Nip in the Bud® Podcast - The children's mental health charity

Nip in the Bud with Rachel McFarlane: Transforming Education

• Nip in the Bud Children's Mental Charity

Share episode

Summary

In today’s conversation, Rachel Macfarlane shares her extensive journey in education, highlighting her experiences as a teacher, headteacher, and educational consultant. She emphasises the importance of equity, diversity, and building strong relationships with students and families. Rachel discusses the challenges of addressing racial inequity in schools and the need for a curriculum that represents diverse voices. She also speaks about the mental health and wellbeing of students, the complexities of closing the attainment gap, and the significance of community partnerships in education. The conversation culminates in Rachel's insights on what makes a great school and her upcoming book which looks at the issues around school avoidance, and shares ideas on how we can all work together to make school unmissable.

Takeaways

Rachel's teacher training ignited her passion for education.

Building relationships with families is crucial for student success.

Racial equity is a pressing issue in education today.

Curriculum representation is essential for student identity.

Mental health impacts student learning and engagement.

Closing the attainment gap requires understanding individual student needs.

Community partnerships enhance educational experiences.

Great schools are always striving for improvement.

Education should be a fun and engaging experience.

Every child has the potential to succeed with the right support.

Rachel's book offering:

Square Pegs: Inclusivity, compassion and fitting in – a guide for schools

Rachel's own books:

The A-Z of diversity and inclusion (2024)

Obstetrics for schools (2021)

The nine pillars of great schools (2018)

Unity in diversity (2023)

Powering Up Your School: The Learning Power Approach to school leadership (The Learning Power series) (2020)

Gathering Greatness (Going for Great) (2014)

Great Aspirations (2018)

Disclaimer: The content provided in the Nip in the Bud podcasts is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to replace or serve as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or mental health issue.

Nip in the Bud - Where to get help

https://nipinthebud.org/where-to-get-help/



Alis Rocca (00:01)

Hi, and welcome to our podcast episode, Rachel. Thank you so much for joining and for giving us your time today.

Rachel Macfarlane (00:09)

Thank you for inviting me, I'm really looking forward to it.

Alis Rocca (00:12)

You're welcome. Let's get going with straight away finding out about your journey. Could you just give us an idea of your journey in education right from the beginning to where you are now?

Rachel Macfarlane (00:24)

Of course. So ⁓ after school, I went to university and did a history degree and then I did my teacher training and my teacher training year was really important for me because I've written at various stages in my career that I think that was the best teaching I ever received. I didn't have brilliant teaching at school, but I was just so inspired by my tutor on my PGCE course that when I joined the course, I was sort of 90 % certain I wanted to teach by the end of a couple of weeks of training and the Anna Pendry influence, I absolutely knew I wanted to teach. That was what absolutely sort of ignited my passion. So I became a history teacher in London in a secondary school and then a head of department and what was then called a senior teacher would now be called assistant head. ⁓ I was a deputy head always in London schools, normally in a London or sort of North or East London. I then became a headteacher and I was head for 16 years of three different, quite contrasting schools. So the first was an 11 to 18 mixed school just outside London in St Albans, with a community with very much sort of London features. And then I came into Waltham Forest and became head of Walthamstow School for Girls, an 11 to 16 girls school, community school in Waltham Forest. Absolutely loved my time there.

And then I heard about an opportunity to apply for the headship of a brand new school that was being built in East London in Ilford, Seven Kings, called Isaac Newton Academy. And although when I applied for the headship there, it was going to be an 11 to 18 school growing year by year from year seven upwards, within the set up year before the school opened the DfE gave us the opportunity to bid for a free school primary phase as well. So the school opened with just year sevens in 2012 and then two years later we took our first primary cohort and grew the primary school from reception upwards at the same time as we were growing the secondary school. So I often say to people I came quite late in my teaching career to primary but it was a real epiphany for me and I absolutely loved being head of a three, four, mentoring primary alongside a sixth form entry secondary. And I made it my business to ensure that I spent a lot of time down in the primary, really skilling myself up with the primary curriculum and everything that was different about primary and doing some teaching and running some extracurricular clubs. So you'd always find me on a Friday afternoon running an art club or, you know, reading to the reception children. And I always thought that, you know, however bad an encounter or an event might be at school. It only took a trip into the reception class to sort of have my spirits lifted. You'll recognise that, So after...

Alis Rocca (03:25)

Yeah, I would definitely jump in there and say, any of my most difficult days as a head, I just think, I just need some time in reception. And you spend some time with those reception children, it's like, oh yeah, now, that sort of filled my tank, I can go back to it all again.


Rachel Macfarlane (03:35)

Exactly! Yeah, their sort of optimism and sort of zest for life is just so infectious, isn't it? And then in 2018, after seven years of being the head at Isaac Newton, I decided that I needed to do what I was always telling the staff and students they should do, which was push myself out of my comfort zone a bit. I've done, you know, 16 years, as I say, of headship.

Rachel Macfarlane (04:06)

And I've been for the last five or six years, I've been quite heavily involved with London Leadership Strategy running programmes ⁓ and training modules for school leaders. And actually for nine years, I've run a programme called Going for Great, which work with leaders of good and outstanding schools to help them to connect with each other and learn from each other and to move their school on that sort of ever evolving journey from good to outstanding and outstanding to beyond outstanding. Very much sort of arguing that an Austin outstanding judgment is not the end of the journey, that a great school is something far beyond that. And I'd really enjoyed that sort of adult education piece. So I took a role as director of education services for a big school improvement organization called, at that stage, Hearts for Learning, it's now called HFL Education. And that involved leading a team of about 100 advisors and consultants who were working in schools and settings, PVIs, nurseries, primary schools, secondary schools, special schools, ⁓ and being responsible for their development and the quality assurance of the service that they provided. And so I did that for about five or six years during the COVID pandemic, which was really interesting times, because obviously we had to pivot and work quite differently supporting schools and school leaders when we couldn't physically be on site and when the needs ⁓ for support were very different.

During that stage I started to do some quite serious writing. I'd done editing of case studies that had been written by the schools that I'd worked with on the London Leadership Strategy. So I had been involved in writing and editing education texts for a number of years, but I'd never written a book on my own. I'd co-authored a book with Guy Claxton and some other school leaders around building learning power. And I'd contributed chapters to volumes that were sort of education books.

