mistake, get some feedback, move on, and competence around, like the specific skill set that we all need as a foundation. But then for each role function we hold, we talk about cultivating belonging for all. It has to be for all stakeholders and not just the teaching staff. Another tension is that we get asked to go and run training for the staff when we find out who's in the room. It's the teachers, maybe the TAs, but actually all the OP staff, support staff also need to be part of that conversation. It needs to touch every single person who's a stakeholder within that school community.

Speaker D: Do you think we, uh, can feel like we belong all of the time, Hannah? Can it be so good that it's far reaching, it's all encompassing?

Speaker C: I don't think that is achievable. I think it's being aware of what you need to belong as being different to what someone else leads to belong. And I think that's where it can sometimes go wrong, that we often recreate the conditions of belonging that we need rather than what other people need. And then it's also about having the agency, isn't it that thinking about psychological safety, thinking about being included, thinking about being able to access things, thinking about being represented, treated, um, equitably. If that isn't on offer, then you challenge it, you question it, or you vote with your feet, you find a better space. So I don't think it's possible or sustainable to have a high level of belonging in every space. All the time, but it's being aware of where you need that belonging and having that ongoing dialogue, I guess, about what's working and what's not working.

Speaker D: Far better for me to sound Ofsted esque, really, in this, but can it be measured? Or at the very least, can we quantify the outcomes brought about by pupil and staff belonging? All of these elements you're, uh, discussing here, can we see it in figures? Can you see it on a graph?

Speaker A: Is it, Is it that tangible?

Speaker C: It's such a good question because everyone is desperate to measure it and quantify it. And I think that dream, we know we're having impact, we know we're making progress when we can show in our data report to our governors, whoever it might be. Um, and, um, we obviously know that obviously they've got an increased focus on this specific area. Like for me, going back to the idea of it being holistic, the data also needs to be holistic. We need to be drawing together all those different data sets. So thinking about the pupil's experience of belonging, looking at attendance, looking at behaviour, looking at safeguards, studying, look at achievement progress, if we're thinking about secondary schools, looking at progression into sixth form pathways, employability, all of that data can be interpreted through a lens of belonging and we need to get quite curious about what it tells us. Similarly, with the staff data set, I always talk about the fact we're quite data rich when it comes to the pupils, data poor when it comes to the staff, but we do have data, uh, around the staff that we're perhaps choosing not to look at. So, again, thinking about recruitment, who's applying, who's not applying, who's getting the job, who's staying, who's getting promoted, who's leaving, that's a big belonging, kind of like piece of work. Looking at staff absence, looking at who's giving us feedback, all of those are also indicators about levels of belonging. So I think actually we tend to overcomplicate it, we tend to try to quantify it, but actually, qualitative evaluation is also really important. So are we brave enough, courageous enough to ask the questions and hear the, the honest truth that comes back to us about who doesn't belong and why that belongs? That might be. We have schools who contact us to say, hannah, we're doing everything you recommend, but the feedback still that, like, people don't belong? Well, are you actually asking people what they need or are you assuming what they need? I think there needs to be a bit more of a back and forth dialogue.

Speaker D: I'd Just like to push that point a little further, you know, what would be the advice and guidance to a school leader who struggles frankly to find the right tone around belonging?

Speaker C: I don't think it's necessarily tone. I think it's the willingness and the openness to be vulnerable, to be really open to the fe feedback. So Doreen, I think as leaders we can sometimes go through the motions of asking the questions, but are uh, we asking the deep questions? And when we hear responses we don't like, how willing are we to have our own reality, perhaps challenged? So one of our partners when it comes to um, dib data analysis and evaluation tools, um, is a company called Ejurio and they run the big kind of like staff surveys across the map. Um, and we support them and support a lot of our settings and use that data. And some of that data can be really, that feedback can be really challenging. Like when you suddenly see a load of red around different aspects of your school or you get feedback that staff don't feel psychologically safe or staff don't feel like they can speak up and give feedback to their manager. That's quite raw data. It can be quite stark. But I'd rather know and when I'm, as a former head, I'd rather know when my staff were uh, disgruntled, frustrated, not feeling seen, respected, heard. Because data's knowledge, isn't it? And by knowing that you can then redress that. And I think the connection between the quantifying and the qualifying is sometimes a bit tenuous that the data is the first part. We can sometimes have too much data. Uh, and I'm seeing the same data being churned out regularly at the moment around racial equity or inequity. For example. For me it's the follow up questions and dialogue you have. So I'm a m, former English teacher. Like I'm a storyteller. It's looking for the stories in the data, it's looking for the trends in the data. Ah, so I'll give you an example. Like a head teacher I was working with recently said to me quite innocently in a conversation about setting counts, that she'd lost a high number of her black teachers. Um, this year. They'd all resigned. They were all moving on and then she kind of moved on to the next thing. So I just brought her back to that. I said I'm just really curious. Have you asked them all why they're leaving? Oh, well, they've all got new jobs now. I get they've got new jobs but have you asked them about their experience of being a black teacher in your school? Like, if they were all leaving, I'd be quite curious about are we doing something wrong or is there a problem with, um, racism in our school? And she said, but they're leaving. But I think that's a missed opportunity to actually find out about our school, that you can't do anything differently for them. They are leaving, but you can be better informed, better equipped to then think about how when you recruit more black teachers in the future, what they, what they might need from you that's different to what you've offered at the moment.

