070 - Pit Pony Revisited: The Summer Series - Katie Stone

In this powerful reissue from our archive, we revisit the story of Katie Stone, a teacher who resisted the profession for years before finally entering via the TA route and discovering a love for the classroom.

From her PGCE at Manchester Met to seven years in teaching, Katie describes how the joy of working with children was eroded by pressure, exhaustion and an informal “support plan” that left her anxious, confused and eventually signed off with work-related stress. Pregnant at the time and coping with grief after losing a child, the relentless scrutiny pushed her into panic attacks and left her unable to continue.

Katie opens up about the guilt of stepping away, the impact on her young family, and how she slowly rebuilt her confidence. Today she runs a thriving virtual assistant agency, supporting education businesses with the very organisational and communication skills that once went unrecognised in school.

Her story is a reminder that teaching skills are transferable, resilience can be rebuilt, and there is life - and success - beyond the classroom.

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Edited with finesse by our Podcast Super Producer, Mike Roberts of Making Digital R...

Transcript

Thank you to our sponsors Little Voices. Are you a teacher with a passion for drama, music and performance but feeling stuck in the classroom? Little Voices gives you the chance to step into a role where you can truly inspire young minds through the arts. This is a company I know well and admire. 

They're passionate about child development, highly rated and genuine and transformative. With small group teaching, a focus on confidence and creativity, with the opportunity to guide children through lambda qualifications, you can make a real impact. Plus, with the support of a nationwide franchise network behind you, you can run your own successful business, doing what you love while teaching in a way that truly fits your life.

Hello, lovely listeners, and thank you for pressing play. This has been recorded in July-August 2025, so technically school's out for summer, and Sarah and I, still teachers to the very core, are taking a little bit of time off, but we still want something dropping regularly to you, so we've chosen a few of our favourite episodes. We've loved doing all of our podcasts, but we've chosen a couple that have really struck chords with our listeners, that have had a huge impact, and we're going to revisit them. 

There'll be a couple of special episodes as well, this may even be one of them, where me and Sarah are chewing the fat. So yes, we're putting our feet up, so sit back and enjoy what we've got for you. Thank you.

Coming up in this episode, when that plan started falling into place, and they started asking me to do things like, oh don't do informal planning anymore, now here's a template that we want you to fill out every day, and stuff like that, whether my rejection sensitivity put me into panic overdrive, and therefore everything went into this awful spiral, that looking back, I was never going to get out of. Hello, and welcome to another episode of our Pit Pony podcast. We've got a great guest today, we've got Katie Stone. 

Now, Katie was solidly against going into teaching for 10 years, she resisted. She told me that she remembered a teacher recruitment event at university, and there was a visceral response, I am not doing teaching, and she did pub management, worked in call centres, but it was a step-mom who worked for the Department for Education in teacher recruitment, who nudged her into the wonderful world of education, and Katie started via the TA route, the teaching assistant route, which is very common for teachers in many ways, how they enter into the profession. Having done the role of TA, realised she loved being in the mixer with kids, and applied for a PGCE at Man Met. 

From 2010 to 2017, Katie worked as a teacher. She exited with work-related stress after seven years under the threat of a support plan. It's going to be really interesting to capture what Katie did, so to speak, and what happened to Katie. 

So, welcome, Katie Stone, and can you tell us what it is you're doing today? Thanks, Sharon. Yeah, I'm now the owner of a virtual assistant agency. Oh, fantastic. 

Now, what normally happens, Katie, is we get straight into the conversation about the last couple of years of teaching, but what I think is important for our listeners to realise is that when we have guests on our podcast, I do a pre-record meeting with them. We have a chat, we talk through what's happened, relive, and go back periods of years of their life that, in some respects, have been put in boxes and locked away. Katie, we met a while ago and we talked about what happened. 

How's that impacted you, that conversation? Because I think it's important to start with that before we go back. How's the last couple of weeks been since our conversation? It's been tricky, honestly. I am an amazing compartmentaliser. 

I am incredibly good at doing that sort of stuff, and while I was aware that when I left teaching there was probably an element of PTSD left behind, 2017 was the last time that I was in a classroom and I thought it was okay. But yeah, the last couple of weeks there have been a lot of dinging bells with triggers and feelings of extreme anxiety and worry and stuff like that. So yeah, it definitely made me realise that it hasn't gone away and I'm not sure that it ever will. 

I hope it will, like better, you know? Yeah, but can I just... I think that's important in the framing that our Pit Pony guests come on and they're talking about vulnerable periods in their lives, so thank you for that because your journey, like all the other guests we have, acts as inspiration and information and education for our listeners. So thanks for that and with that in mind, I'm going to take you right back to that period. Talk us through the end. 

How did you exit the classroom? What was going on in your world? So I was pregnant for the second time and working in a school that was a good 50 minutes to an hour away from where I lived. So there was a long commute, as many people will remember with a second pregnancy, like it's never as easy as the first. It's never as easy, like my hips fell apart immediately as soon as the hormones went through and I had to have newspaper in the car to swivel in and out because I couldn't open my legs far enough. 

So it was hard anyway and I think as I went through, like that was August and then through September and October, whether I was not as self-aware as I should have been or whatever, but things started to slide. By November, I was feeling extremely pressured within school on what, looking back I guess, was an informal support plan but was never really called that. December, I remember going to see the doctor just as we came off and he said, try, keep going, see how you do but come back and see me in January if it gets no better once you're back and yeah, January was the time when I went to see the doctor having suffered a panic attack in the car and he signed me off sick that night. 

It's a weird one this Katie, you said it was like an informal support plan, I didn't really understand it. Support plan, support in the world of teaching is like an oxymoron almost, isn't it? It just has such an impact on teachers. Sarah, it's dead interesting, isn't it? In our work, in our head office, we're all ex-teachers, same with our franchisees. 