But I decided I wanted to write a book around creating high performance cultures. So I wrote a book called Obstetrics for Schools that came out sort of during the pandemic. And that really got me into the writing bug. So about two years ago, I decided I wanted more time for writing. I'd written a couple more books by that stage. And I wanted a bit more space to be able to do...

keynotes and school improvement work across the country and with a range of different trusts and schools and local authorities, not just in my region of Hertfordshire. So I took an interesting career change and moved from being the director of the team to being a member of the team, ⁓ which is actually a real joy. And I became lead advisor for underserved learners because at that stage I was very much focusing on underserved groups and minoritised groups and supporting schools and school leaders to really believe and have the strategies to ensure that those children achieve just as well as their more advantaged counterparts. And now, just in the last few months, I've stepped back from working for anybody and I'm completely self-employed, so I'm an independent education consultant and advisor. I'm working on another book and ⁓ I'm doing a lot of work with a whole range of dioceses, trusts, local authorities, schools around high performance cultures, around learning power, around race equity, around inclusive education, around developing belonging, self-efficacy and also making school unmissable. So I've had a really sort full career and I feel so blessed and so sort of fortunate to have been able to change, and pivot my work at different stages of my career.

Alis Rocca (07:55)

And I was going to say, really full, and you've been able to do so many different aspects of what makes up a good education for a child. What do you think have been your main drivers to stay in the education system and to approach it from so many different lenses? 

Rachel Macfarlane (08:16)

Well, I talked a few minutes ago about how powerful my teacher training was. I've never lost that absolute sort of excitement about education ⁓ and the power of educators. And I've worked with some absolutely brilliant teachers and professionals. And some of the best educators I've worked with haven't been qualified teachers. They've been teaching assistants or operational staff. ⁓ I've had some great, great teams in the various schools that I've worked in and led and that's just kept me sort of motivated and you know bursting for sort of more ⁓ and I suppose as my work has become very much around how you unswervingly focus on high performance for everybody at a time when societal inequity seems to be getting more more stark and more and more entrenched and poverty levels are rising and all the of metrics suggest that the gaps that have existed stubbornly for years and years aren't closing, aren't going away. That absolutely keeps my feet to the fire because there's still a huge job of work to be done and we know that it's possible to close gaps. We know it's possible to create cultures where everybody succeeds, but it's tricky, it's difficult. And as resources become more scarce and budgets reduce and pupil numbers reduce, which cause even greater financial challenges, one has to just keep chipping away, but also keep ⁓ reviving strategies, looking at things differently, ⁓ searching out what might be really effective strategies that can be transposed and transported from one setting to another. So I think it's that sense that there's an awful lot that can be done that really would transform the lives of particular youngsters who are currently underserved, underserved by society, underserved by external agencies, underserved perhaps, we have to admit, even though it's a hard fact, by schools because of the fact that we're so hard pressed.

Alis Rocca (10:31)

You've done a lot and written about disadvantage and looking through the lens of economic and ethnic disadvantage. Why do you think that education is important through that lens? How will it make the changes that you're talking about changing that gap? And why is it important to you?

Rachel Macfarlane (10:56)

Perhaps if I take the two parts of that question in the opposite order and start with why it's important to me. ⁓ I had an awful lot of advantages as a child. So I grew up in a really comfortable, know, lower middle class family. My parents were both teachers. So if I happen to have a bit of a dud experience in school, maybe, you know, a supply teacher for a year, I can remember, you know, my GCSE year, I didn't have a full time English teacher for a year or so my dad just stepped in and read the set text with me and helped me and educated me at home. When I found things difficult or I needed help with independent learning or my homework, my mum or dad would step in and help. And although we weren't sort of flush with money and resources ⁓ and we weren't sort of super well off, my parents didn't struggle to provide the things that would really help me to have a good education and to have that cultural capital and social capital.

But I was very aware at the secondary school that I went to, perhaps more than the primary school because I was older and saw things a little bit more objectively, that there were haves and have nots and that some people really weren't getting a fair crack at the whip. And I was also aware that some of the staff in my school viewed children from different backgrounds differently, perhaps had different levels of aspiration for them, perhaps pushed them differing amounts, perhaps gave them different amounts of attention, perhaps were more interested in some than others. And I had a friend who came from a particularly disadvantaged background and it used to really incense me that she wasn't, that teachers didn't expect as much of her as they did from me. And this had been a friend that I'd gone through a little village primary school in and I knew she was really smart, I knew she was better probably at maths and English than I was and she had huge potential and yet she never really got sort of a little bit sort of marginalised and was allowed to slip under the radar at secondary and I can remember feeling the inequitability of that. I think now I look back that my parents were you know huge influence on my thinking around education and around politics with a small P just around the role that education can play and adult educators can play in helping to create a more equitable playing field for people. ⁓ My father ⁓ also wrote quite a lot. My father recently died about four months ago and I've gone back and reread a lot of his work and inevitably in organizing his funeral and sorting his affairs, I've spoken to a lot of the friends and colleagues that he worked with and were influenced by him over the years and they have just reminded me just how passionate he was about fighting the cause of the underdog. ⁓ And I suspect that, you know, whether I sort of was aware of that or not, that influence has really bumped off on me. ⁓ And I just, I think we see, don't we? know, once you've been in education for a number of years and you've seen the power of a great teacher or a great adult champion to really build the sense of status and self-belief of a child to really support a family in need to be able to co-educate a child really effectively. We see the power of education to to transform lives. ⁓ So, yeah, I I think that's really been what has got me interested in supporting those that have less and ensuring that great schools are great schools for everybody.

Alis Rocca (14:48)

Brilliant, thank you. And I love that you sort of ended that by saying how education can transform lives. And I think it's recognising how transformative it can be. And as an educator, as a parent making sure that we have the highest quality education that we can provide. You know, we all have the ability to teach and it's just, you know, do we understand the importance of that? Do we understand the importance of sharing even just a book at home with a child and just seeing that that can make such a difference. It can just create that spark. You talked about learning powers and I think, you know, I love the work of Guy Claxton and curiosity being one that is so important because again walk down to the reception class and it's full of curious children that are just born curious you know and it's it's about us not getting in the way of that curiosity.

Rachel Macfarlane (15:46)

Yeah, not allowing that to sort of dim. Ken Robinson spoke and wrote really powerfully, didn't hear about how just society tends to squash that sort of imagination and curiosity and almost sort of idle mind wandering that young people are so brilliant at.

Alis Rocca (16:08)

And we almost ⁓ teach them that that's wrong in some of our classrooms. We're teaching that idle. Mind wandering can be, you know, just bring it back to the curriculum. This is what we should be doing.

Rachel Macfarlane (16:19)

Yeah, yeah, there's a right or a wrong answer. You didn't tell me what I wanted to hear.

Alis Rocca (16:25)

Let's move on to another intersection. So SEND, so Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and Economic Disadvantage. Why do you feel that that's an important intersection to recognise and for educators in schools to be discussing and be putting in place strategies that are going to support children that fall into both of those brackets?