Speaker D: You've identified some of the issues, some of the bumps in the road there. Uh, Hannah, but just to broaden that out, I mean, what would you say tends to be the biggest sticking point? Where does that lie? Where can schools go wrong even if they have good intentions?

Speaker C: Well, that's a big question. Um, so I think a couple of things to be aware of from a kind of a workplace culture kind of piece, is that we do a lot of work, um, for our pupils around them, feeling psychologically safe in the learning environment, in the classroom for being newer, inclusive in how we communicate with them and how we help them learn. And then we can be guilty of not doing those two things when it comes to the adults. So I would really ask anyone listening to think about how psychologically safe are the different spaces in my setting for the adults. So thinking about the staff meeting room, the staff room, the line management rooms, the boardroom, et cetera, and how neuro inclusive are we being and how we communicate to our adult stakeholders, because I think we often default into an extroverted, neurotypical way of communicating. Holding meetings, holding trainings, and actually we can do better. And we've got, we've got the muscle memory and the skills and the knowledge for how to do that better for the children. But we tend to just default to doing it the way we've always done it when it comes to the adults. So I think that's an interesting place to start. I talk quite a lot in my training. I truly believe that schools are designed by extroverts for extroverts to flourish and thrive, and that we often think through a, uh, neurotypical lens about how we communicate in a very linear way. And if we could, how we communicate and how we create mechanisms for different ways of having conversations and different ways of gathering feedback that could make a massive difference to a high proportion of the staff.

Speaker D: Let's just flip it, Hannah. How far do you think, if at all, can children show the adults a thing or two about belonging?

Speaker C: Well, I talk a lot about spending 19 of my 20 years in schools, in secondary schools, and then I spent my final year working across a secondary and a primary and how different a, um, primary school is to a secondary school. That just the interactions, the structures, the relationships, the dialogue with the pupils, with the staff, with the parents and the carers is very different, um, in a primary to a secondary. And I actually think secondary schools could learn a lot from primary schools. And um, I think we need more knowledge exchange across those different um, sort of stages. And I think actually listening to pupil voice is really important. I saw a brilliant post on LinkedIn, I think it was last week, about the performativity at the moment around, um, listening to pupil and student voice, not just in schools, but actually like youth voice in the wider, um, business kind of sector, uh, where quite often we're actively seeking the young person's voice. But is it a tick box or are we truly listening to it? And I think one of the things to think about recreating inclusive spaces is how we democratise the space around where the dominant voices are, um, around who's doing the talking, who's doing the listening, around the equity of the airtime and how we move away from the people, People voice perhaps being a little bit tokenistic and actually start there. And I think like really great pupil student voice around surveys, around focus groups, around student council, student leadership dream. They get it. I can remember being ahead of a startup school and our year seven student council did one of the best assemblies I've ever seen about the difference between equality and Equity. They were 12 years old and they completely got it and they articulated it in such a clear way to their peers and to the staff. I actually think we do need to be centering their voice and their thinking

Speaker D: a lot more when it comes to you. Hannah, can you tell us about a moment, maybe when someone or a group of people helped you feel like you belong and that the power, the transformative effect of that.

Speaker C: Well, I'll tell you, it's interesting when, um, you're progressing up the leadership ladder and you can sometimes feel that um, distance or that disconnect between being a member of the staff and the member of the senior leadership team. I had quite, um, open explic conversations with colleagues and friends about becoming part of SLT and how that might make me feel like I belonged less within the staff body. But a lot of my closest friends were some of the staff, um, in the school. So that was an interesting moment where, um, we talked it out. I took a lot in my work around social contracting, explicit communication around expectations and needs, um, and I was ly managing one of my best mates, um, and we had a really um, transparent conversation about how things were and how things would be and what we both might need to do differently to protect ourselves and to put some boundaries around the professional relationships that didn't impact the personal relationship. So I think that's the moment that kind of springs to mind where there's transition points in your career, like moving from things being implicit to explicit. So we actually talk those things out and we don't assume them, um, and we don't start making up the kind of the stories in our own head about what's going on, but we actually articulate it. And that requires us to be quite emotionally vulnerable and quite open and honest. But I think it always pays off.