We have to be really careful about using the word support in that word because it doesn't mean support. How can you be on an informal support plan and not know you're on a support plan? Just dig into that a bit for us, will you? I think I was working in a mixed year one and two classroom which is hard work as it is and it's, even if I did go back to teaching, I would never have a mixed year one and year two because they've got different needs. So I was trying to make those different needs match, those needs of, you know, being able to play, learn through play, all of that stuff, the EYFS mixed with SATS in year two. 

And the leadership, I think, I do believe they were trying to be supportive and I think they felt that progress wasn't as much as it should have been. I think that they felt that my planning wasn't reflected in what was happening in the books and I'm saying I think at the beginning of all of this because whether I have compartmentalised it away so far that I can't remember these conversations or whether it wasn't explained well enough to me at the time, all I really knew was that at some point in maybe the October or the November, it was requested that I have weekly meetings with senior leadership where they sat and went through my planning and went through the books at the same time and tried to match them together. And that was always done at a lunchtime, so I would be sat on those tiny little Key Stage 1 chairs. 

That is what I do have a memory of, is sitting on tiny Key Stage 1 chairs at six months pregnant and trying to explain my planning and what the books look like to the head teacher, very viscerally remember saying to her, I am not a bad teacher, I don't understand what's going on. And I think that was the day, I think that was in January and I think that was the day I had the panic attack on the way home, I'm pretty sure. Okay, so I'm going to bring Sarah in now. 

Sarah, support plans. Okay, going back over what Katie's just said. Surely clarity is needed when it comes to this. 

What's been your experience of support plans, particularly when you were a senior leader? What's the point of them? How have we got it so wrong? Oh, that's a loaded question. And I, can I just cycle back before I go to that? The very idea of cross-referencing planning documents with what's in children's books. I can see the point of it to a point, but a plan is exactly that. 

It's a plan. And way, way back, part of the Ofsted framework, and sorry to invoke them, was very much that plans should not be fixed. You should be live in the classroom. 

You should adapt to what's going on with the children's needs. And so a plan might go out the window in the first five minutes of lesson, because it's a plan. It's not an absolute. 

It's not a process I am absolutely going to follow during this lesson. So that for me, that's, listeners can't see my facial reactions, but that was why my face did what it did, because that to me is nonsense. Support plans. 

I understand why they're there. There is a capability process. There is in any profession, and there has to be, because you cannot have a profession, any profession, where 100% of the people, 100% of the time, are doing exactly what they should be doing in order to fulfill their job role. 

There are people who the role, whether it's teaching or whatever, is not right for them, or they're not right for it, or they're not doing what they should be doing. I understand that capability needs to be there. And the informal element is there in principle to avoid the need to go to the formal element.

It's there to support, to get somebody on track. It's the contractual obligation to give somebody a chance to put it right. That's what it is. 

But somewhere along the way, instead of people using the language of informal capability and capability, somebody's changed informal capability, and support plans have become the language. And in some places, I think they are support plans. They're written with the teacher. 

They are, what do we need to do? What can we do to support you? What will help? But more and more, what's happening based on our conversations with people and experiences that we have is that they're imposed. They are not discussed. They are done purely from the side of the school, not the teacher. 

And therefore, they are not a support plan because a support plan should underpin what the teacher needs. And for me, for everything that is in a support plan, and I've written about this on the group, and other people have said it as well, okay, if somebody says that you're going on a support plan, then what are they doing? Where's that written in the support plan? Are they going to come in and model the things that they're saying that you're not doing? It's that sort of thing. It's so one-sided. 

It's punitive. It's not support. In my experience, Katie, and I don't know if you've both found this, school's idea of a support plan, actually, when you strip it back is, we're going to monitor you more. 

We're going to check your books. We're going to come into your lessons. Not a support plan as in, would it help if you worked from home one afternoon a week? Would it help if we put more TAs in the classroom with you? Would it help if we decreased your class size? It always seems to be that the workload is increased, and the monitoring and pressure is increased, and that's then deemed supportive. 

Did you find that that's the route? But more than anything, bloody hell, love, if you're on a support plan, you need to understand why. You started every sentence with, I think they were unhappy. I think, so there's clearly no clarity conversation going on there. 

No, and I think, I said before, didn't I, that I think, I do believe that they were trying to be supportive, because I was going through other things at that time, and I wasn't self-aware. Like I'd said that I was pregnant. Obviously, the thing that I didn't say was that I had, in between having my first and falling pregnant with Rosie, had lost a child. 

So I was incredibly anxious. I spent, I remember spending mornings, like getting in at half six, seven o'clock in the morning to school, and sitting there with my hands on my belly, like waiting for a kick, and having to run off to, and because we live so rurally, the hospitals are so far away. Like if I had to run off to the hospital to just go and get a quick peace of mind scan, I was out for the full day. 

So there was stuff going on, and I believe that I did need help, and I believe that she wanted to be supportive. I wonder whether, looking back, she was trying to be supportive. She was trying to not make me panic, but by doing that, she wasn't clear enough about what the issue was, and therefore it all got muddled. 

I also wonder whether, as teachers, we feel under so much pressure all the time. I talked to you about this just before we came on the recording, about those sort of teacher triggers, that ding-a-ling, that rejection sensitivity that we all experience, that whether I, when that plan started falling into place, and they started asking me to do things like, oh, don't do informal planning anymore, now here's a template that we want you to fill out every day, and stuff like that, whether my rejection sensitivity put me into panic overdrive, and therefore everything went into this awful spiral that, looking back, I was never going to get out of. Can I ask a question? Was there ever a plan given? Was there ever a document? Was it ever semi-formalised? Was it written down, what they were going to do? I do remember being in her teacher's office and her working on a computer while we were speaking, so yes, possibly. 