Rachel Macfarlane (16:51)

Yeah. So my most recent book was called The A to Z of Diversity and Inclusion and it looked at diversity and inclusion in lots of areas. But I found that time and time again, I was coming back to ethnicity, economic circumstance and special educational needs and disability. And the intersection between the three of those, I think is really important for us to understand because we see a lot of children that will fall into two or three of those categories and therefore have sort of multiple potential disadvantages. And I think there are various sort of commonalities. ⁓ I think it's really important that when we're thinking about economic disadvantage and SEND as educators, we are really conscious of our own biases, preconceptions, ideas, and that we're constantly sort of challenging our assumptions, our expectations, our language, our goals, our strategies, and keeping ourselves as literate as we can be around those issues, areas. I also think that if you are a parent of a child with SEND and you're also living in poverty or you're economically disadvantaged, you really are disadvantaged in two significant ways. I've worked quite closely with a number of special schools and when I talk to special school leaders about how they spend their pupil premium money, they are often supporting families with education aids and resources for their child at home just to sort of give them a fighting start so that their education is not something that is confined to things that are happening during school hours. So I just think that for parents who are fortunate enough to have money, time, agency, connections with sort of important groups, it's possible to fast track resource and support for a child with a range of SEND that it just isn't if you're a parent who doesn't know who to go to or how to advocate for your child or doesn't have the money to get a sort of private EHCP assessment or to push for SALP intervention or whatever it might be. So I think that we see, unfortunately, a large number of children who present with SEND in school also having multiple complex sort of challenges with perhaps living arrangements, economic circumstance, space, mental health worries, which just puts more and more sort of potential barriers in the way.

Alis Rocca (20:09)

So what should schools do? Recognising that, understanding that intersectionality, understanding the vulnerability, but also on the flip side, understanding that education can be transformative, like we said. What are your recommendations for schools and educators?

Rachel Macfarlane (20:28)

That's a massive question because of course every individual family or child and circumstance will be different. But I think as an absolute starting point, building a relationship, building a really deep relationship of respect and understanding and connection with any child that has that sort of intersectionality and the parent or carer or responsible adult for that child, making it abundantly clear to the child in an age appropriate way and to the family that your expectations of them are no different from your expectations of anybody else. Your aspirations for them, your determination to give them the best possible education are ⁓ second to none and that you will do everything you can to give them an equitable education which means that you will do more different, better, extra for them because they need more ⁓ support. And then thinking creatively and in a solution-focused way about what it is that is needed to make the difference. Not assuming that a label means that there will be certain challenges or barriers, really going in in a sort of evidence-informed rather than assumptions-laden sort of way. ⁓ Recognising that it's going to need to be a piece of work that involves a large number of people both in the school but ideally also out of school. So being open to working in a really connected and joined up way with external agencies but also skilling up and empowering family members and other important adults in the child's life to play a part too. But making sure that every adult in the school sees them as a child with potential rather than a child with a label or a child that can be put into a sort of box or a category and whose barriers or struggles can be sort of explained and used as a justification for them being kept on the outside or marginalised or not included in the same activities or having adaptations to make them really sort of involved.

Alis Rocca (22:48)

Do you think there's ever an excuse for not doing that, for not taking the time to really build those relationships with the individual child, with the family?

Rachel Macfarlane (23:01)

I don't think there's an excuse for not doing it. I think there are reasons why that can happen which are not about people being uncaring or bad people and I'm not saying it's easy but I often think that. And I would say particularly at secondary here, I think it's less of an issue at primary. But I think that when educators are sort of time poor, they often feel that building the relationship is something they just don't have the luxury of the space or capacity to do. But to me, that's just a massive time saver. So when I was ahead, I was an absolute sort of convert to home visits, home visits before a child joined reception, home visits before a child joined year seven. And I'm always amazed at how few schools do routine home visits for every single child joining the school, particularly at that transition from primary to secondary. People will often look at me in kind of absolute amazement and say, what you did, so 270 home visits a year in your school, because we had 90 in primary and 180 in secondary. How on earth did you find the time to do that? And my answer would always be, well, we didn't have the time to not do it because we absolutely had to understand those families and ideally to see the home context and to get to have a really honest and deep conversation with the family about their hopes and aspirations, also their anxieties and their fears, their interests, their passions, their challenges, the things that they need to support with. And by spending 40 minutes, half an hour in a family home, doing that, the very beginning of the relationship with the family, it just saved so much time. It built up such a sort of speed of trust that then if something went a bit awry on the seven or 14 year journey through their school education, which inevitably it would do at some point, and somebody had to pick up a phone and have a potentially difficult conversation with someone at home, it wasn't such difficult conversation because the person at home knew that the school and the staff really had the back of them and their family and also understood their circumstance and their lived experience. 

I think we often feel that because we have limited money, limited time, limited resource, we can't do some of these things that are just fundamentally important. ⁓ And that by taking the time to build relationships and really appraise ourselves of the lived experience of the families that we're working with and the youngsters that we've got in our schools, that really helps us to manage on kind of meager resources.

Alis Rocca (25:41)

I completely agree and as a head was exactly the same. I think those initial weeks at the beginning of every academic year, not just the home visit, but every transition that you're doing, the beginning of the new year, regardless of the age, it's okay to step away from the curriculum, step away from some of those other things that you're thinking, I've got to pile this in and build the relationships and get that sense of trust and get the children, whatever age, into a place of learning before you then start expecting them to learn and it does pay dividends. You you might think well now I'm three weeks behind my curriculum but that catches up because you've put those foundations in. So I suppose it's about it's about prioritising them and where your school puts those priorities so as school leaders we need to be getting that message out that actually relationship building is still a high priority at the beginning of every academic year.

Rachel Macfarlane (26:43)

Absolutely, a young person has to be in the right emotional space to be receptive to learn, don't they? If you don't create the environment and the climate first, you can't hook some knowledge or content onto that. think it was Andy Clark who said the job of teachers is to grow bigger and better brains. Well, you have to make sure that your soil is well fertilised and has all the right kind of nutrients before your plant's going to grow, right?


Alis Rocca (26:50)

Mm, mm. Yeah, I like that, that's lovely.

Let's have a bit of a focus on ethnic minorities and racial equity now. I know that you've done some work around that. What do you, again, what do you think that schools need to do more of to ensure ⁓ beyond the relationship building, but to ensure that there is that equity and maybe start answering that question from a leadership point of view and then we'll move more into the classroom.

Rachel Macfarlane (27:47)

Yeah. So every school is going to be different and every school will comprise a different makeup of pupils and staff. And I spent the first part of my career, you know, working in London, working in very pluralistic environments ⁓ where ⁓ children from racially minoritised groups in the country were often ⁓ the majority group within the school.