Speaker D: And a head or a leader listening to this right now, who really wants to improve belonging and everything you've spoken of uh, in this conversation in his or her school. What's a good starting point? What's a fairly solid starting point for them for the process?

Speaker C: Okay, because I suppose a couple of things. So our website is Manadin's cave of free assets and resources. Um, we've got 700 blogs, we've got 40 toolkits, um, we've got curated reading lists, glossaries, you name it, we've got it. We've tried to do the hard work to reduce the labour in schools. So last week we published Next Academics Year's DIB calendar. Ah. Um, and it's been picked up by like, national organisations like Comic Relief, like thank you so much for doing this work. So we try to reduce the labour to give time, energy and resource to then go and do the work. So that's the first thing I'd say. We collaborate with a lot of partners in the system such as Edurio. So we're currently doing a free two part, um, webinar series all around belonging, how to strategize it and how to measure it. Um, so if you've missed signing up for those sessions, all of the recordings of those sessions will also um, be on our website. So we try to create space for regular ongoing conversations. Um, we do a monthly newsletter where we signpost out all the things that are happening and we also have um, a safe community space. I think one of the problems with talking about DIB is that ah, um, it often it doesn't feel safe to do that on social media particularly. Spaces like X are really quite toxic now. So when we published, um, our book back in 2021, we created a safe community space on Mighty Networks. Got a couple of thousand people in there. Um, it's invitation only. You can actually, um, sign up for it via our. And everyone in their works in education cares about deib. So, you know, there's a values alignment there, um, around the conversations and you can then collaborate and share and ask for help. So I think, I think there's, there's lots out there. It can feel quite overwhelming and it's about creating a sustainable way forward and just taking little steps, just challenging your own thinking, seeing things differently, listening to the feedback, exposing yourself, um, beyond your immediate circle, like disrupting, I guess, the potential for group think and listening to, actively listening to different voices as well.

Speaker D: Let's end Hannah on, uh, what one could arguably say is the $64,000 question. If you could redesign an aspect of education through the lens of all that you've spoken of belonging very much at the core of that, what would it be?

Speaker C: One thing. Just the one thing. Just the one thing. Well, more if you wish. I'll give you two things, Joanna. My first thing for the pupils would be, um, the curriculum that we really need to think about who is represented in the curriculum and who is missing from the curriculum and what a difference that makes. Like going back to your question about what made me belong, that for my whole schooling I saw teachers who looked like me and I saw myself in the curriculum. So I really believed that I could be anything. I wanted to be, perhaps less so in STEM because I had less females teaching me in sciences. But on the whole, I didn't receive a deficit narrative about my potential based on my identity. So I think there's a big piece of work to be done around reviewing the curriculum. And I'm an English teacher reviewing the library as well and thinking about positive representation and role modelling and whose stories we are amplifying. And then parallel to that for the staff piece, like, we really need to look at representation, um, across the sector, who is applying to teach, who is being retained in the teaching profession, who is being promoted to senior leadership, executive leadership, who is governing, um, our schools, colleges and trusts because there's that idea that if you can't see it, you can't be it. And like we, we tell our pupils they can be anything they want to be, but they can't see m themselves in the curriculum. The library, the staffing structure, the leadership. Leadership structure. It kind of undermines that idea that there were no limits to our, to our progress.

Speaker D: Yes. You mentioned a short while ago your company's website, Hannah. Just remind us where that is.

Speaker C: Sure. So the company is called the Belonging Effect. The website's really simple. Www.thebelongingeffect.co.uk um, we mainly just, um, exist now on LinkedIn. So you can follow our business page on LinkedIn. We put out a couple of posts a week, a couple of blogs a week and do a monthly newsletter and I'm quite easy to find, but I'm on LinkedIn as well, so. Hannah Wilson.

Speaker D: Hannah, uh, Wilson, it's been a pleasure to have this conversation on the School Leadership Podcast. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker C: Thanks, John.

Speaker A: Um, I was talking there to Hannah Wilson. The webinar she mentioned is open to you if you're part of NIHT's EDI Networks and it's on the 7th of July at 4:30pm it's called Amplifying Diverse Voices and you can contact NAHT for further information. Now, uh, that's it for this month to make sure you receive all future podcasts from us. It's easy to subscribe on the platform you use and, and we're on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts and GoodPods. Any feedback that you have is gratefully received. And if you can write us a quick review, that would be immensely helpful. NIHT is a professional association and union for school leaders. To discover more about the benefits of being an NHT member, go to naht.org.uk join. That's naht.org.uk Join. Until next time, take care.

Speaker B: Giving a powerful voice to school leaders and bringing about real change. The School Leadership Podcast.