Nip in the Bud with Professor Barry Carpenter: How can we support Mental Health in Education?

In this episode I speak with Barry Carpenter  on important themes in education such as school curriculum,  the impact of covid on mental health, absenteeism, complex needs and how we as parents and education professionals can support the children we care for in an ever changing environment.
Barry Carpenter is the UK’s first Professor in Mental Health in Education, a Chair created for him at Oxford Brookes University. He is Honorary Professor at universities in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Australia. He has been a Fellow of the University of Oxford. In July 2020 he was awarded the Distinguished Fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching , for his leadership of the Education field during the pandemic. He has been awarded an OBE and CBE by the late Queen for services to children with Special Needs. In 2017 he was entered into "Who’s Who" in acknowledgement of his national and international contribution to the field of Education  In 2022 , he was made Doctor of Letters ( D.Litt.) in recognition of his lifetime achievements  in Education.
In a career spanning more than 40 years, Barry has held the leadership positions of Headteacher, Principal, Academic Director, Chief Executive, and Director of the Centre for Special Education at Westminster College, Oxford. In 2009, he was appointed by the Secretary of State for Education as Director of the Children with Complex Learning Difficulties and Disabilities Research Project.
He is the author of over 200 articles and many texts on a range of learning disability/special needs topics.) He co-authored  two books on children with FASD, building on his post doctoral research in this area.  . Additionally , his book  , "Engaging Learners with Complex Needs" (Routledge), which outlined his research around Engagement as Pedagogy ,  has been further developed by the Rochford Review as the model for statutory summative assessment, with legislation to enshrine this enacted in 2021.
Barry lectures nationally and internationally. In recent years this has included China, Japan, Dubai, Australia  , New Zealand , USA, and Germany.  He is the co-founder of the National Forum for Neuroscience in Education. For the Mental Health Foundation, he Chaired the National Inquiry into the Mental Health of Young People with Learning Disabilities. He Chaired the National Forum on Girls and Autism  ,which led to the publication in 2019  of his new, critically  acclaimed ,co -authored book on this subject. He serves on the Board of the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, and several other Boards related to Education and Healthcare. He is Patron of the ADHD Foundation .
Barry has 3 children – one a School Principal, one a Senior Occupational Therapist and a daughter with Down’s Syndrome, who now has a home of her own, and published her first book in 2017. Free knowledge rich webinars that support our conversation today:
Webinars:
Bullying and loneliness
Bereavement
Sleep and screen time
Anxiety
Trauma
Eating disorders
Self harm

Nip in the Bud - Where to get help

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Chapters

• 3:51 Barry Carpenter's background and experiences of being a teacher
• 7:02 Holding the child at the heart, even of policy making
• 7:59 keeping the main thing the main thing
• 13:17 Engaging learners with complex needs
• 15:50 How can complex needs be defined?
• 19:02 Pedagogical tension
• 20:44 In what way do children learn differently?
• 21:13 Engagement as the liberation of intrinsic motivaiton
• 23:45 We need a lens of engagement
• 25:08 Observation is key
• 26:55 Curriculum first or maximising relationships with children?
• 27:38 How can our curriculum engage able children and offer challenge?
• 29:41 Engagement profile
• 34:00 Post pandemic and dis - engagement in subject specific learning
• 36:30 Girls and Autism
• 40:01 Why do girls with Autism respond differently to boys?
• 45:20 Some indicators of primary aged girls with autism
• 46:46 Masking and camouflaging in girls
• 48:50 Impact of rigidity and OFSTED fear
• 52:00 British teaching ... some of the best in the world
• 52:30 Mental health and wellbeing in school curricula
• 55:15 1 in 4 children with mental health concerns in 2024 in the UK
• 59:30 Persistent absence from school
• 1:02:45 Teachers have a powerful humanity
• 1:03:35 How to help an anxious child in class
• 1:04:45 Happiness boxes
• 1:08:07 Mental wellbeing curriculum
• 1:09:37 Sleep for mental wellbeing
• 1:12:25 How can we teach sleep and why is this important?
• 1:15:00 Impact of the pandemic on teachers
• 1:17:30 Living in hope through parenting and teaching

Transcript

00:00:03.021 - Barry

We have to be honest as teachers, we were never trained in the area of mental health, but we can't ignore it and what I'm so proud of our profession for doing is they have accepted that this is what's happening to children. We need to be there. We're going to have to learn on the hoof. But actually, isn't that one of the joy and generative parts of teaching? Is children change and we have to be responsive to it? Doesn't that motivate us and keep us going?

00:00:30.161 - Alis

Nip the Bud is a charity that works to support children's mental health by working with mental health professionals of the highest standing, producing free, short, evidence-based films, podcasts, and fact sheets to help parents, educationalists, and others working with children to recognize potential mental health conditions. Barry Carpenter is the UK's first professor in mental health and education. He's the honorary professor at universities in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and Australia, and is a Fellow of the University of Oxford. In July 2020, he was awarded the Distinguished Fellowship for the Chartered College of Teaching for his leadership of the education field during the pandemic. He's been awarded an OBE and CBE for services to children with special needs, and in 2017, he was entered into Who's Who in acknowledgement of his national and international contribution to the field of education. In 2022, he was made Doctor of Letters in recognition of his lifetime achievements in education. In a career spanning more than 40 years, Barry has held a variety of leadership positions, including head teacher and director of the Center for Special Education at Westminster College, Oxford. In 2009, he was appointed by the Secretary of State for Education as Director of the Children with Complex Learning Difficulties and Disabilities Research Project. He is the author of over 200 articles and has co-authored two books on children with FASD. His book, Engaging Learners with Complex Needs, outlined his research around engagement as pedagogy. Barry lectures nationally and internationally, and is the co-founder of the National Forum for Neuroscience in Education. He also chaired the National Forum on Girls and Autism, which led to the publication in 2019 of his new critically acclaimed co-authored book on this subject. Welcome to the Nip in the Bud podcast, Barry. It's an honor to have time to speak with you, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. So thank you for giving us the time. Can I start by asking you to tell us a bit more about your background and what has been your passion that has driven you?