So I worked in a school in Tower Hamlets that was think 97 % Bengali and had sort two or three white children. But then I've also worked in recent years in and supporting schools that are predominantly white where perhaps there are no members of staff who are from racially minoritised groups at all, where perhaps there are very few children of colour in each year group or even in the entire school. So the context is really different. But the reality is that we live in a country and we have a society and we are all fed by and influenced by a media that has racist tropes and that is structurally, racially inequitable. And that's quite a challenge, it's obviously a challenging reality, but it's sometimes for some people quite an uncomfortable sort of truth to ⁓ accept and internalise.

The very first thing I think we have to do as school leaders is to recognise that race inequity is a reality in our country, in our society. ⁓ And that it's too simplistic to think that racism is just the behaviour and the language of a few sort of bad apples and unpleasant people that you might encounter on the football terraces or at a demonstration or something.

⁓ I read a really powerful quote the other day that said, you know, racism isn't the shark, it's the water. And, all around us there are ⁓ structures, institutions, modes of doing things, systems, policies that aren't necessarily, they may be, but they aren't necessarily intentionally creating race inequities. But the result is that people of different racial groups are an advantage or disadvantage by them. So school leaders, think, need to absolutely understand and believe that point. And that might involve going away and doing some really deep reading or some work with a coach or some training to sort of grow racial literacy. And I found as a leader, although I've ⁓ worked in the area of sort of race equity in various different roles as an equal opportunities coordinator at one point, you know, as a curriculum leader, as a head teacher, in my recent role, I've needed to constantly go back and make sure my reading and my research and my discussions are sort of updated because it's something that if you're not constantly revisiting it, you your muscles go flabby. And then I think it's really important that a leader is brave in communicating that they know that it is their role to ensure that the school they run is striving to be racially equitable and that they know there's a job of work to do and that it doesn't mean that your school is a bad place ⁓ if you acknowledge that there are structural inequities that need addressing and that probably this is a piece of work that you're never going to get to the end of, that you're never going to be able to say 'I'm a leader of a school where there's no racist attitudes or tropes or assumptions or behaviours or policies. I'm working really hard at it and I'm constantly looking at things through a race equity lens. But I appreciate that in my lifetime, in the next 20, 30 years, we may not get to a position where we can say, know, racism is a thing of the past.' We can sort put that to bed and work on something else. And that's uncomfortable as a leader because I think we feel as leaders, if we take on a challenge or we make something a strategic priority for a year, we want to see at the end that the job's been done, it's, you we've knocked that off, we've achieved that, we can move on to a different priority. ⁓ So I think it's important for leaders to, as I say, make this a lens through which they are questioning and ⁓ interrogating everything, always on the lookout to compare data around children or adults or families from different ethnic groups just to see what that shows and it may show no difference at all which is great or it may just show some interesting trends it may show blips that happen one year and not another or it may show entrenched patterns. think leaders need to ensure that the voice of minoritised groups including racially minoritised groups ⁓ is constantly sought and heard and listened to and responded to and that means sometimes saying you know around this particular policy or this initiative we're particularly interested in hearing from our Pakistani community or from our East Asian community or from our Black Caribbean parents and feeling comfortable with seeking the feedback and the views of particular groups just as you might say you know around this piece of what we really want to hear from our parents of children with SEND or parents of children who are recent arrivals to the country or to the school. So I think it's really crucially important, if a school is serious about striving for race equity, it's crucially important that the leaders are on board and that they are vocal about the fact that they are making that a priority ⁓ and that they are open to hearing stories and seeing data which might show them and reveal sort of uncomfortable truths and difficult to hear ⁓ evidence.


Alis Rocca (34:12)

Can I just pause you there? How does that work with that school you described where it is mainly white with only a few families of color? How do you look at that data? So if you've got one Chinese family, one Bengali family, one Afro-Caribbean family, what does the data tell you? What do the stories tell you? And how would you feel that you should respond as a head or as a leader?

Rachel Macfarlane (34:43)

Yeah. Well, I think in a school like that, it might well be the case that what leaders want to know is what the experience of those children who are, you know, the one child from this background is, how included they feel, how much they see themselves represented in the curriculum, in learning resources, in the stories that are told, ⁓ in the visits and speakers that come into school and just whether there are any differences. So there it might well be that you're gently sort of just probing, that you ensure in any sort of feedback group you include that parent or that child who might sort of stand out because of their difference. And one of the things you're almost testing is whether they feel invisible, that they just don't ever see or experience anything that pertains to their culture or what they would do out of school or what they eat or where they go at the weekend or ⁓ their heritage. But equally you might be testing to see whether they feel hyper-visible. ⁓ And I write in the A to Z that both of those sort of ⁓ concepts are really sort key in race equity. It's really important that nobody feels invisible because really difficult to feel like you've got status or a sense of belonging to an organisation if you feel like, you know, if you weren't there nobody would mind or that, you your story isn't told or your life experience isn't usualised. But sometimes in efforts to achieve race equity it's possible to make people feel hyper-visible, isn't it? And that applies to children with a physical disability, for example, or, you know anybody who is just different and new arrival to the country and we want people to feel included and safe and that they belong but also that they're understood and that their life experience and their heritage is valued and ⁓ included. Does that answer the question?

Alis Rocca (36:50)

So that does really help and that leads me into the second part of the question which was really around what can we do in the classroom and I think that talks to curriculum and making sure that our curriculum has the visibility that we need and the broad understanding that we're looking at humans from around the globe and their own particular version of living and culture and everything else that comes with that. What would you suggest curriculum should look like and also what would you suggest teachers should be doing in the class to make sure that people feel both visible, seen and heard, but not hyper visible?

Rachel Macfarlane (37:39)

Yeah. So I think it's really about representation. It's about auditing your subject or your scheme of learning for a term or your programme of study through a key stage and just sort of asking the question who features in this curriculum? Whose stories are told? Who are the heroes? Who are the victims? Who are the aggressors? Who are the oppressed? Who's central to the narrative and who's a bit peripheral? Who has a sort of bit part in this curriculum and who's seen as a sort of key player? Who's usualised and who's a bit sort of potentially exoticised or, you know, brought on, ⁓ you know, as I say, with a sort of bit part and different sort of highlighted? Which societies are depicted as, ⁓ you know, the fonts of civilisation?