But was that ever given to you, if you not remember? I wouldn't be able to say truthfully that I remember. And that, for me, probably, and I'm making big leaps, and I might be wrong, would suggest that you didn't. Because if you had have got it, you'd have known about it. 

I am aware of people who've had their plans given to them, and when they've read them, they've gone, this is nuts. I don't understand why this has happened. And I think, for me as well, that the further context of, A, the pregnancy, and B, the loss, that you had protections under law, and actually for them to be imposing more workload on you, more monitoring, given the circumstances, regardless of the perception that she was trying to be supportive, her actions were the complete antithesis of being supportive. 

She was piling more stress on to you. But I think, just listening to both ends of the spectrum there, the one thing Katie is saying is, she genuinely believed the intent of the headteacher not to be punitive, but that was a failing on the leadership skills and probably training of headteachers. There are some headteachers who I genuinely believe weaponize support plans for females over 40. 

We talk about that. I speak to them on the phone, Sharon, I've just had great feedback from the last observation. My results have been brilliant. 

Ofsted came in last year, and now I'm being told my books aren't up to scratch. So it really is a vulnerable position to be in when you want to weaponize this concept of support. But it sounds to me as though you had a headteacher with the best of intentions, but hadn't had the right training and the leadership skills in order to effectively do what she wanted to do. 

Would that be fair? I think it would. And I think when we put it into the wider context of what senior leaders are experiencing in education at the moment, the pressure that they're under to produce these results, I can well imagine that she could see a teacher in a tiny school with less than 100 children, where every result counts for large amounts of percentage points. I can well imagine that she would have panicked at what she saw as somebody who was in a downward spiral, who was going to be going off on maternity leave in April anyway, and who therefore wouldn't be around for the SATs. 

And while I believe in principle, she believed that SATs were not the important thing, that results were not the important thing. This school was very holistic. It was values-led. 

It was beautiful. It was such a good school. But she still has that pressure from the top. 

There's still that unrelenting pressure of Ofsted might be turning up soon. We haven't had Ofsted for three years. We're due another one.

Let's have every staff meeting on a Monday be about the Ofsted. All of that stuff still comes into play, and I don't know how much of that was her fault. Hello, listeners. 

We just want to thank Matt Gibbons from LS25 Web Design for sponsoring this episode. If you're setting up a new business and feeling unsure about how to get a website sorted, Matt can help. He's been building professional, affordable websites for over a decade, and he's great at working with people who need a bit of extra support and getting things off the ground. 

LS25 Web Design also offers hosting, aftercare, and ongoing support. Everything you need to get your business online and running smoothly. Listeners of the Pit Pony podcast can get 10% off initial web design fees.

Just mention the podcast when you get in touch. All of the details are in the show notes. You're in this bubble of confusion. 

You think you're on a support plan. It's informal. You don't know, but what you do know is there's more monitoring. 

You've had this image of yourself being on these small chairs, and so it's not a great place to be in at that point. How's it impacting you emotionally? You've talked about these triggers. You've talked about what you've gone through when you've relived it. 

What did it look like at home for you? At home, I had Archie, who at that point was three, three and a half maybe. He'd just started going to see a childminder. His dad was doing most of the care because I was at school every single day. 

Because it was a long commute, I would get up at half past five and wouldn't see him and just jump in the car after I'd had my break. Most days, I would be home at seven after he'd gone to bed, maybe twice a week, but he would barely look up, Archie, and that obviously had an impact on me. I can remember flashes of being at home on the weekend and Archie toddling up to my desk, which was in the living room because we have no other space to put it, and saying, Mommy, come play, and me literally pushing him away and saying, No, baby, Mommy's got to play.

Even on those precious times that I did have time to spend with my child, I was prioritizing school. I felt like I had to prioritize the schoolwork because I felt under pressure. I was also experiencing a lot of, like I say, rejection sensitivity is a big thing in my world because I always assume if somebody tells me that something's not done the way that they wanted it to be done or the way they envisioned it, I immediately go, Well, that's me. 

I'm a terrible person. It's clearly my fault. That's my fault. 

There was a lot of that going on as well. Sarah, rejection sensitivity. It's something that we're aware of in our world. 

We recognize it within ourselves. What's your take on rejection sensitivity? What's your understanding of what Katie's talking about? It's very common in terms of neurodiversity. Really common, but I think it's also common when there has been trauma of some sort. 

I think we underplay the traumatic impact that some of the things that individuals and as a group, we collectively experience, but it comes from nowhere. When it happens, it can be the interpreted tone in an email. It can be the slightest hint of something, particularly in written communication, a text, an email, whatever. 

I experience it and I'm like you Katie, I've done so much work on myself, so much work on myself and 90% of the time I'm fine, but I can take a five word text and read every catastrophic outcome into that that probably is not intended by the person that's there because it's in me. It comes from nowhere. It's overwhelming and it's all consuming.

Thumbs up on a Facebook message. Do you get it for a thumbs up on a Facebook message? You're like, God, they hate me. A thumbs up, that's just... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 

And even actually sometimes things like that where it's at a distance, where it is something that's something on Facebook or something on social media or something that you feel, well, is that passive aggressive? Are they having a go at me? What is that about? It causes an overthink when that other person probably isn't giving it another thought. So it is a very real thing and I think it's more common and probably people, certainly people in the group, don't necessarily realise that that is what is happening when they have a response to something. Do you know, it's really interesting because I'm in touch now with a lot of teachers who have now exited the classroom and are doing their own thing, whether that's further employment somewhere else, whether it's entrepreneurship, whatever it might be.