00:02:59.011 - Barry

I think unequivocally, My passion is children, but children that have a need, however we want to describe that need. I suppose the modern language would talk about those children that are neurodiverse, and that's an all-encapsulating concept. I think that probably reflects my career, which has been working with children across age ranges. When I originally trained, early years was one of my specialisms, but during my career, I taught primary age and secondary age pupils. But of course, a lot of years working in higher education, I've been teaching undergrads, master's, and I'm still to this day supervising doctoral students. I think for me, what I've come to learn is teaching is teaching. Yes, of course, you have to adapt and modify depending on the age and stage. But actually, the fundamental process of one human being communicating with another and imparting knowledge, but entering a discourse and a dialog around that and making it interactive and what are the learning outcomes for the learner of whatever age, that is still a process to this day that can excite me very much. But at the heart of that would be children, really, because even when I'm doing teacher training, I'm talking about how we as teachers might grow in our ability to educate some of society's most vulnerable and challenging, in the nicest way, challenging children. And I suppose if you want to know where that passion came from, I think deep down the seeds of it were laid in my own childhood because I had four grandparents, as everyone does. And by that, I mean, I knew my four grandparents. But one of my grandparents, my granny Carpenter, I never knew her walking. I've got one picture of her holding me as a baby, but my actual memories of that grandma were as a woman in a wheelchair, arthritis of the spine and walking around the house with aids and such like. And yet she was a grandparent that would show me the greatest love, and her hugs were unforgettable to this day. And I think probably, I learned to love a person with a disability very early on and that never went away. And it's only laterally, I've probably come to realize that that's where the seeing no boundaries and barriers in my work has come from. I know I've driven some teachers mad in my career because I've refused to accept that any child was not educable. No child is ineducable. It's just that sometimes we as teachers don't have the eyes to see. And that's okay because some children are very complex in their learning patterns. As my work in recent years, it's particularly illuminative. But just because they are very unique as learners doesn't mean that we can't evolve ways that support their learning and development. That could take a lot of trial and error, but it's okay to make a mistake as a teacher. We're not a perfect profession. We don't always get it right. You and I will both have had lessons, Alis, where we've planned what we thought was the most brilliant lesson, the next day fell flat on its face. And we think, well, what went wrong there?

00:06:32.311 - Alis

Absolutely.

00:06:33.651 - Barry

So for me, it's just about the children that even working at government levels and the most complex and strategic of conversations, It's holding that child at the heart of that conversation, not always articulating that, but when you're saying things to ministers, et cetera, of just being able to say it with a conviction that if I can get this piece of policy through, it could improve the lives of some children. So I think that's where my deep conviction lies. I know it's made me unequivocal at times, and some of my staff would have said, very fearless, and taking them on a roller coaster of a journey, but they all got off the ride at the end so where's the problem?

00:07:20.981 - Alis

I think that moral purpose at the core of what you're saying there is what gives you that sense of bravery as a leader and a teacher, because if you do keep having the children at the center, it gives you that destination all the time. What would you say was your most challenging time as a teacher and then as a leader in schools with regards to keeping the main thing, the main thing, to keep that in the center?

00:07:51.261 - Barry

That will have changed over time, but only the context will have changed. So if I go Back to my early career, when I went into this field of work, this particular strand of teaching children with very severe special educational needs, when I became a teacher, the schools for children with severe learning difficulties, for example, had only just become schools. They had been junior training centres before that. So for example, when I became a Deputy Head Teacher, I worked for a lovely person who was the head of the school, but she'd only been a one-year trained health teacher and was struggling with the demands of a headship of a school, but was still very effective in her work with children. But there was still a lot of prejudice around. I think the image there from that time, and it is worth sharing, is when I was in my first headship and was asked to take in children into the community special school that I was head teacher of, take children in from the local hospital school, because in those days, Alis, we still had sub normality hospitals, as they were called. So these were the residual children. Things were moving and changing. So I went to visit some of these children so I could get to know them and then assimilate them into the school. And I went on a visit, and I went early morning because I wanted to see the routine so that we can embody the right self-help skills work into what we would do in the school. And I remember this huge charge nurse telling me, 'Well, the children weren't quite ready'. I said, 'No, I've come to be part of the early morning routine'. Oh, well, I haven't had their shower yet. Okay, fine. Well, let me help with whatever dressing is needed, whatever supports needs. That's fine. He said, 'Okay, well, I'll carry on with their shower'. And he lined up these six boys, mainly who had Down syndrome against a wall and turned a hose pipe on them. And that was their shower.

00:10:05.401 - Alis

Oh my God. That's shocking.

00:10:11.081 - Barry

Yes, and particularly by modern standards, it's very shocking. But that was where we were evolving from. So of course, the desire to make a difference, believe you me, was just fearless in me and determined and It fired me on. And then if I just roll that on to time when I was National Director dealing with ministers, and some ministers, particularly one Secretary of State, was pig-headed and frankly just insensitive, but still driving policy that he thought was very creative, and it wasn't. And you just have to stand your ground. And sometimes you have to pay the price for standing your ground. I took the decision that I could no longer work in that context. Having had five years of very creative work nationally, I knew that that creativity would dry up and I had to exit myself. So you do have to bear consequences for being so passionate and unequivocal and fearless at times. But I could only sustain a job where I knew I could make a difference ultimately, in different ways, whether it's direct classroom teaching, whether it's running my own school, whether it was carrying out inspections, pre-Ofsted I have to say, where you could make a developmental difference by getting in resources to school, whatever. It's that, ultimately, knowing however far away the child may be because of the nature of the position you hold, it might be very senior, that you could, through those processes you put in place, make that difference.

00:12:08.281 - Alis

It sounds like your sense of humanity just runs through everything that you've done and as you say, it doesn't matter how close or how far away you are from the child. That sense of right, that core belief of what is human, what is right, what is compassionate and kind, seems to be a real part of what you've been championing, really.

00:12:34.121 - Barry

I would agree with you, but I take it away from myself, actually, because you see, I see that work as a privilege, and I don't want to say that in a cliched way. What I mean is that each and every day, working with any of those children, they teach us what it is to be human.

00:13:01.051 - Alis

Thank you. That's really touching, actually, to hear that. Let's talk a little bit about your book. You wrote a book called Engaging Learners with Complex Needs. First of all, just what what's meant by 'complex needs in children'? Is there a clear definition? Just go on to say a little bit about this book. What would you say are the main messages?

00:13:27.591 - Barry

Okay. Is there a clear definition of complex needs? There wasn't, but there is now. It was back in, let me see, 2009. I was actually about to start a lecture tour of Australia. I was still a school principal at that time, but my board of governors were very good and would allow me time to go and carry out lecture commitments. I just arrived in Australia and was about to begin this and I had some communication with the Department for Education. What became clear was that they were wanting to create a project, a research project, around complex needs, because at that point, 2009, in that early part of the 21st century, the word 'complex needs' had started to be used by teachers. But there was no legal definition of what was complex needs. You could actually drive past some special schools and it would say, 'Mrs. Blogs's School for Children with Severe and Complex Needs'. You cannot call a school which is a legal instrument of government in the administration of its duties towards children, something for which there is no legal basis. So you couldn't actually officially have the complex needs part in there. Long story short, eventually, I was appointed later in 2009 by Ed Balls as the Director of the Complex Learning Difficulties and Disabilities Research Project. Quite a mouthful, we abbreviate to Complex Needs. But if you take it that we talk about severe learning difficulties, moderate learning difficulties, etc. Complex learning difficulties and disabilities falls into that same language structure. One of the early tasks in that piece of work, which was a national and eventually international project and covered the four provinces of the United Kingdom, so it became more massive than ever it was meant to be, was to define what is 'complex needs'. And so complex learning difficulties and disabilities means that a child has two or more interlocking, co-existing, compounding learning difficulties and disabilities, two or more. It's often now certainly now, more than two. And therefore, within that, there is a tension because as a teacher then, which pathway do you go down? If it's autism, for example, we know we go down a predominantly visual pathway. But with other disabilities, that's not so obvious. It might be for a child of ADHD, we were using lots of auditory vocal, lots of verbal cues and clues to help the child regulate their behaviour and keep on track as a learner. And yet many children have a dual diagnosis, do they not, of ADHD and autism. But for us as teachers then, there is actually a pedagogical tension. When we began the work, it wasn't just about defining the population, and that in itself, yes, I would to pause and say that, There were new phenomena, there are new phenomena in this 21st century that have re-written the special needs registers of every school. It's just to this day, sometimes the schools don't realize that. If I was doing SENCO training, Alis, I'd often say to them, 'So which group of learners do you think has rewritten your special needs registers in this 21st century?' And you get the answers, ADHD, autism, social-emotional, speech and language. But the truth is, it's children born prematurely.