I can remember when I was teaching the history of medicine being fascinated to find that, you know, there was all this sort of focus on the ancient ⁓ Greeks and Romans in terms of water systems and hygiene. But actually centuries earlier in Indian civilizations, all of those sort of techniques were really usual, you know, in cities. ⁓ But, know, that sort of Western ⁓ dominant culture that can appear in lots of different subject areas. We need to challenge, we need to challenge why it's not common in a maths textbook to hear about mathematicians from the Middle East or from Southeast Asia when there were all sorts of really inspiring mathematicians ⁓ whose theories and techniques children could sort of learn through why is it that often in music education when we talk about the great composers, they're composers from the sort of Western musical traditions. ⁓ So yes, I think going back and tracing through our women featured as promptly as men, our civilizations from around the world equally sort of represented. If the national curriculum says we need to study this period or this culture or this society, how we at the same time say, and while this was happening here, meanwhile elsewhere in another part of the world, this was happening and look how similar that is. So, you know, this tradition of storytelling was happening in, I don't know, ⁓ ancient Mesopotamia at the same time as this tradition of storytelling was happening in Germany or, you know, just really helping to open children's minds to, you know, that lovely quote about, windows and mirrors, know, that the curriculum helps you to sort of understand yourself and shines a mirror on yourself, but also opens windows for you to see out into all sorts of different vistas that help you to understand, you know, that our world is enriched by people from all over the globe.

Alis Rocca (40:43)

How far do you, sorry. I was just gonna say how far do you think we still have to go in schools in the UK to open those windows, to show those differences, because what you're talking about there is quite a change in our curriculums. And again, we're talking about time poor individuals who might easily just think this is what we do here. This is the way we teach history in year five. We've always done it. We're going to continue doing it. Where do you think we are on that road to change?

Rachel Macfarlane (41:24)

Yeah, I think it's vastly different in different schools, but I don't think change is as awesome and enormous a job as it perhaps kind of first seems. You can start small, you can start with one subject area in one year group or one new unit. You could start with a unit that you were planning to revamp anyway as opposed to something that you've only just sort of finished polishing, you know, where it would seem like a huge upheaval to append it and start all over again. You can start it because of an impetus of, you know, perhaps a community that's moved into the area that brings a different perspective to one that's been represented in the school before and thinking, okay, maybe we will involve some of the parents. One of the things that we can do to make them feel connected to our school community is to say, we really like to know whether you've got any favourite nursery rhymes or children's stories that are important to your culture or books that you'd like us to include in our library. So there are ways of almost spreading the load so you're bringing in people from the community or families to help to inform and enrich you. One of the things that teachers often say is, I just don't know where I would start, where would I go to find out about scientists from the Caribbean who ought to be included in my curriculum.

Rachel Macfarlane (42:46)

And often my response is, well, have you got people from that heritage, that culture who you could ask, who you could involve in that conversation? Children are often great at wanting to work with librarians to diversify book stock in libraries. And they're really good at sort of doing reviews and giving feedback about ⁓ the stock that already exists and new texts that could be purchased.

And where it is really, where a school perhaps says, I'd like to diversify my geography topic books, I can see that they're populated by lots of images of white people on beaches or on cliffs and there's nothing sort of diverse about this book, but we can't afford a new set of resources. ⁓ We have to work with these. Then I think it's about, and this can happen right down at of key stage one, key stage two.

If you are using resources that you know aren't as diverse as they should be and you would want them to be, just opening up some curious discussions with the children about what they notice about that text or that resource or that image or that picture book and helping them to notice and articulate, isn't that interesting? We're not seeing any Asian families in that shopping centre scene. That doesn't look like our shopping centre. Wonder why that is and then perhaps inviting children to write to the publishers and say, you know, we're working from this book and we've noticed that this doesn't look like our community or whatever, you know, why is that? Are you planning to do a sort of, ⁓ in the next revamp of the book, you will it become more diversified? So you can bring diversity into your curriculum even if the resources you've got aren't necessarily the ones that you would want to be working with through the activities you do and the curious questions that you ask.

Alis Rocca (44:40)

Yeah, so lots of work to be done, but as you say, it's small steps. It doesn't have to be this huge gargantuan task that is throwing everything out and starting again. And you've talked about the importance of having a sense of belonging and feeling heard. Whatever vulnerable group you might find yourself in or a cross between them.

Let's have a think now about the downside of that. If you don't feel that you belong, if you don't feel seen, how do you think that plays on children's mental health and wellbeing?

Rachel Macfarlane (45:21)

Wow. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of my role is that I hear really tragic stories. And from my Race Equity book, I interviewed quite a lot of children and quite a lot of adults, people of colour who spoke to me about their experience in school, who are still in education, maybe as teachers or head teachers or governors. But I've also spoken to a lot of children living in poverty when I've done people premium reviews in schools and or reviews into eliminating economic exclusion which I've done a lot in the last few years and I think you know whatever the potential sort of vulnerability or difference I think there are common sort of consequences and they are feelings of tiredness, frustration, anger, exhaustion, ⁓ low self-worth, low status, insecurity, vulnerability and they lead to a number of behaviours, all of which are really unhealthy.

So sometimes they lead to people just sort of withdrawing and trying to make themselves invisible and sort of exist on the periphery because of a fear that, you know, the teacher's going to say, tomorrow I'm going to get you to write about where you went on your summer holiday and they know they didn't have a summer holiday, so what are they going to write? Or, I'd like you to keep a food diary of everything you ate last week and maybe their home diet is very different from everybody else's and they don't want to sort of write about they were eating dhal and chapati when everyone else is going to write about roast beef dinners or whatever it is. So sometimes it leads to people wanting to sort of ⁓ disappear into the background, which obviously isn't good for anybody in terms of education because then they're not getting the attention and nurturing they need. Sometimes it leads to masking behaviour. So sometimes it's really difficult for a teacher or educator to know that a child is being disconnected because the child is really sort of masking that.

Going back to that example of the food diary, I spoke to a head teacher who said she was, as a child, was given that very task and she completely fabricated what she'd eaten for the last week because she didn't want anybody in her class to read a diary where it was clear that she'd got a kind South Asian diet. ⁓ We have children who mask the fact that they're really desperately unhappy when they can't afford to go on a school trip and they sort of say, I didn't want to go or that's going to be boring.