And I've had a few little dings over the last couple of weeks and I've got my little crew who I go and talk to who are all ex-teachers and who are all doing something similar to me. So I dropped into our little WhatsApp group. I was like, oh guys, I'm having these little dings.

Is it just me? And they were all like, one person wrote into the WhatsApp chat, teaching has ruined us. Because they all had those same dings and they all said the same thing to me, which is, that's a teacher thing. It's because we were teachers, that's dinging you.

And I think it leads to something then, that it leads us to almost very childlike behaviour and the kind of, I've got a picture of Cartman from South Park in my head and I'm not going to but that kind of, well, I'm just going to walk away from it. I'm just going to throw everything in the air and I can't do this and, or what's the point? And I think then, and I hate the word resilience because it's been overused in teaching, but that thing about actually in a different circumstance, in a different life, I'd walk through that. Now I need to find a way of walking around that or walking away from it. 

And I think the psychology of understanding how you react to something that isn't necessarily somebody rejecting you or criticising you, but you receive it as such, it requires a lot of work. It really does. I'm definitely not there yet. 

I'm at a place now where I can see those dings happening and I can recognise them, but I'm still feeling a huge emotional response to them. And it is very, very hard. I won't lie. 

So that's brilliant. You've touched on so many things here, but let's get back to this. You're sat in this informal support plan. 

You go off with work related stress. How do you exit? How do you actually come to the decision and go, I can't do this anymore? Walk us through the mechanics and the operational aspect of your leaving to the classroom. How did you leave? I was lucky because I was on maternity leave for a large portion of the time that I was away. 

But January, I had the panic attack while I was driving home from school and the doctor signed me off there. And then I had one visit, I think maybe six weeks later with the occupational therapist who took one look at me and said, you're not going back until after you've had this baby. And that was that. 

Then there was a year of maternity leave, which I had taken without the added benefits that I was due because at that point, clearly I was, I was worried that I wouldn't be going back and I didn't want to have a financial burden on me to repay. So I think I got to maybe just before Christmas, obviously due to go back in the April. And at that point, I got in touch with the head teacher and said, I want to give you as much notice as humanly possible. 

I know I'm definitely not coming back. You can now recruit for somebody to fill my position in April. As it happened, they recruited the person who was covering my maternity leave. 

So the class got continuity and that was great. In terms of the practical aspects of it, at that point, Toby was still a teaching assistant. He'd been a teacher, that's where we met. 

So he was working as a teaching assistant in a local secondary school part-time because he was looking after Archie at the same time. So the decision at that point became, how do we manage financially? And again, we were relatively lucky in that I managed to pick up some informal sort of admin assistant work with a family down the road. And that meant that I was able, we were able to at least pay bills and that lasted for a little while until the whole sort of entrepreneur business thing started. 

But certainly while we were inside that decision, there was no thought of setting up a business. I was trying to think about finding remote work with one of these companies that hire completely remotely like Basecamp or somebody like that who are based in the US. And I was trying to do that alongside this informal work. 

But honestly, again, we were in a really lucky position in that we've got parents who are fairly well off and we knew that we wouldn't be like, we wouldn't starve essentially. And we felt that my mental health and looking after the children was more important at that stage. And if we were going to have to, you know, give up the house that we were living in and go somewhere cheaper, we would have done it, I think. 

I think that's, that takes us back to the original Pit Pony video really. One of the core things we talk about is letting go of stuff that we think matters the most. Like, do you really need the Sky Sports package when you can have a fire stick? Do you really need to go to the gym? And sometimes you have to take a step back with what you think are the trappings of life that's so important. 

Let that go. Saving the knowledge, you can build it back up. But when you're at your lowest, when you think you're losing this job, that's your identity, that's everything you are, it's those trappings that are so important to you. 

And that's where you get caught in this cross, the cross hairs of this pain point and having to give up this job and now having to give up this lifestyle. But it's so important, I think, to realise that it is a lifeboat position when you leave. You've got to, haven't you? I mean, we were kind of lucky in that we had distance on it as well. 

I think I would have found it a lot harder to make that decision if I was in the school every day with the children, feeling those feelings of guilt, like, oh, I'm letting the children down, because we've all joined the teaching profession, not to make money and be incredibly successful, but because we believe in education and we think we know we're going to change the world child by child. That's what we're doing, isn't it? And so I was, I think the decision may not have been the same and I might not have escaped, perhaps quite so easily. But I was, I'd been out of it for six months. 

I'd seen, because I had the school on Facebook group that, you know, the class were doing really well and they had this teacher who was doing really well for them. And I felt content with that. The things that I had to come to terms with were, did we have enough money to pay the rent and, you know, do those things? Yes, we did. 

I had to come to terms with the feeling of having failed at teaching because that's, that's a big one. And I still have regrets in that area. I don't think I'll ever fully come to terms with it, but I was okay with that. 

I think I was also very lucky to have an incredibly supportive family who said, you do what you need to do. Because I know so many teachers whose family go, oh, but you know, like you've worked so hard, like that sort of, the sunk cost, what do they call it? The opportunity cost, where people say, but you put four years into doing your big long PGCE or whatever, what a waste. And you're like, no, no, God, people are looking for those skills everywhere. 

Those teacher skills are so valuable, but you can't see it at the time. Hello, loyal listeners. This is a little plea on behalf of myself and Sarah to donate a few pennies to the Pit Pony Podcast Production Fund. 

Sarah's taken to selling her cure records on eBay to fund the episodes. So see the buy us the coffee link in the notes below and save her collection of Robert Smith's warblings for us, will you? Thank you. I think what's interesting as well, and it is going back to this concept of the support plan, there will be many listeners sat here going, yeah, I can see where this could have gone. 

