it.

Once your teachers feel that they have a sense of self-efficacy and purpose and that are also being recognised for what they're doing well, then, I mean, we're all just grown-up children, aren't we? So then you begin to kind of unfurl.

Now, if I give an example... and listeners forgive me if you've heard this example before but I think it stands the test of time this is the first assembly that I ever did at that school I'd got all the teachers sitting around the edge of the hall all the children all sitting in the hall listening and I shared a book with them and it was a story about a child that is very stressed and anxious and the child meets a little old lady who says let's take your worries out of your worry bag and the worries shrivel up and then And I'd got a bag on my shoulder with some typed out worries laminated.

I am a professional laminated worries in my worry bag.

Anyway, and after I finished reading this book, I turned to the children and I just said to them, well, the thing is, I'm a bit worried.

And you could see the teachers around the edge of the room like, oh, for God's sake, we've got another one.

You know how.

Alison, what about in your professional life and questioning or challenging the status quo where you feel things weren't quite right?

Yeah, so my first teaching job was in Harlow in a comprehensive, an 11 to 16 comprehensive class.

I'd been trained as a primary teacher and there weren't any jobs currently.

I saw this teacher for general studies advertised in the local paper and I applied for the job.

And from the offset, it was going to be, I knew it was going to be a challenge because it was a really challenging community.

So there were a couple of things I did there.

Well, several things I did that stick in my mind to challenge the status quo.

about choice um and what place that plays what part that plays really in causing young people to feel like they do have agency because so much is at their fingertips there's my segue so much is at their fingertips so how do i know it's 10 years so how do we how do we seize this moment in a way that that is positive tell you we trust them it's

from commercial organisations, but what does a true partnership look like? And what I've been excited to kind of learn over this past year is how we can work together and create new initiatives in the system.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right and it's through a climate of mutual respect and I've got to know you over the period of the last year and anyone who knows me well will know that when I start to joke around and use humour it's because I feel comfortable in a relationship and I can see that there's a genuine commitment to doing the best thing that we can for our teaching profession in order that our young people can get the best possible outcomes.

And what we know about, of course, about the inclusion agenda, it's interesting hearing you sort of talk about your journey towards this, because you're right, back in the day, we didn't label it.

We just got on and taught everybody to the best that we could.

I think recently several things have happened, one of which is if you listen to people like Professor Barry Carpenter say, He makes the point that more children now have their lives saved, even if they're born very prematurely.

And a premature infant may have developmental issues later on.

And those kinds of children who may have had a very fragile start to their life, nevertheless, of course, deserve the very best education they can.

These are questions I was starting to explore maybe a bit further on, but because of where we're going in the conversation, I'm just curious about what is the thoughts, what is the feedback that's coming back from

Found a photograph of her, a prize winner at university.

They were twin girls.

They weren't identical twins, and one of the twins, um, had been labeled by her teacher prior to me arriving at the school, had been put in the bottom set, and her mum came to see me and said, "I really don't think this is fair.

I really don't think this is right." But this girl had kind of built a sort of self-image, because that's what happens really quickly if you're labeled, of "Well, I'm not good enough.

I'm, I can't do..." Anyway, um, we worked with her.

By the time she was in year six, she had a brilliant teacher who was also the deputy head at that time, Simon, and she really came out of herself and started to really achieve well.

Yeah.

And when you apply, you have to [laughs] uh, document how you are going to behave in a collegiate manner against a set of professional principles and practices.

What lessons from headships sort of still most influence your work today, do you think?

Well, huge.

So I was very privileged when I took up my first headship.

First and only headship, actually.

I mean, the role changed a lot in a period of time, but the school was in special measures and So this is the first headship I was going to.

I was being researched as a deputy head by a team from the University of Cambridge, and they were coming into my classroom to observe teaching without labelling children.

And when I got the headship, it was a school in special measures.

But I'm just going to flip that a little bit and ask you if you can remember one or two amazing young people that have really kind of... you know made you who you are as a leader and um obviously with confidentiality maybe what that was how that has stayed with you and how that drives you because i i you know we're talking about young people being at the heart of what we do uh morally

Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

I will remember that phone call for the rest of my life.

Yeah, I'm getting chills too, just talking about it.

I said, "Would you happen to have anybody in your family that might have been missing for a really long time?"

"What about Holly? What, what about the baby?"

And I was like, "Baby? What baby?" My brain just was on fire because I was like, "How can a child be missing for 40 years and nobody know where she is?"

teaching the strikes what needs to change for that to feel like a more cohesive relationship between teaching and the public so

i think that's that's a very complex issue if we think about the pandemic for a moment i had hoped during the pandemic that because teachers went above and beyond i mean they really did um that the public would forever be grateful But it's almost like The Wizard of Oz.

It's almost like because they were beamed into people's living rooms and they saw their children responding to Mrs Jones teaching phonics or whatever it was, it was almost like the mystique was... taken away the reality is the way that teachers and this is this is at the heart of what we do at the charter college the way that teachers will build greater respect is through being professionally as competent as they possibly can be as knowledgeable as they possibly can be i think back to when i was teaching too often particularly before I started studying and engaging with Learning Without Limits.

In my early days of teaching, I would do what I thought intuitively was the right thing to do.

My teacher training was a PGCE, so it was post my degree.

So it was only a year and then you've got teaching practice interspersed in that.

So the amount of theoretical training that I had through a PGCE, although it was excellent, I went to the University of Warwick, it was nevertheless limited.

I know, it was a very English