And yet, you know, they're the one child in the class that doesn't go out and have that cultural experience that everyone else does. They miss out on the bonding that happens on the trip, but also all the lovely chatter and follow up afterwards. But they feign, you know, disinterest. So sometimes it can lead to sort of masking behaviour. Sometimes it leads to children just not turning up to school. Why would you want to go to school on Christmas jumper day when you can't afford a Christmas jumper? Why would you want to be in school when the children are learning about the transatlantic slave trade when you're the only black child in the class nobody's sort of set up a safe contextual environment for that to happen. So, you know, unfortunately we see a big intersection between absence from school or sporadic sort of absence and ⁓ being minoritized in one way or another ⁓ or coming from a group that is perhaps going to feel, you know, less likely to feel that kind of sense of belonging. And then we just, we know that children aren't in a in an optimal space to learn and to be able to pick up new concepts and attach them to the schema in their brain if they're worrying about ⁓ a difference being exposed in class or if they're worrying about what's happening in their family at home or whether there's going to be food on the table or whether they're going to be cold at night, whether they'll be any internet connection at home and whether they'll be able to do their independent learning, whether they'll get into trouble the next day because they couldn't print something out because they didn't have a printer at home. know, the myriad different ways in which being vulnerable or different ⁓ can play out to make it harder for you to connect to learning. And I think, you know, we as teachers, we often, we get excited understandably by children who really thrive at school and learn quickly and make great progress and become really proficient at something, whether they're a really good flautist or really good cricketer or really good at languages. And we can so easily get hoodwinked into thinking these are sort of natural gifts or abilities and actually not stopping and thinking, is the child who's really good at cricket or really good at playing the flute or really good at Italian, really good at those things because they just had the advantages of the conditions and the resources and the time and the money and the support and the home backing. They're no different from the child who isn't yet excelling at those things except that one of them has that sort of entourage or cavalcade of support around them and the other doesn't and really needs that from, you know, professionals at school to stand in and be that sort of cavalcade for them because they're not fortunate enough to have  perhaps other adults or other people outside of school to do that for them.

Alis Rocca (50:36)

Brilliant answer and I think it really leads into that notion of us as leaders needing to close the attainment gap. So we're constantly being told, we need to close the attainment gap. You've got these children on pupil premium and these children from this minority group and we need to be closing the attainment gap. And it can be so superficial the way that that is approached. But what you've just said there and what you've said throughout our conversation is it's actually really complex and it starts with getting to know the child really really well so going back to what you said about ⁓ relationship and understanding where that child's coming from and then not having those assumptions that well they're not going to be good at playing the flute or playing cricket because they just haven't shown that but actually thinking what else can we put in around this child and family importantly that will give them that boost, that step up, that starting on the journey of levelling the playing field so that the gap can close. But it's huge, it's a massive challenge and I think like you said about creating an anti-racist school, it's never going to end and I think with the attainment gap it's never going to be something that as a teacher or as a head teacher you can say well we've done that in our school, it's finished, we can move on because we've put this in and this is how we spend our pupil premium because every time you get a new cohort of children in there's going to be new challenges. Yeah.

Rachel Macfarlane (52:13)

Absolutely. And I think because we're time poor and because it's complex, I often read people premium strategy statements that identify as the challenges or the barriers, quite sort generic challenges, the things that the media kind of say are the challenges. And when I stop and say, you've said here that, ⁓ I don't know, let's children have lower literacy levels on entry and that that's your challenge. And I say, and what's that based on and what is it about literacy? Is it their writing or their spelling or their vocabulary or their reading? Sometimes you realise that actually the detailed analysis hasn't been done. It's the sort of, well we know that in the past these children have tended to have these characteristics or been behind in this aspect of learning.

And it's really easy to sort of just generalise ⁓ and treat children who have that sort of pupil premium label as a homogenous group, rather than really drilling down and finding for this particular cohort of year six children in my school at the moment or reception children, these are the characteristics and these are the barriers and therefore these need to be the strategies. We're never going to really be successful at addressing barriers if we're not really clear about what the barriers are.

So it is a job of work of really getting to know the individual children, really being data rich and informed and saying, I can see that this is the particular sort of issue. Again, you sometimes people say, ⁓ attendance is not so high. Our people, premium, eligible children or children from this particular group don't attend as well. But without sort of going back and really unpicking what is the barrier to the attendance? You know, is it about not having friends and not feeling sort of socially safe in school? Is it about not having the uniform and not coming into school because you haven't got a clean shirt to wear and you don't want to get into trouble. Is it about ⁓ children going on extended leave to other parts of the world? What is it that is the barrier?

Alis Rocca (54:26)

And it's again, it's assumptions, isn't it? And it's just checking your own individual assumptions because we are all constantly bombarded with imagery and with ideas and with generic notions of groups and it's constantly pulling yourself up and thinking would I say that about a group of white middle class children who are doing well would I expect them all to be exactly the same or am I okay with thinking well that one's really good at this and that one's really good at that so so why would I do that with a group of disadvantaged because just that term this is our disadvantaged group or what what is the disadvantage is it is it you know to do with economic is it to do with minority ethnic group? Is it to do with language barriers or food barriers or whatever it is? It's like you say, checking our assumptions, going back to building relationships and digging deep into data. And the way you're talking there, you're not just talking about quantitative, you're talking about qualitative data as well, which is the richest type of data that we can work from.

Rachel Macfarlane (55:33)

Yeah. And you're so right when you talk about language, which is why I'd much prefer the term underserved, because I think when you talk about a child being disadvantaged, it sounds as though that's just a state of fact, a permanent sort of condition, not something that can be shifted or you can do anything about. And then, of course, if you think like that, consciously or subconsciously, you're almost excusing yourself for the fact that there is a difference in outcomes and progress and saying, well, you know, I can't do anything about that. So, you know, I don't have to sort of try. Whereas if you talk about someone being underserved, that feels really uncomfortable. You're sort of saying they're different because they're not getting what they ought to be getting. And then, you know, you feel a sort of restlessness that and I could be doing something about that. So I need to think about what I could do about that. And I can't do everything, but I should be doing what I kind of humanly can do within my capability. And also, I think you when we talk about disadvantaged it sounds very binary like you're either advantaged or you're disadvantaged and we know as ex-heads that you know our children have all sorts of different sort of complex combinations of characteristics and life experiences and you could be advantaged by your gender and not by your race or advantaged by your physical ability and not by your ⁓ status in the UK you know so

We all have multiple different sort of components that make us up as who we are and some help us in a particular situation and some don't. something like your age or your sexuality or your gender could positively advantage you in one context and disadvantage you in another. So it's not as simple as just disadvantaged and not. And it's constantly changing, isn't it? A child might be really thriving ⁓ and comfortable and happy and settled one term and then the next term maybe their mum loses their job or their older sibling gets in trouble with the police and suddenly everything comes crashing down and they are underserved at that moment in time but they might not be six months later.

Alis Rocca (57:43)

I think your right language is very important. You talked a little bit earlier about partnerships and schools making sure that they're making the most of partnerships. Could you go into a little bit more depth with that? Because that sense of being underserved and our role as educators is to serve the child and to serve the family and to serve the community.

How do we do that optimally with other agencies so that it isn't all on the shoulders of the head teacher or all on the shoulders of the class teacher, but actually it's going back to that understanding that it takes more than one person to raise a child. And if we're looking at community, what could we be doing better as schools to enhance the community in order to provide and serve so that those children do get what they need?