00:17:26.901 - Alis

Why is that?

00:17:31.261 - Barry

Well, 92% of all babies born prematurely and prematurity is anything pre-36 weeks gestation or 36 weeks and before gestation. Then it's because those children are surviving in greater numbers than we've ever known. And the real difference is those children are surviving 28 weeks before, when the brain is white matter, it's not grey matter. So the cortical folding, etc, is not there, not present in the brain. And there's parts of the brain that do not develop until post-28 weeks in utero. So some children have been born without certain aspects of the brain actually being developed. And despite that cliché of, 'Oh, don't worry, they'll catch up'. I'm sorry, some children, well, many children, do not. And latterly, last Christmas or Christmas before, the Lancet reported a 47% increase in children surviving 22 to 24 weeks gestation. What's the brain of a 23 week look like? I'm not sure. And I'm not sure I've ever taught one. I'm I'm sure you've ever taught one Alis. And so what are the learning pathways that are available there? And how then do we teach? How do we respond as a teacher? And it isn't enough to say, 'Well, we might do it this way or that way'. It might not be the way that that child learns. So it's actually modern medical progress has given rise to the survival of prematurely born children. It's given rise to children with rare syndromes. When we did the national project, we had 31 different types of rare syndrome of the children in the cohort nationally we got. And I thought, 31 different types of rare syndrome? I'd been teaching that number of years at that time, ironically. I thought, I don't know 31 different types of syndrome. My whole career has been in this field. Why don't I know 31 different types? And I went back to my 1980s textbook. I didn't want Dr. Google's answer. I wanted to know, why did Barry not know? And when I went to my 1980s textbook, they'd say things like, 'Jacobsen syndrome: child with Jacobsen syndrome may survive until they're three years of age, but then life expectancy is limited. Child with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome may survive till four years of age, but after that, life expectancy is limited'. But those children now are beginning to survive and are coming into our schools, but we had no pedagogical history of educating them. Add to that as well, there are more chromosomal abnormalities. IVF has given particular rise to chromosomal deletions, as they're known as. Those, again, are surviving and profiling in our schools, and we have no pedagogical history. So there were these new phenomena, and also phenomena that were caused in the complexity that you alluded to before. Where there are two or more needs. And so really, that was the driver. Can you see we've got quite a different population to have special education have been traditionally built. Ultimately, if may continue, if you think of those different children, you as a teacher yourself would then say, 'Well, those children are different. In what way do they learn differently? And when we know how they learn differently, how do I teach differently?' We didn't have all the answers for that. We never do, teachers. We never do. But we then went one step further and said, 'Okay, well, how would we construct teaching for these children?' What we discovered from an international literature review and then some trials that we did was that engagement was the key indicator for successful learning. The literature tells us that engagement is the liberation of intrinsic motivation. Again, you will know from your extensive experience, if you can motivate a child, you can conquer the learning world for and with them. So engagement became the key platform with other things such as differentiation and personalization. But engagement was the major outcome from that, and it led to other work, which I'm sure you're going to allude to.

00:21:35.041 - Alis

What were the recommendations? What hope that listeners could take away from this and start to maybe just improve their own pedagogy with?

00:21:44.341 - Barry

Bear in mind that now we are a profession that has been scarred by umpteen years of politically-driven curriculum. At times, some of those political decisions, I'm sorry to say, are a mismatch with the children that we see in front of us. Absolutely. Phonics would be an example there. Not that I'm antiphonics, I'm very pro-phonic. But it cannot be universally applied. But there is a particular political diktat that says, 'Thou shalt apply it to all children'. Well, I'm sorry. If you're deaf and you can't hear those sounds, or you have a disability with an auditory vocal processing issue, you can't hear the sound to reproduce them, and therefore you cannot learn to read phonetically. You need other supplementary methods. It agitates me hugely that the supplementary methods are not valued and are restrictive. In the latest reading framework guidance from the DFE says that where a child isn't mastering phonics, then you use intensive synthetic phonics as an approach. That's not a solution unless you've got a miracle cure for hearing loss. It's not. And also, some children's brains are wired differently. The child with Down syndrome doesn't process speech and language in the left hemisphere of the brain. They process it in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is attuned to visual pathways to learning. So my own daughter, Kate, who has Down syndrome, learned, actually, she could read at the age of five, the level that any five-year-old would read, but she signed her responses. You need to tell me, because she could sign and not speak, that that wasn't reading. I would argue to death that that is reading. For any child, I think any teacher needs to say, 'How do I engage this child as a learner?' Then apply the curriculum. But we need to identify how that child is a learner. And that's what engagement does. We need a lens of engagement. If that child is coming into my class, I can see that child, but it's only when I get my long lens out, like a professional photographer would , and turn that lens, that child becomes sharply into focus. And then I stand a much better chance of effectively teaching that child. Because without engaging that child, there will be no deep learning, there will be no meaningful progress, there will be no significant attainment and achievement. Engagement is the key.

00:24:15.171 - Alis

How does a teacher do that? I love that image of sharpening the lens. I love the notion of a teacher seeing each individual child in the class as individual and working to engage that child as an individual based on their needs, based on their interests. But how? How do you put that into practice in the day-to-day when you've got a class of 10 or a class of 30?

00:24:44.271 - Barry

Surely observation is still fundamental to the role of teacher. Whether you're teaching A-level physics or whether you're teaching the early years curriculum or the child with autism, we all still observe. I mean, okay, the A-level physics teacher, probably less so. But even then, they are observing young people doing experiments and observing the application of knowledge in those young people and observing the outcomes of learning from what they think they've taught and the level to which the children have mastered that particular learning. So it's about making more of the observation. What early years teacher on receiving the reception children doesn't begin by observing them through play? It's just maximizing at times what is already in our teaching repertoire. So you're observing, what are you observing? Fundamentally, you're observing how the child is engaged, because if the A-level physics student is not engaged in that syllabus, is not engaged in what the teacher has said. They're not going to get the grades. So you're observing there, just as you're observing fine motor and gross motor in early childhood with the children. It is still that process. And what is it we're observing? We're observing engagement of knowledge in physics, of early years play. But we're observing the engagement of the student. We seem to have lost the focus that engagement is crucial.