And you swerved that with your life choices. We get a question on the group a lot, Sarah, and it'd be interesting to know your take on this. And they're just very blank posts about to be put on a support plan. 

Has anybody ever got off it? Has anybody ever successfully worked through a support plan? And I would love to know the statistics that sit behind this, because there are so many people who are given these support plans. And the first thing they do is contact their union and look for a way of negotiating themselves out of the classroom. Sarah, do you know of anybody who's successfully made their way through a support plan? Yeah, but it's context driven. 

It's when a support plan was genuinely a support plan, when something needed to be adjusted, when the right support was in place, where it's been where it's been support in its truest sense. And I think it's very difficult. There are no stats out there that I'm, I mean, I'm not even sure that the unions would hold stats about they certainly wouldn't about successful support plans, I don't think. 

And within the group, we are an echo chamber. So we're always we are going to get the side of things where people are asking and going, almost what we talked about a few minutes ago of that, well, I've got choices here, I either find a way around it, find a way through it, or I'll walk away. And, and I think most people's, most people's natural response when they're faced with that is to go, I'm not going to get through this. 

They clearly want me out, even if that's not the case in the small minority of cases where that might be true. And, and so you go to what's the line of least resistance. And I think that's where sometimes in the group, I, we try and be balanced because people will be critical of the union. 

So all the unions are just trying to negotiate people out. Yes, because that's what people have gone and asked for. Get me out. 

What's, how can I get out of this before it goes to, there aren't statistics. And I don't know without looking, the group's the wrong place to draw that conclusion from, but I know personally from work in schools over, over 25 years, and I know from other people that I know that there are people who have come through support plans, but when they are done genuinely, supportively. Got you. 

Got you. So, okie dokie. We've got Katie Stone. 

She's out of teaching, pretty much saying I've had my kid at arm's length where work's concerned. I don't want to do that again. I'm going to build a world for myself on my terms. 

Would that be fair, Katie, that you, you wanted to build. So tell us now, what is it you actually do? So I'm a virtual assistant and it's a very good question. The reason my business is called Katie Stone PA was because I didn't believe anybody would know what a VA was. 

And back when it was first set up, actually, most people in the UK didn't really. Obviously, everything went online in 2020. And at that point, VA's exploded, proliferated. 

But yeah, at that time, no. So a VA is somebody who, a jack of all trades, somebody who can take business admin off the plates of business people so that they can focus on doing the thing that makes their business grow. So instead of like, a lot of people who have their own businesses will feel that feeling of being in the weeds where you've got to get your invoicing done and you've got to like, you've got to do your marketing and you've got to do, and you know that none of this stuff is the actual stuff, the reason that you created your business. 

But I feel like teachers are pretty amazing at that stuff because we are used to having a to-do list that never ends and always has more stuff shoved on the bottom of it than falls off the top. We're also, especially primary teachers, I think, and I was primary, but I think primary teachers are incredible generalists. Like we're not experts at anything, but you ask us to do anything at all and we will roll up our sleeves and find a way of doing it. 

Like my NQT year, they were like, guess what? You're PE coordinator. And I was like, dudes, look at me. I haven't run for a bus in 10 years, let alone done netball. 

And so that was the way I ended up using my skills. But in the end, it was quite forced, the setting up the business in that I found it hard to find the remote work because I didn't have experience of working remotely. And that's what a lot of the firms were looking for. 

They loved my CV. They really liked the teacher skills on there. I think because I was able to talk, a lot of them were customer service positions and I was able to talk about communicating with multiple stakeholders, like working out how to communicate something to a six-year-old and then communicate that same thing to its parent and the same thing to a governor and the same thing to an Ofsted inspector, like all those different levels of communication.

But when they would ask me, oh, and have you done any remote work before? I'd be like, oh, no, I haven't. And so somebody else would always get that position. And then in April 2020, obviously the world closed down and I'd heard a bit about VAs, but haven't really paid any attention to it. 

Nobody in my family owns a business that we don't, we're not entrepreneurs. We go to work. I went to a grammar school. 

They didn't even mention the idea that you could have a business. You went to university and you got a job, preferably a teacher, like something academic was what we were told we should be doing. But yeah, like we all closed down. 

Toby was doing his PGCE at that point. So that went online and he was doing a maths secondary PGCE. So we had quite a lot of grant money. 

So we were lucky enough to know that financially we were okay. Toby was watching the kids and my mum sent me 500 quid because it was tax year end. And so I had enough money to build a website, you know, get some insurance and really have a run at it, which is what I did. 

And it, yeah, it grew. That's kind of how it in a nutshell began. Sorry, that was really long. 

No, no, that's perfect because people, we sat here going, what is a virtual assistant? What, what does she mean by a VA? And, and I think you're absolutely right. Primary school teachers, we've got a head office, right? Conexus has its head office and we have three members of our team. They were all ex-primary school teachers. 

You are absolutely right. And I would say they are jack of all trades and master of them all in the end, because what we've got them invoicing, marketing, the whole lot, we are insane administrators because we, you never focus on any one thing when you're a primary school teacher, you're doing all the subjects, you're marking all those bloody books as well. And you're doing the, the marking and you're doing the stuff on the computer and you've got your to-do list. 

And then they ask you to be a coordinator of something you've never heard of. And plus, could you just do this little extra thing over here? And oh, by the way, we're doing afterschool clubs now, you've got to do one of those a week. And do you know, so you do end up being able to juggle a lot of stuff. 

And that is the prime, when you're doing business admin, I have, we've got a team of nine of us now, so there's 10 all together. That's, and I sent out my Christmas cards this year. It was more than 40 of them to clients. 