Rachel Macfarlane (58:40)

When I've looked at schools that are really, really good at partnerships and collaborating and, as you say, thinking smartly about how they can get others to support them in raising and educating the children in their care, they tend to have a real sort of strong conviction that they can be enriched by their local community, by which I mean the businesses, the organisations the faith groups, the youth groups in the local area, but also obviously the families that live in the local area. And that they can enrich the local community. So they positively want to break down the strong barriers between the school gates and the outside and to say, we exist to serve the local community, we want the local community to use our resources, to benefit from our facilities, to feel like there's a permeable boundary.

But equally, we know that by being generous and opening up to the community and making sure that we work with the local old people's home and the special school around the corner and the food bank and whatever, we know that that's going to enrich us too and our children are going to get a much richer curriculum experience out of that. They're going to, know, when they've, ⁓ I don't know, maybe done an art project they might get to display their work at the local art gallery or get a local artist to come in and judge it. So, you know, by breaking down the boundaries between the school and the outside, it's really mutually beneficial. By saying we really genuinely want to work in partnership with parents and families and, you know, it's not like we do education and we're going to tell you what you need to do to help us to do that. We see that you do education too and we want, you know, the education of the child to be a 24-7 experience and for that we know that you you play a massive part because they're with you for longer than they're with us. You're then sort of conveying a respect ⁓ and a status to families that sometimes I think, you know, traditionally families don't always feel, particularly often families of children who are more underserved. But equally then you're more likely to find that families will say, you know what, we could help you out with this. We could come and run a secondhand uniform stall in school. We'll help out with you know, this particular event will come on this trip and support with, you know, staff and will come and hear children read. So I think it is either a virtuous or a vicious cycle, depending on whether you sort of put up the barriers and say, no, we've just got to get on with education. can't haven't got the headspace to deal with, you know, what's going on outside of school. Or, you know, if you take this leap of faith and say, no, you know, we're here as a sort of a community resource and we're enriched by that as well. And that will help us with.

All of the children who perhaps don't see themselves so well represented in the school. If you are a school that has perhaps a sizeable minority ethnic pupil ⁓ cohort, but all of your staff are white, then it's really important that ⁓ black and Asian and minority ethnic people from the local community are coming into school and doing activities. That's the way in which you create that sort of diversity and representation perhaps. ⁓ And similarly, perhaps a child with a particular SEND or physical disability who doesn't see themselves necessarily represented within the type school community ⁓ could see themselves represented and usualised within the sort of wider community. So yeah, I think those partnerships are really, really key. And I think that if you invest the time and energy in them, you're repaid sort of tenfold.

Alis Rocca (1:02:23)

I agree. And I think for me as a headteacher, it always felt almost like a bit of a relief, a bit of weight off my shoulders to think actually we're in this together. It's not all me and I have to make it all perfect, but actually we're in this together as a community and let's do the best that we can for the children in our care together. And that really did, that really helps.

You've got another book coming out, so you're in the midst of writing another book and I'm really interested to just hear a bit about that because I know there's such an issue at the moment with ⁓ school avoidance. So tell us about your latest write.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:03:07)

So this is a collaboration with a colleague, Paul Jenkins, and it's going to be called Making School Unmissable. And it's really looking at the situation we're in currently where far too many children aren't attending school. We've got persistent absentee and severe absentee numbers still way too high sort of post pandemic. And actually, although the pandemic really didn't help with families and children feeling that school is unmissable. We had a significant beginnings of an issue before that as well. So it goes back way before 2020. We've got children for a whole range of reasons, just not feeling like school is where they connect, where they belong, where they feel valued, where they feel safe, or just not feeling like an education is a kind of, you know, absolute essential for them. But we've also got families who don't necessarily see school as unmissable and for a variety of reasons might condone or accept absence levels that we know aren't good for children. And then we've got a whole crisis of recruitment and retention of staff, teaching assistants, teaching staff, operational staff. So we've got a profession that isn't necessarily as convinced that school is the place to be and ⁓ an unmissable experience as well. So the book's going to look through those three angles of pupils and students, parents and families and staff who work in school and teachers and it's looking at five senses that we argue are essential for you to feel that school is unmissable just like we have our five senses as humans the senses that we think you have to have quite strongly in order to feel that school is unmissable is firstly a sense of purpose you have to be able to kind of understand what's the point of going to school what are you going to get out of it secondly a sense of belonging. No one's going to go anywhere where they don't feel safe and valued and protected and wanted. Thirdly, a sense of success. We think there are far too many children and adults just not experiencing the joy of success and feeling like they're achieving things when they go to school. The fourth is empowerment. We think that's really important for building status and self-efficacy and creating ⁓ people who absolutely feel that they can be independent and self-regulated learners.

And the fifth, which we talk about so infrequently but I think is so crucial, is a sense of adventure. Why aren't more people feeling like school is fun, it's exciting, it's unpredictable, it's taking me out of my comfort zone, it's opening up horizons that I didn't know were out there. So in the book, we divide it into those five sections. We look at each of those five senses through the three stakeholder lenses.

And we just tell lots of stories and examples of schools and leaders that we've come across ranging from nursery right through to secondary and sixth form who are doing really interesting things in developing those five senses. We look a little bit at the sort of the facts and the research, but it's much more sort of practical handbook of how can I build a stronger sense of purpose? How can I build stronger sense of success or adventure in my school that will make everybody feel like you'd been absolutely full not to want to be here, you'd have a sort of fear of missing out if you were off school on any given day.

Alis Rocca (1:06:31)

Do you look at the obstacles to creating those senses? What do you think are the main ones at the moment?

Rachel Macfarlane (1:06:37)

Yes. I think it's a combination. think it's partly curriculum, structures, accountability systems. I think, you know, let's take adventure and fun for a minute. I think if you're told what you have to teach, that children have to pass exams, that you're going to be judged by league tables, that Ousted will come in and slap a sort of grade on you and expect to see certain things, it can be quite easy to say, well, unfortunately we can't sort of take the time to do this sort of wild, know, fun thing, frivolous thing, because we have to get through curriculum coverage or, you know, I'm not sure that, ⁓ you know, how this would be sort of perceived. ⁓ So I think that's a high stakes, high accountability sort of culture that we find ourselves in really doesn't help. 

When it comes down to something like purpose, I think that's a really interesting one. I don't think as educators we're clear about the purpose of education or the role that we play in delivering that. It's decades, decades, decades since we've had a national debate about what's the purpose of schools, what's education for. When you look at the national curriculum, you'd think that 1989, 1990 when the government introduced a national curriculum, they'd have started with the rationale, what's the point of curriculum, what do we want our curriculum to be about, how will we know whether it's successful or not, but it doesn't have anything like that, it just goes straight into these are the subjects, this is what you teach in each of them, this is how you'll be assessed and when you learn what, it's just a very mechanical, sort operational, this is the curriculum, no rationale at all.