00:26:19.901 - Alis

You said it really clearly when you said maximizing the time. And I think that's the key thing. It's not curriculum coming first, and it's I've got to teach this by 12:00, but actually maximizing the time on those crucial things, like observing, of having those strong relationships with the children and the young people that you're working with. So you understand what you're observing. You understand what engagement looks like for them.

00:26:47.731 - Barry

I don't know whether it's that engagement just seems to be a word that's been around and people aren't really considering it. But let me tell you, it's absolutely key, particularly when there's talk of universal curriculum design, that whatever it is we're designing, we got to know what the starting point for engagement is. The more I've thought about it and seen it in practice, some of the best teaching I see now is where the teacher has truly engaged the children of whatever ability, including exceptionally able children. We know how disaffected those exceptionally able children can be in our schools because the curriculum has not offered challenge, because we haven't looked at how they engage and how we can spiral out what it is we're teaching to some really challenging stuff that perhaps they only as an individual can do. And many teachers say, Well, I haven't got time for the individual. Excuse me, it's just about saying to the child, Okay, that's what everybody's doing. When you've read that, why don't you go on and read? Because that'll already been that subject teacher's repertoire. Why don't you go on and read da, da, da, da? You know? It's not that difficult, but I think we've oppressed teachers so much. We've knocked the creativity out of them, and that's so sad, so very sad. So yes, I think engagement is key. As I think, differentiation, which is the process of adjusting teaching to meet individual needs, is key, as is to personalize. And I'm not throwing here words at people. Oh, they're thinking, 'Oh, it's something else, it's something else, it's something else'. Can I remind ourselves that differentiation is one of the legislative curriculum principles in the Education Reform Act of 1988. Nobody's changed that Education Act yet. So we've got a solid platform there. Personalization, personalized learning came through in the 2015 Code of Practice on SEMD. That's a solid building block. And engagement now, and I'm sure, again, we're going to discuss this in more depth. But as of 2021, engagement is statutory summative assessment for children with special educational needs. You've got three solid building blocks there. No Ofstead inspector can truly challenge you because you're on solid ground.

00:29:12.721 - Alis

Tell us a bit more about that summative assessment.

00:29:16.061 - Barry

I was completely started with taking the concept of engagement, as I say, it was based on a literature analysis, and I developed engagement as pedagogy with the team I was working with. We developed an engagement profile that teachers can use. It's been used internationally. It was trials throughout this country, but it then had, because we had a very forward-thinking government at the time, it's before the Conservatives came in. We trialled it in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Ireland, so the English-speaking countries. So the validity comes in a qualitative way, not in a quantitative way. And then we built on that by making what we called a formative assessment so that you as a teacher could be looking, is the child curious? Are they persistent? Do they anticipate? And you're keeping notes about that. And that's your formative assessment. That already had probably gone beyond the remit I was originally given. So I never looked at how this could be statutory summative assessment. That was a legal process and was out of my hands. But interestingly, so my work, the work of the team, we published in 2012 with accompanying modules. There's 15 modules of teacher training on a website, www.complexneeds. Then it was in 2016, the government asked Diane Rochford to chair what became the Rochford Review to look at assessment of children with special needs. From her work there, then they alighted on engagement and put out to trial, two trials, to test whether it could be robust enough to be statutory summative assessment or to be summative assessment. Diane's report then to the Secretary of State recommended this could be. The government made legislation that meant that from 2021, teachers could start to use this as a summative assessment model. It's had quite a journey. Whilst I advised on the implementation, I was not part of the Rochford review. People should know that. It was very independent. It wasn't me peddling a particular line. They came to me once a decision had been made, and I did support the implementation nationally of that approach.

00:31:51.871 - Alis

What do you think the impact of that approach has been so far? I know it's still early days.

00:32:00.491 - Barry

Teachers say that they are no longer having to put square pegs into round holes. Some of our existing assessment methods, it was the P-scales before that. And I want to say very clearly, when the P-scales first came out in the 1990s, they were ground-breaking. Whoever thought we could assess children with, even, very profound difficulties in in such meaningful ways. So they broke the ground. I'm proud to say I used them and used them well. But the children changed, and suddenly they changed very rapidly. Again, it was modern medical progress. I think there must have been advances in premature care or care of premature babies that caused that. Therefore, we were pushing square pegs into round holes. So the P-levels were no longer truly serving the needs of the children. But even more so, the P-scales, I think, have been abused by teachers by them, because they were using them as curriculum, not as assessment. Assessments should be the outcomes of curriculum, not the driver of it. And so there needed to be some change. So teachers are finding it a more child-centred approach. What's very interesting, though, one final point on this, Alice, is that in the text that DFE wrote to support the implementation of engagement as a statutory summative assessment model, they wrote that this is for children, 'not engaged in subject-specific learning'. I always thought that was quite a bold statement, but I have to be honest, I never really told civil servants how bold it was, because now it's been an absolute watershed, because post-pandemic, we find ourselves with children who are not engaged in subject specific learning because basically having to learn from home in lockdowns has switched many children off. So teachers are finding that in alternative provisions, et cetera, they can use the engagement model to re-engage a child. Because if you believe in engagement, you have to believe in its antithesis, which is disengaged. We're seeing lots of disengaged children. I know other work that you've covered is reported on that. If you believe then, that child is disengaged, the journey, the process you and I as teachers need to put in place is one of re-engaging that child to bring them back to authentic, full, meaningful engagement.

00:34:38.981 - Alis

I love that, authentic. I think that has been an issue when it's almost like the tail wagging the dog. Are we thinking curriculum? Are we thinking assessment? I think it's about coming back to authentic engagement. Thank you. You’ve also written and co-authored a book about girls with Autism. A little bit of a tangent off of what we were talking about there. Could you tell us a bit about that? What led you to getting involved and interested in this area?