No one client asks us to do the same thing. There are a lot of things like that we end up doing that are similar, but no one client needs the same thing because all of them have different things that they hate doing, different things they procrastinate over different. It's, and that's the delight of it. 

That's the bit that I love is getting my fingers into somebody else's business. And there'll be like, oh, but you know, like people will send me messages to ask me if I can tutor so-and-so and it falls through the crack and I forget. And I'm like, I can build you a system for that. 

I can do that so that no **** falls through the cracks again. And it's, it's honestly delightful. It really is. 

It gives me joy every single day. Love it. And I get to stay home entirely. 

Like I am talking to you now from the wardrobe in my bedroom, because that's where we've got space for me to work from. I'm like Harry Potter, brilliant. But we get to take the kids to school. 

I get to, like, I went to the nativity and well, I'll talk about that later on because you're going to ask me for that little moment. I am going to ask you. Do you know what I mean? What you did was you took your skills and you did monetize them. 

You were entrepreneurial. I think you and I have met at a conference, haven't we? We met- We were at the tutoring conference because I did the lead magnet one, the email marketing talk at the tutoring conference. John Conyer told you I wanted you to be my best friend, Sharon. 

I remember. That's why you're- I do- Because you backed away very fast. You accosted me on some stairs, went, Sharon! And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. 

It's one of the mad ones, Sarah. No, it was brilliant. It was absolutely brilliant. 

And that's what I did. I stepped away from the classroom. I monetized my skills as an English teacher, but then built a business. 

And there's nothing you can't find out if you don't Google it. I don't even know how I passed my degree without Google. I mean, good God. 

It's fine, isn't it? All them library books. Honest to God, who'd do that now? Christ alive. And I think what's important, Katie, you are good on social media. 

You are very available. And if anybody wants to get in touch with you for any advice, any support, I know that you'd be more than happy to help anybody. People do often. 

And I am always pleased to just give advice and help out people who are just looking for an exit route. Because I think there are multiple exit routes as well. Like mine was my own individual story. 

And there were so many just sort of like, not lucky turns, but just circumstances that would never rear their heads again. I mean, having a pandemic to build a business in where you didn't really have to worry about finance and you had six months to just do what you want. That's not happening again.

Parents who were happy for me to look like, a husband who was so supportive, all of these things made my own individual journey. But everybody, I think the thing that I would love to have told myself when I was leaving teaching back then is building this business has given me back like my self-worth. When I came out of teaching, I felt like I was useless. 

I felt like I was worthless. Like I had failed at the one thing that I wanted to do best, better than anyone. And now this business is like, it's like my third baby. 

It's so precious to me that not only do I still get to help people, but because we chose, a niche is a marketing tool, but we chose to niche into education businesses. And I love the fact that I still get to be a part of education. Like in my own small way, I'm still helping kids because I'm helping tutors and I'm helping consultants and I'm helping all these people who are going into schools and making kids' lives better. 

And I just, I really wish I could go back and say to myself, you are brilliant. You're infectious. You're absolutely infectious. 

And do you know what? The irony is not lost on me that we spent the first part of this podcast talking about you on a support plan, having then built a business to support people. So I think the word support has been, it's been writ large throughout this episode and just a... We've taken it back, haven't we Sharon? That's what we've done. We've taken that word back. 

So have you. I think you and Sarah have done exactly the same thing. You've taken that word back and made it mean what it's supposed to mean. 

Thank you for that. Thank you. You're right. 

You're right. When we support, we mean support. In so many ways for you guys as well, not just for kids, but for all them teachers who are coming out of teaching and who need it. 

Thank you for that. So you know what I'm going to ask you now, don't you? Now you love your life, life from your wardrobe. What? What's your sliding doors moment? Not your sliding wardrobe doors. 

I've now got a new name for my blog. It's going to be life from Kirti's wardrobe. I couldn't decide between two. 

One's really brief and the other one is a little longer. The first one was when Rosie went to nursery. I had a really hard time with Rosie when she was a baby. 

Like she didn't sleep well. She and I were not good friends. And honest to God, when she got to a year old and she could go to childcare, I drop kicked her through them doors and ran screaming in the other direction. 

And childcare was the thing that gave me back my relationship with Rosie. And I remember it was before lockdown going to her nursery nativity. And it was only little because it's such a tiny school that my kids go to because we're so rural. 

And we were all sat in this little hall and all the parents, once again, all the parents on them tiny little chair. And they all walked down the middle of us and Rosie walked past me and she had these little angel wings because she was an angel. And she turned round when she got to the front and I'm going to cry when I tell you. 

It was my best thing ever. And all the other parents looked at me like I cry at sad donkey adverts, Sharon, like I will cry out. But honestly, that still makes me go.

And my other big one, which is more of a business one, because this is since I actually built the business, I was still doing just admin work back then. Last year, I took my kids out of school a week early, and we buggered off to New Zealand for three weeks. And went to see like my step mom has a sister over there. 

And I gave my children an experience that they will never, ever forget. We went to wetter workshops. We went to this horrible smelly place called Rotorua, which was on a volcano and stinker, stanker. 

Rosie still talks to me about that place. And they're going to remember it forever. Archie came out of that. 

We saw dolphins. We tried to see a killer whale and didn't manage one. And Archie wants to be a marine biologist now, off the back of that. 

I mean, whether he will or whether he won't. I said to him on the front of the boat while they were chasing the dolphins, Archie, please be a marine biologist. I want you to be there for a living so that you can take mummy on your boat. 

So he better not. It won't be, it might not be a life changing thing for him, but they'll never forget that. And neither will I, because we got to go with my dad and my step mom, who are now in their seventies and probably won't manage a long haul flight ever again. 