Alis Rocca (1:08:28)

And as a head teacher, you wouldn't go into a new school like that. You would start with the why. You would start with your vision. This is the whole purpose of what we're doing.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:08:34)

Yeah. Yeah, and if we're not clear ourselves about the why, how can we possibly expect parents and children to be clear about the why?

Alis Rocca (1:08:45)

And that why constantly changing. mean, look at the landscape now compared to a year ago, let alone 10 years ago. With AI coming into play, there's going to be a lot of children thinking, well, why do I need to go to school? I can get AI to write my essay better than I can do it. So why wouldn't I? So it does have to be a national debate. And that does need to be ongoing because it is changing rapidly all the time.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:09:14)

Yeah, I totally agree.

Alis Rocca (1:09:15)

And it goes back to what you're saying right at the beginning of our conversation about education being transformational. But why is that? Why is it transformational? What does it do? Does it open windows? Does it build that sense of curiosity and the resilience to want to step out of your comfort zone for life? You know, that's the exciting thing is when you really are hooked, you do it for life. And it just pays dividends, it fuels you throughout your life if you understand that. And so that's what we need to be igniting in our children.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:09:51)

Totally.

Alis Rocca (1:09:53)

So what would you say makes great schools?

Rachel Macfarlane (1:09:57)

So I wrote a book ⁓ about great schools called The Nine Pillar of Great Schools. I co-wrote it with two friends and that came out of the work that I'd done with ⁓ well over a hundred outstanding schools across London and just beyond over a period of nine years. And we really explored the research and the data around great schools and we absolutely said this is not about an Ofsted framework. This is not about the Ofsted outstanding. It's way beyond that. Probably the concept of a truly great school is a bit like a school that has no racism or any other isms in it. Perhaps an idyllic sort of endpoint that isn't ever obtainable. And perhaps if you felt that you were the head of a great school, you'd already be on a downward trajectory of complacency and decline because there probably is no sort of endpoint in the journey.

But what we said in the book, and I then involved the work of the book when I went to HFL into a sort of framework of great schools, is it's about a great curriculum, teaching that's inspiring and sort of inclusive, ⁓ great development both of children and of the adults that work in the organisation, a school that's resourced responsibly and for the long term a school that's outward looking and working with the community and expanding national and global and international connections that learns from others, ⁓ that is truly inclusive and diverse. So it's lots of component parts and it's a school that is really data rich and data informed and not frightened to constantly probe and take a dipstick check of how well it's doing in the knowledge that it's never going to be sort of purring in all areas, it's never going to be sort of, you know, without grizzly things that exist sort of under the stone that you lift up. And that that's just normal and natural and that, you know, a great school is always restless to want to be better.

Alis Rocca (1:12:08)

Oh, I love that. Restless to want to be better. Thank you so much. It's been a fantastic conversation. Do you feel like there's anything that I haven't asked you that would be really good for our audience to hear? Remember, our audience is both educators as well as parents and carers.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:12:26)

No, except just to say that what's really inspiring and optimistic and we need to constantly remind ourselves of is that each of these problems is not a problem somewhere. So I've never come across a group or a challenge or a gap that isn't being resolved and addressed really successfully somewhere. And so

What I try to do in my writing and my work is just to share little examples, ideas, tidbits, advice, because each one of those sort of stubborn gaps that we talk about and we see nationally is not a gap in some school, probably not that far away from you. That was one of the very exciting things about being ahead in London, that London, as you know, under London Challenge, moved from being the worst performing region in the country to the highest performing region in the country and schools that were serving really challenged and underserved communities were suddenly getting really fantastic outcomes. And, you know, as a head teacher, you could never say, we just can't do this with kids like these, because, you know, somebody would be able to pipe up and say, well, they're doing it like half a mile down the road, go and kind of take a look. So I think we just have to remember that, that when we feel sort of a bit in the depths of despair, we've been really sort of working our socks off, trying really hard. Everyone's been pulling out all the stops and yet we haven't made the progress we want in a particular area or with a particular group or even individual, there's always another idea that you can try and there will always be something that can make a difference.

Alis Rocca (1:14:01)

It's so important to be outward looking, isn't it? Finally, my last question is about a great read. So I know you've got your own book, so you might suggest those, but what book would you suggest that we could put on our website that might help either a parent or an educator or both around supporting mental health, around the areas that you've talked about in particular and that sense of equity, the sense of belonging to ensure that we are ⁓ meeting the needs, the mental health needs, the wellbeing needs of our children.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:14:36)

Yeah, so I won't recommend one of my books, maybe someone else will or you can recommend one of ours. Yeah, so if I just, I've got a couple because you may, my first one I suspect is probably already on your list. These are just books that have really, that I found really helpful and they're varied. You've probably got square pegs on your reading list.

Alis Rocca (1:14:38)

You can. I will definitely put your books in the show notes.

No, we haven't. So tell us about Square Pegs.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:15:03)

Okay. So you probably can't see but my copy is really, it's covered in coffee, it's stained, it's got markers, it's well, well thumbed. This is a, it's called Inclusivity, Compassion and Fitting In, a Guide for Schools. And it's ⁓ a collection of essays by lots and lots of really eminent and successful academic school leaders, researchers, teachers. But what it has in common is this idea that in any school, there are a whole number of square pegs that don't sort of fit into round holes. That, you know, one of the joys, but also one of the challenges of schools is that every individual is different. And whether, you know, somebody brings mental health concerns or has a special educational need or disability or comes from an underserved group, a sort of one size fits all approach to education just isn't going to work. And so it's just really inspiring stories, some tragic quotes and stories but some really uplifting stories about the power building relationships, mental health and the brain, fun, happiness, creativity, play but also sort of inclusive practices and it's just it's a real joy each chapter is sort of three four five pages long so it's like it's one of those books that even if you're completely exhausted at the end of a day you know at school if you go to bed and you just want to read something for five, 10 minutes and go to sleep dreaming about it, this is a great go-to book.

Alis Rocca (1:16:36)

Fantastic, that's brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing that and for sharing all your ideas and your experience today. think it's been a really good conversation and a really important conversation and just lots and lots for school leaders to still be doing, for educators to still be doing and hopefully for parents to step forward and talk about their own experiences so that their children feel seen and heard in the way that you've talked about.

Rachel Macfarlane (1:17:04)

Yeah, that book has a lot of parent voice actually so it's a good book for parents too. Alis, it's been a pleasure. Thank you and thank you for all the great work you're doing.

Alis Rocca (1:17:05)

Thank you so much, Rachel. ⁓ brilliant. Thank you. Thanks for your time.