00:35:15.101 - Barry

Yeah. So, autism has been a major platform for my career. It's been the focus of one or two of the professorships that I held. It's been a major part of my work, whether it be as a head teacher, whether it be an academic. It's an area that I'm passionate about. What became very obvious, probably from the mid 2000s onwards was that we were missing a lot of girls with autism. I have to give some credit to my youngest daughter, Grace, for the insight she gave me that really helped me to deeply understand how we were missing these girls. Grace is an occupational therapist by background, but specializing in child mental health. She would come home and tell us about girls that she had seen who'd been referred for eating disorders or self-harm. But when she began to peel that back, The underlying issue was undiagnosed autism. And yet these children then were 14 and 15. Why did we miss it? So by then, they had to deal with not only their autism, but a mental health issue as well, which was going to really affect their developmental trajectory. Why was all of that happening? It's because the girls were masking and camouflaging. They're great imitators, they're great mimickers. The girl with autism would be listening to the conversations of her peer group who were talking, let's say, about boy bands, and the next a day, she'd be able to say, Oh, this group is my favourite boy band, and she could tell you lots about that boy band. In fact, if you let her carry on for the next 2 hours, she wouldn't stop because she'd have so much detail, including inside leg measurements of each of the members of the boy band. It was just prolific. But she did that because she wanted to be seen to be the same as the other girls. But of course, in adolescence, all of that begins to unravel because whereas they contained their autism and made themselves seem like the other girls during the primary years, in adolescence, with all of that hormonal raging, keeping it in was impossible. And they began to fall part. I realized that we needed a piece of work around this. At that time, NASEN, the National Association of Special Educational Needs , invited me to chair a group that they had come to the same conclusion: we needed to look at girls with autism. I began to chair this group, and eventually it grew so exponentially that National Association of Head Teachers agreed to host the group. Because, as you well know, again, from your own experience, unless we change the hearts and minds of school leaders, we're going to get nowhere. I, for two, three years, chaired  this group, and they were a fantastic group of people. Women with autism, head teacher of Limsfield Grange, Sarah Wild, which is the only state school for girls with autism, people as eminent as Professor Francesca Happé, who eventually co-authored the book with me, all sorts of people that had rich experiences, Sarah Jane Kirchley from Autism Education Trust, Cary Grant, the TV presenter, who is the mother of daughters with autism. So lots of multiple perspectives on this. And during the course of the campaign we had and the work we were doing, we produced a pamphlet. Eventually, I just turned to the group and said, 'We need to write a book'. Well, many of them had never been authors. And so we set up a system where they could be coached and mentored into writing. And so it was a big It was a piece of work. The book was a real labour of love, but a very purposeful one. So you have some great scientific chapters, but equally, you have a mother or mothers telling the story of raising their daughters, or indeed, women with autism, talking about what it was like to be a girl with autism in the school system.

00:39:51.521 - Alis

I've got a couple of questions around that. Why do girls with autism respond differently to boys? That's one thing that is of interest. But also as a teacher and a parent, what are the signs that you would look for in a girl that you might not look for in a boy that might tell you, actually, they're having trouble here and you could support them?

00:40:17.491 - Barry

Let me start with that first question then. It's down to the social biology of the brain. I don't need to tell you that men are different. The male brain is different. It's just It is. And women, I'm generalizing, but I hope not offensively generalizing, women are naturally more social creatures than men. And therefore, A Girl with Autism is a Girl First, which is why we called the book Girls and Autism. I mean, though it was a movement because of the People First approach, which I very much support, that we should have called the book Autistic Girls. But the issue, the problem, as it was, is the fact that they were girls. Their feminine traits were masking and camouflaging what was going on underneath. Parents, when they're thinking about their daughters. I'll give an example. A woman in the village I live in stopped me a couple of years ago, and she knew me from some children's activities we'd done in the village. She said, I've heard you talk about Girls and Autism with other people. My daughter's adolescent now, and suddenly she won't comb her hair, her personal hygiene is awful, she won't change her clothes, she's become very faddish about her foods. Any one of those things on their own, you could just put down to adolescence. You start to get a combination of them, then, in this mother, the alarm bells are going off, and rightly so. Let's just say, subsequently, the girl has had a diagnosis of autism. But what I'm trying to say there is the starting point to personal hygiene. You'd never think normally of starting a diagnosis with personal hygiene. That's one of the indicators.

00:42:14.461 - Alis

That's good to know. What about younger girls? Sorry. I'm thinking primary. How would you nip that in the bud, if you like? What are the signs before they get to adolescence and start to struggle? Or are there none?

00:42:30.541 - Barry

well, that's a good question. No, no, there are signs, but it's a very good question because I can't fully answer it because the research study to answer that is currently happening. I'm supervising my last PhD student who is looking at that very question. Because when we'd finished the book, Alis, and it's been the most successful special needs book for last four consecutive years.

00:43:03.391 - Alis

Well done. Amazing.

00:43:05.241 - Barry

It's had a huge impact internationally. I've been around the world, from Dubai to New York to Sydney to Auckland, to launch it. But for me, the question that we hadn't answered, but I don't think we'd even ask the question because there were so many questions to ask, because it wasn't a complete holistic peace. We had fragments and they needed cohering. But for me, I just asked myself this question, why did I miss it? Why did those girls have to get to 13, 14, 15 and lose good quality mental health? Why? Because those were little girls of 3, 4 and 5. Why did I miss it? What did my teacher not let me see. The indicators of early childhood autism in girls is different, again, to adolescent indicators, because I've talked about eating disorders and self-harming, you don't really get that in little children, nor do you get some of those things in boys. The little girl of 3, 4, 5 is not as loud and out there as the boy of 3, 4, and 5 with autism, who is probably already showing some disturbed and disturbing behaviours. I've done a preliminary piece of work, not necessarily published, but I've done a comparative study in three countries, where I've asked teachers, where you've had a girl with autism or that girl that you think should be referred because you suspect autism, what did you see? They said things like the girl would play, say, with the dolls, say a horse and a toy doll. Even when other children came to play alongside her, if they asked if they could now play with that toy, she would often let them play with that toy. So again, stick with that image of the horse and sit in a doll on top of the horse. Except if the other child then placed the doll on the horse facing the wrong way, the end of the world would come. The girl with autism question mark would lose it. The teachers then said, when they say, as teachers of young children do, 'Children, it's time for story. Come and sit on the carpet in front of me,' the little girl with autism would come, but you always sat on the edge of the group. If the teacher said, 'Oh, Why don't you come and share the story with me today with the rest of the class? Come and sit by me'. Then the meltdown would come. The demand was too much socially for her. So there are indicators, but if you just take both of the scenarios, A, the child was compliant and came to sit on the carpet for story time. So where's the problem? Isn't one. And if you looked across, as a busy teacher in that earlier setting, you looked across, Oh, yes, she's playing alongside other children appropriately with the dolls. Where's the problem? In that busy classroom, let's be honest, you're not going to pick up nuances. So can you see already the masking, camouflaging, and because they're more compliant, frankly, is obliterating your ability to bring out an understanding of their profile of need. So we need to change the lens. We're working on a profile, not a diagnosis, but a profile tool that teachers could use, therapists could use to start to collect information where... And again, you will know, but sometimes some of our best responses are gut reactions. That's not quite right with that child. And you start to look more, don't you?

00:47:19.741 - Alis

Is there something around the setup, the way we do education, especially in the UK, that that almost feeds that compliance, feeds that ability for the girls to be able to mask? Because we're actually, as you say, we give a directive, the child follows it, there's a tick. If there's a boy that's kicking off, then we don't come back to look at the girl that's sitting on the edge of the carpet. We'll be, as teachers, our minds are taken up with the non-compliance. I'm just wondering, is there something different that teachers could do in their class routines and processes that might actually rattle rather than just feed the, 'This is what we do at nine o'clock. This is what we do at quarter past. Come and sit here, hang your coat up here, put your shoes there', which is all one compliant behaviour after another.