Like all these last chances and we never got a chance to do them before. Could I have taken my kids out of school? God, no. I couldn't have taken myself out of school. 

Could you imagine? Yeah. So there you go. Those are my two. 

Oh, they're beautiful. And I think it's the one with Rosie in the wings because yeah. Oh my God. 

I love that one. She was so beautiful, Sharon. You've got no idea. 

No, it is because I had something not this similar with Ellie. We did not gel early doors because I was working. I was stressed. 

You're right. It was like, oh God, I've given birth to this mini narcissist who hates me. Was she a second? I think seconds are always a bit of a surprise. 

I'll tell you something. If she'd have been me first, she'd have been an only child. This is what I say about Rosie. 

And now she's my best mate. But no, that has been for me a cracking episode because you brought something to the fore, which has been the conversation around support plans. We will do multiple episodes with people who've been in this position whose outcome has been different. 

You've also brought to me and to our listeners, something that I think is quite accessible, which is your business model, because we've had chocolatiers and celebrants and fire door specialists. But at the same time, that is quite specialist. There's a real passion there behind that kind of talent and artists and things like that. 

But what you've done is you've taken a series of skill sets, you've taken work ethic, you've taken the ability to multitask, and you have created a very, very successful business for yourself, still within the field of education, still supporting those who need it the most. It's a belting thrival story. It really, really is. 

It's a belting thing for anyone to do. And you don't have to. I know so many teachers who've come out and I know quite a few who've come out and become virtual assistants.

And I'm the only one. In fact, I'm the only VA that I know, apart from maybe one other who's niched into education. Most of them run screaming because they never want to see education again.

And I don't blame them. There are so many things like, start off as a generalist and people find out, oh my God, I love making automations. And they'll turn themselves into tech VAs who just build automations for people. 

Or they'll be like, I mean, I fell in love with email marketing and I still do my generalist VA stuff, but I also do specialist email marketing consulting and charge an awful lot more for that because that's not VA level. I've heard you describe a VA before as like a really trustworthy teenager who has no real sort of specialist skills, but will bloody well go and work really hard at what you've asked them to do and we'll get it done. And that's what I say to all my clients is like, I'm probably no better at you than this. 

I haven't worked in this thing either, this piece of software you're asking me to work in, but I'll tell you what, I will take the time off your hands that you would have spent hunting through the help documentation on the phone to someone like customer care, crying quietly over trying to make that automation. You're preaching to the choir. And before I built my head office team, I used a company called Pink Spaghetti and Pink Spaghetti, the founders live in Limb near me.

Really? I haven't realized. Yeah. They're brilliant firm. 

They're a great franchise model. Just brilliant. So listen, we're rambling as always. 

Of course we are. Me and you will forget we're recording and be like, right, what are you having for dinner? So thank you, Katie. It's been a belting episode. 

I'll see you soon. No doubt. You'll probably be coming to our conference, hopefully this year in July and Sarah, any last words of wisdom or just a thank you for Katie? Well, yeah, just to thank you. 

Really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it. And, and is making me think of a, please don't panic Sharon. 

I'm not going anywhere, but you know, there could be a different, there could be a different world out there for me when I take early retirement. Okay. So at what point in all of that, am I not supposed to panic? And on that note, Katie Stone, you've been brilliant. 

Thank you so much for being a guest and we'll see you soon. I loved that. I loved her. 

She's great, isn't she? Yeah. Super. I like the energy and then it was interesting that she reflected off audio after we'd finished recording about, she almost, she did articulate the kind of two part. 

What did she say it was? The story hill of a, of a pit pony. The first part is always like really, and then, and then that kind of redemption bit afterwards. Now I really enjoyed that. 

And I think there's so much of what she said the fact that as teachers were able to do, she coined it really nicely, an ability to do work at a reasonable pace to an appropriate standard. And that being important when you're exchanging time for money, I thought that was, that was spot on. And, and I think it took me back to when I came out of teaching and that kind of, what can I do? What can I utilize? What can I, what can I leverage? And, and it was exactly that. 

Do a bit of photography, do my own photography work, do some for other people. I did a bit of VA stuff. I did some tutoring. 

I did, it explains, I taught myself how to use a piece of software so that I could do it for somebody else because they couldn't figure it out. It, it's all that sort of stuff. And I think you go back to that word, just, that I'm just a teacher. 

It's all I've ever known. Yeah. Do you know how skilled that actually makes you? What a work ethic that you've got. 

But words, this is always the peak irony when I listen to people's thrivals and what they're doing. I'm not going to reference previous episodes in case people are not listening to them in order, but we have got pit ponies who have either been put on a support plan, made to feel inadequate, have had to leave the classroom. And then when they have, have thrived doing the very things that they were being scrutinized and not able to do, it's bloody, the irony book is going bing, bing, bing. 

So this is a woman who needed help with her organization, that her plans matched her delivery, that how can we support you in this way and that way? She's built a business around being super organized, helping to support other people, multitasking, planning. We come back to it every time. People are in the wrong environment. 

If you are in the right environment, a supportive environment, a safe space where everybody wants the outcome to be success, you will thrive. She went back to that time where she sat on those tiny chairs with a completely, and I don't want to speak out of turn about her head teacher because she was very kind about her head teacher. I'm sure she doesn't fall into the toxic category, but a disorganized, unclear head teacher is trying to put a support package in that has complete opposite effect on Katie. 

Katie's now got a team of nine PAs around her. She's outsourcing work, she's supporting businesses in the education world, and she was sat down muddling through, what am I even doing wrong? And that's where the problem comes. We have a massive talent pool in teaching, a huge talent pool that are not being managed correctly. 