00:48:24.011 - Barry

That is a massive, huge question because it's going to demand total reform of the education system, to give you an honest answer to that.

00:48:37.391 - Alis

You've got time for that, haven't you?

00:48:39.301 - Barry

No. And what I could say could be very contentious. I mean, I would just... So I'm Just going to take it back a little bit because some of the difficulty for teachers will be the rigidity of our curriculum, the rigidity of our system, the Ofsted fear that thankfully at last, but tragically, because of Ruth Perry's death, has been exposed. But we've got an Ofsted-driven school system. People dance the tune because we live in fear. It's not a good healthy state for teachers and it's certainly, therefore, not a good healthy state for children. I think my answer in brief would be, if we look at some of our contemporaries in other countries, they have far more play-based learning for those very early years, right through to the age of seven. I mean, the Finns who consistently top tables in the international elite tables, do not begin formal education until seven. It doesn't say that children don't read before they're seven, but it's done in a very play-based, not pressurized role. I mean, I have a grandson of four who the head teacher was thrilled to tell his parents he's got all of his initial sounds and some blends after one term in school. Well, that's great, but I'm not sure that would be the major priority for a child who's actually still socially quite withdrawn.

00:50:15.691 - Alis

I wonder, and I don't know if this is part of your PhD students' research, is what does that identification earlier on of girls with autism look like in other education systems? Those play-based systems, for example, can you see a little bit earlier on what you need to be able to see? Because there is that sense of creative play, that sense of choice-making, the slightly lighter control?

00:50:50.571 - Barry

I can see where you're going with that question, and therefore you think it's probably going to be a stunning answer from somewhere else in the world. I'm now going to be completely contradictory again, because believe it or not, our thinking about the education of children with autism is probably the best in the world. So in consequence, other systems are not even asking these questions. The book has been translated into several languages, and the demand to speak internationally is still very great. I'm just back from the international conference in the States, where everybody thinks it's the Mecca of autism. And yes, there's some fantastic research coming out, but the whole question of female autism is still like, 'really?' They haven't gone into the depth of thinking we've gone into. We do some things very well in this country. Thinking about children is still a great strength. How we do it when I consider the constraints our system is under, I don't know. But we do. I still think British teaching is some of the best in the world. You just do wonder, though, if we didn't have all of these constraints and frankly, the wretchedness of Ofsted, would we be in a very different place again?

00:52:19.601 - Alis

Brilliant. Thank you. Great answer. Okay, let's move on a little bit. I'd love to pick your brains now around, I mean, it'll still be about curriculum, really, but around mental health and well-being and how that appears in the school curriculum in the UK and beyond, if you want to talk about beyond.

00:52:42.991 - Barry

The pandemic has changed it. It was already an increasing phenomena. Very interesting, if I can draw the threads together, Alice, when I finished the national project for the DFE on complex needs, there were 12 recommendations we came up with. And when I took that to the Minister at the department to then report to Secretary of State, she said, 'Which of these am I going to choose? Because I can't take all 12 to Secretary of State. He won't accept them easily'. It was really hard for me because I was passionate about all of those outcomes. But the one that I chose that she should focus on was actually mental health. The reason I did  that was because mental health is the one that will destroy the developmental trajectory of any child of whatever ability. We all know instances, do we not, of our most able students who've pushed and pushed and pushed themselves to get through those examinations and in so doing, have broken before even they've entered that examination room. So this wasn't about children with SEND, this was about all children. So if I reflect on the situation currently in the mental health and well-being of our children, I can nicely compare and contrast how it was pre-pandemic. And pre-pandemic, we were seeing these emergent trends in mental health in our schools, teachers getting increasingly concerned. Some good government initiatives, I mean, I very much applaud the mental health lead, the role in schools, the fact there has been training, there can never be enough. But we have to be honest as teachers, we were never trained in the area of mental health. But we can't ignore it. And what I'm so proud of our profession for doing is they have accepted this is what's happening to children. We need to be there. But it's all learning on the hoof. And again, I'm not criticizing in that statement because they can't send every teacher back to university to train in mental health. We're going to have to learn on the hoof. But actually, isn't that one of the joy and generative parts of teaching? Is children change and we have to be responsive to it? Doesn't that motivate us and keep us going? If only we're honest in time about what has kept us in the profession, why we want to do this. So currently, for example, the latest analysis of data from the pandemic on mental health in children has put it at one in four children. Now, if I contrast that back to the 2019 figures, we were talking about one in nine, one in ten children with a mental health issue. During the pandemic, I was back at the Department as Expert Advisor online because we all were at that point in time. The figure had moved to one in six during the pandemic, and now, post-pandemic, the data is saying one in four. But goodness me, from one in nine to one in four in a four-year period? That's huge. That is absolutely huge. And any system would crumble under that and we're seeing the crumbling. CAHMS can't cope. Teachers are blaming CAMHS. It's not CAMHS' fault. You can't suddenly recruit enough specialized personnel. People take years to train because mental health is often not a first subject in any discipline. We all train genetically at undergrad level and then specialize, don't we? So we don't have enough CAMHS professionals. It's not fair to keep blaming them. And in schools, we're trying to work with complex mental health issues for which we're certainly not trained. But the school system is trying its best with the children. Eating disorders has gone up 600%.

00:56:55.591 - Alis

Since the pandemic?

00:56:56.851 - Barry

Yeah, during and since the pandemic. Because food intake is the last bastion of control, isn't it? And Nip in the Bud has done some excellent work around eating disorders. And it's about 600%. Just beg us believe, what does that even look like? So we're seeing a degeneration in childrens' mental health. However, can I say to colleagues in the profession, mental health is a medical diagnosis, and we are not diagnosticians. So if we're going to work in this area, and we are and we should, We need to get some edu-speak around this. If we take some of the documentation from the DFE, the recently released RSHE curriculum, Relationships Health, Sex Education Curriculum, talks about mental well-being, and that's probably a better educational term, mental wellbeing. Most schools would agree, we need to be profiling the mental health of our children. We need to then think of this diverse range of mental health needs. At the start of the pandemic, my son Matthew, who is Principal of Baxter College in Kidderminster, he and I wrote the recovery curriculum. At the time, we said we thought there would be four significant areas of impact on children: trauma, anxiety, attachment, and bereavement. Not just the actual physical death, if you like, of a grandparent, let's say, due to getting COVID, but actually the grief, the bereavement children experience for the loss of school life, the loss of the friendship group, which everybody, offset included, has said has been the major factor that scarred some of our children from the pandemic has caused a massive decline. Children need children. Teenagers need teenagers to corroborate self-image, self-esteem, all the rest. And now we're bearing that, and I don't think there has been enough accommodation in the curriculum, in teaching and learning. The government have brought in the National Tutoring Program, but he heavily focuses on literacy and numeracy. There's a wider well-being issue. Emotional resilience has crumbled in front of our eyes. Our children are not emotionally strong anymore. And where's my evidence for saying that? We've got 1.89 million children persistently absent from school. The Center for Social Policy just published a report that says, persistent absence has gone up 134 % compared with pre-pandemic figures. My job, however, because I am a teacher. I've had many other titles, but I am a teacher. So all the time I need to say, what's the impact of any of that on learning? Because I can't do anything to stop the persistent absence, can I? It's out of my power. But I can do something about learning. So for me, again, tying in some of the threads that we've discussed so far in this interview, a persistently absent child, I think you would agree, is a disengaged learner. Maybe they're absent because they can't stand the pressure of school. We've got in my local village, primary school, they're having to do fortnightly anxiety workshops for parents about their child's anxiety. You've got parents of children who are just lovely children in the middle of the group, no trouble to anybody, great kids to teach, all of that, yeah? Who wouldn't have been on anybody's radar before. All suddenly parents are saying, I get them dressed in the morning, I can't get them over the threshold of the school. How do I deal with their anxiety? And yes, that anxiety is being dealt with. And the children are coming in, but we haven't solved the anxiety. They're coming in, they're being compliant because they're nice kids. They're sitting down rigid with fear, Alice. And if they're rigid with fear, painted with a plastic smile, so it keeps you as a teacher at bay because you think they're quite happy and engaged. They're not. If they're rigid with fear, the cortisol level in the brain is released. The cortisol level will rise to the surface of the brain. It will block the memory imprint. The anxious child is not a learning child. So we need to be considering our learning environments to reduce anxiety. You see, we haven't the time and capacity to do that. We need a government that allows us to teach in this moment. If we don't teach in this moment, the economic costs of this future generation to the work and ethos of this country and the wealth creation of this country will be huge. Now is the moment.

01:02:09.151 – Alis

There's a lot there to unpick. What do you do, firstly, as a teacher, you say it's not their role. They can't change persistent absence, but they can engage. But if you've got a child in, rigid with fear, with a painted on face, how do you know? How do you sharpen that lens, if we go back to that first image you used, to get beneath what the child is presenting and give the child what they need?

01:02:46.431 - Barry

Teachers are incredible human beings. Teachers have a very powerful humanity. It's why they became teachers, because they care for society's most vulnerable I don't just mean special needs children. I mean children because they are children of animal, and we as adults need to protect them. And we can protect them, build their resilience for life through good teaching, good education. So say that child, to extend my analogy, that those children that were suffering from such anxiety, they couldn't come into school, then they did come into school. It's about that compassionate teacher. We need compassion back in education, big time. It's about them saying to the child, Here's a yellow card. When you get really anxious and you don't feel you can sit in this classroom anymore, Come and put this yellow card on my desk and you know, and I know, you've now got five minutes to go to the bathroom, just wash your face, stand by the outside door and breathe in some fresh air, whatever, or I know you've got your fidget toy in your pocket, go and use your fidget toy five minutes, then come back. We can talk about it further, but go and see if you can get your sense of well-being back. Go and calm yourself. No fuss, because you've had that conversation initially. After that, every time that yellow card goes on your desk Alice, then that's fine. You know what the deal is. They know what the deal is. It's happening. The other thing might be to have something more structured in the classroom. So one of the things that I developed during the pandemic were happiness boxes. Well, the happiness box is just actually a glorified shoe box. In fact, it's gone viral as the happiness box. And I think despite the 12 books, I'm likely to be remembered as the professor who invented the happiness box. Probably sums up my career. So in this happiness box, so if you were having your happiness box, Alis, you would put in it things that make you happy. Could be some music that you could listen with your headphones, or it could be that piece of soft material that you like to rub and feel that you can keep in your pocket and nobody knows it's there, but you can have a little rub and you just feel that sense of calm. Or it could be a fragrance that you like to smell. You can put in there. It could be a little book that you like to read, whatever. And then you see a shoe box has got a lid. So in those more pronounced COVID times, it was actually a COVID secure box. But you could say to your whole class, Okay, we're finishing our math lesson five minutes early. Well done, everybody. Have five minutes with your happiness boxes. And each child goes and gets their happiness box. You can't tell them what to put in that happiness box. It's their choice. And therefore, you give them five minutes of self-regulation. Or the really wise teacher, whose math lesson is going off-piste, the kids just aren't getting it for whatever reason, might say, Okay, we're going to take five minutes to just reset. Think about what we need to do, but let's have our happiness boxes. Go and get them. And instead of When you're going to get 60 minutes of effective maths, you settle for 45 minutes. 45 minutes of good math learning is better than none.

01:06:40.191 - Alis

I hear what you're saying, and again, it comes back to time and relationships, and not being too caught up, bound up in the lesson plan that you created. And you think, 'I've got to get through this', or the curriculum, 'I've got to get through this'. But it comes back to humanity, doesn't it? I loved the fact that you talked about that being the driver for teachers, and we're needing more compassion in the classroom.

01:07:10.671 - Barry

Absolutely. I don't want to say anything, Alice that's going to expose colleagues to practice that then they can't be accountable for. So let me finish. Let me add one other thing that you've urged me to do earlier on. When I talk about curriculum, I gave you those three legislated principles that we could build good pedagogy on. So if you take my point just about mental well-being, mental well-being is a significant component of relationships, health, and sex education, which is a statutory curriculum. Ofsted inspected, not that I think that's a validity, but Ofsted will inspect RSHE. In the mental well-being curriculum, it talks about, for example, sleep. We know that children's sleep went to pot during the pandemic. Lots of people did, but we still have children with high levels of sleep disorder. Or the mental well-being curriculum talks about anxiety. So if you paused your maths lesson in just the way I've just described. And the Ofsted inspector said, 'You wasted five minutes of valuable maths teaching by pausing for this happiness box'. You'll say, 'Well, this happiness box maps into this section of the mental wellbeing curriculum, which is on anxiety. And that, rather than just teach a discrete lesson for 30 minutes each day, I've blended my RSHE teaching as intervention across the day to sustain children as efficient and effective learners. And your point is, Mr. Ofsted, Inspector?'

01:08:51.411 - Alis

And again, it's giving teachers permission, isn't it? It's giving them permission. So yes, we won't do it for Ofsted, but if you are in a school where everything is driven in that way, this gives you permission to press the pause button when you need to for those children.

01:09:09.901 - Barry

yeah. Again, I don't want anybody to think they're my fanciful ideas. They are my fanciful ideas, but Actually, you can ground them in legislation. You can protect yourself with the frameworks that are there.

01:09:23.251 - Alis

You talked a little bit about sleep then. What is the importance of sleep, Barry? Why is that an important aspect of all of this, of mental well-being, of education, of learning?