It's almost like you're a budding actor and your agent keeps putting you up for roles you can't do. You know, there's a role coming up in this film. I didn't get it. 

I wasn't very good at it. Because people are not being put in the areas they need to be in to allow them to shine. And it's such a shame.

It is such a shame. I think it goes back to conversations that we've had before as well about how much the system has changed. And I'm not sitting here as somebody who doesn't believe that things need to evolve and change over time, because that's very much my role now is about change management, putting systems in that make things better, and so on and so forth. 

But if you go, certainly for me, if I go all the way back to my first seven or eight years of teaching, it was about planning for what I taught, teaching it, assessing it, it was completely teaching focus, completely. And over time, I think there's been so much added in, we use the phrase weighing the pig in terms of data, you keep on weighing the pig. And that doesn't make things better, because actually the act of weighing the pig is taking you away from actually teaching the kids and planning for teaching the kids. 

Something's gone amiss somewhere in terms of where the focus is and how much time people have actually got to plan and teach and assess because they're the critical bit. And so much other stuff has been loaded on around it, which means that people don't have the time. And you look at different education systems around the world, and at the risk of sounding like a politician who's just going to pick one off and go, we should do that, but not change our own system, just add that on. 

You look at other education systems, teachers get so much more planning time in some countries, not all. And I think that's fundamentally where it's gone wrong, that the focus is not on teaching. And where it is, sometimes, not all cases, I'm not going to generalise, brilliant schools, there are lots of them, but this whole thing of moving to standardising everything, and you must teach in one particular way, and you must have your standardised PowerPoint slides and all the rest of it, that actually imposes more work than if you are allowed to teach in the way that works for you. 

I couldn't teach like that now. Everything you've just described does exist in some way, and it's tutoring. And I mean, obviously, you know, we come from a place of bias in that respect. 

But if you really look at the art of tuition, that's it. What does this child or this group of children need from me right now? And do you know what, ironically, makes the most successful results for kids? Is that a good tutor doesn't plan, they prepare. I've got my bag of tricks, right. 

Last week, you said you've got your Macbeth coming up. No, no, Sharon. On Monday, we've got an inspector calls. 

Okay. So, guess what I do in that moment? I pivot, I move, I meet the needs of those kids. So, actually, when that head teacher was saying to you, but your plans don't match what was in the books, good. 

Because then I wouldn't be making the assumption or the presumption that that teacher's pivoted in the moment because that's what those kids need. Long term planning for me is nuts in teaching because how can you plan in September where that kid's going to be in July and what they need? And this, I think, was what I was saying, and you know me, I remember details of things. There was a time where the inspection framework specifically talked about this in terms of teachers being able to judiciously change tack within a lesson based upon that kind of, oh, right, they're missing that foundation skill. 

Well, there's no point in us going there until we go back and do that. And it goes to other conversations that we've had, people being criticized because a TA wasn't in a lesson because they'd had to go out and deal with a first aid incident, but that wasn't on the plan. Well, of course, it's not on the plan. 

It's real. So, and I'm, I think you're right in terms of long term plan. A long term plan for me is what do I need to cover with these children over the next 12 months or the next two years, if it's a GCSE course, whatever. 

These are the key topics. But in terms of the actual, and I remember it with business studies, I used to over egg how much time it would take to deliver the finance module of the business studies course because the kids generally really struggled with it. But I remember one year they all flew through it, got it really quickly. 

And so that period of time compressed down to about four weeks worth of lessons. And it normally would have been eight, but a different module took the eight rather than the four that it was planned for because they just weren't getting it. That's, you adapt your plans.

It's life. It's nonsense. It's life. 

Being able to check, I loved her. I thought she was great. I think it's a good episode again, going back to what are my options available to me, particularly for people who still want to work in the world of education, but don't consider themselves to have a core subject that they can maybe move into tutoring. 

It's just another example of, for me, and this is the sadness, people thriving outside of the classroom when they could have been brilliant, still serving from within. I also just want to make that point as well. And I think, and it's where I'm going to leave it today. 

We are very, very grateful to our guests who come on and relive what they've gone through. And there's been a couple of guests who've said to us afterwards, my parents haven't even heard me tell this story, or I haven't thought about this for five years. And we said all the way through, didn't we, that these podcasts were going to be the antidote in many respects to the echo chamber of the group where people are coming on at points of desperation and points of being utterly lost.

These are the examples of the thrivals. But in order to tell the thrival story, there has to have been that awful, awful experience. So not only would I like to thank Katie, but I'd like to take this opportunity in light of what she said to us, to thank all of our guests, really, for sharing some of the darkest parts of their lives just prior to the thrival, which I think is what makes our podcast something that we're very, very proud of, really. 

The feedback there is amazing. Our messages, ping, ping, ping. That was a brilliant episode. 

And there are lots of opportunities to give us feedback. You can leave us messages, you can leave us reviews. But more than anything, we're going to end this episode with a little warm feeling that our random recordings do make a difference. 

And I hope one day they end up in the ears of people who can make some changes within education and start listening to some of these stories, realising they are not one-offs. There's so many common themes running through. And people who can make decisions in education go, we are hemorrhaging talent, left, right and centre from our education system, and we've got to do something about it. 

Agreed. Okay, I'll end that on the part of Political Broadcast on behalf of the Pony Programme. Bye, pal. 

We're off-ski. I'll see you on the other side. See you later.

Thank you so much for staying with us throughout another great episode. And on behalf of myself, Sarah Dunwood and all at the production team, we appreciate your continued support. If you wish to contact me directly for a support session or a clarity call for your next steps, please find my link in the comments below. 

See you soon.