01:09:38.431 - Barry

Well, for children, particularly, it's about brain growth because the brain does lots of sorting out during sleep. It does have a lot of its growth spurts during sleep. For example, some of the latest research that ACAMH, the Association Child and Mental Health have been putting out is about patterns of teenage sleep, because we do get teenagers up very early and send them to school. Lots of parents say, 'Oh, all they want to do seem to lie in bed all day'. The advice that's come out now is, well, okay, you have to get them up and get them to school. But at weekends, you should allow teenagers to lie in. And the recommendation is they should be allowed to lie in for up to two hours. Why is that? Because in the age 11 to 15, the brain goes through its second most rapid growth spurt since the first year of life. In order to go through that growth spurt, it needs to do that when the child is sleeping. Actually, it is about good mental health because the brain is actually growing the scaffolding that will prepare for adulthood. And a major focus at the moment, and I hate to say it again, but from Ofsted, is preparation for adulthood. Everybody thinks Ofsted has just invented another thing. People seem to have forgot, that preparation for adulthood is the major legislated principle of the 1988 Education Reform Act. But that's just people not connecting the circles. So sleep is about preparation for adulthood because it's allowing the brain to grow in a way that will be helpful to that at adulthood.

01:11:34.681 - Alis

Do you feel that that is enough a part of the curriculum? Do you think there's more that teachers and parents need to find out about sleep in order to help support their children and young people?

01:11:46.541 - Barry

Well, the good thing about sleep now is that it is in the curriculum. It is in that statutory curriculum under mental well-being, under RSHE. But again, and you and I could genuinely ask ourselves this question, when were we ever trained as teachers on sleep? Well, we weren't, were we? So there's some good resources on the ACAMH website. There's some videos that I've commissioned the Charter College of Teaching to do, to go alongside. How do you teach sleep? So the fact we can teach sleep is just a good thing. I mean, we all know. You and I will have complained as we've gone into work and day, God, I don't know how I'm going to get through today. I've hardly had any sleep last night. It could be because our own children have kept us us up because they were babies or just we were so worried about something that we didn't sleep well. And then you begin to think, why on earth haven't we ever taught sleep? Because it's fundamental to being a good learner, isn't it? How many times have we said about children being too tired in class because they watched TV too late or played on their Game Boy too late or their Xbox or whatever. We haven't ever taught it. And yes, it's a fundamental part of our well-being, isn't There's a whole sleep hygiene routine you can put children through.

01:13:03.931 - Alis

Can you tell us a bit about that? What would a sleep hygiene routine look like?

01:13:10.981 - Barry

It's about turning devices off an hour before. It's about the lighting in the room. It's about the comfort, the self-soothing we bring to ourselves in terms of what we might have near us and so on. It's probably easier to say if you go to my website, type in sleep, you'll find information there.

01:13:39.871 - Alis

That was going to be my next question. Where could we send parents? So thank you. Thank you for saying that. Parents can come onto your website, which we'll have a link in the show notes and click on sleep. Brilliant.

01:13:50.731 - Barry

yeah. And my website is just www.barrycarpentereducation.com. And it's not... Yes, it has a on there for teachers, but not exclusively so. And lots of material I put on would be very accessible to parents as well.

01:14:10.381 - Alis

We've talked a lot, so thank you. Thank you for sharing so much. We've talked around SEND and and complex needs and autism. We've talked about mental health and absenteeism. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think I'd love to just share this before we come to a close?

01:14:32.381 - Barry

I think we've been fairly wide-ranging. No, I think we need to acknowledge that this is, I feel, a fearful time at the moment because the profession is exhausted. I don't think we took account truly of the impact of COVID on teachers. I don't just mean them as teachers, I mean as human beings. Teachers were trying to manage their own children, teach online, probably had concerns about their own elderly relatives and the safety of their own family and the difficulties of shopping to feed that family, etc. People return gleefully, actually, post-pandemic, but without any energy. The batteries have run flat very quickly. I see some very tired, well, more than tired, I see some very exhausted teachers. The rate of attrition is somewhat worrying. Teacher recruitment is a real issue. We just need to revitalize the joy of teaching, to make it an attractive profession again.

01:15:51.871 - Alis

That brings us back to how we started, isn't it? Reminding ourselves of what has driven us to become teachers, reminding ourselves of that moral purpose and keeping children and young people at the core.

01:16:05.871 - Barry

Absolutely. Children are still the most exciting group to work with, I think. There's never going to be a script, is there? Thank goodness.

01:16:15.041 - Alis

No.

01:16:15.481 - Barry

There isn't, because they're all so different and they all change. Teaching is a generative profession. We are dynamic. We're not static. Who wants to be static? I want to be challenged. I want to be curious. We encourage curiosity in children so they engage. Let's encourage curiosity in teachers so we engage, too.

01:16:40.341 - Alis

Yeah, brilliant. Barry, what would you hope our listeners would take away from our conversation today? We're going to have some parents engaging and listening to this. We're going to have some colleagues within the profession. What would you hope are the main takeaways from what you've said?

01:17:00.701 - Barry

That you never give up hope. I have seen some of life's most challenging children, and I don't mean challenging through their own souls, but through circumstances in life. Go back to those young men I saw being showered with a hose pipe. That is no way to rear a child.It's that living in hope all the time that by the quality of our parenting, we can set our children off on a good life course. They have to make their own decisions, but we know we've laid the foundations well. And the same as a teacher, that I still believe we can transform lives. I'd say to any colleague listening to this, you have treasure in your hands, treasure that can transform those lives. Please invest it wisely, because that treasure will have a return in years to come. We all hear, do we not, that the interviews on TV or radio where some famous celebrity is asked, What teacher influenced you most at school? And suddenly this joyous memory is poured out. And you think, 'Oh, I'd like to be that person'.

01:18:30.801 - Alis

It would be an honour to be that person.

01:18:36.371 - Barry

An honour to be that person. Just to have that life's privilege of making a difference in a child's life. What a gift can one human being have to another?

01:18:49.981 - Alis

Barry, thank you. Thank you for that. What a wonderful way to finish our conversation with that real notion of hope at being the centre of all that we do, whether we're parents, whether we're grandparents, whether we're teachers, it's that idea that there is always hope. So thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your experiences and your wisdom with us today.

01:19:14.911 - Barry

My pleasure. Thank you, Alis.

01:19:17.051 - Alis

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation and are able to take something interesting and positive away from it. Our podcasts are sensitively produced and give evidence based information, whether from academic research and experts in their fields or from lived experiences. They are created to help others spot early signs of distress and may require further monitoring and information on how to follow up and get help. Learning about child mental health and understanding how to recognize potential disorders is an important first step for everyone caring for children and young people. Please visit our website, nipinthebud.org , and go to our 'where to get help' page for organizations which can provide both support and further information to help you and those you care for. Any specific links that we've spoken about today can be found in the show notes. Finally, you can find Nip in the Bud on all the socials and get more information and further support. Don't forget to subscribe, like and share with someone who you think benefit from all that Nip in the Bud has to offer. See you next time.