Everyone Wants to Learn

Antidote’s 10th Anniversary Conference
2nd February 2007

Drama teacher Julie Leoni and Bristol Learning Initiative director James Wetz launched the conference with a look at the emotional factors that need addressing if we are to close the achievement gap

James Wetz

It was me and Paul just having a laugh. I got told off and Paul didn’t; so I stopped but he kept on going and I said ‘fuck off I can’t be bothered with you’ to him. The teacher heard and said ‘Steve, stop swearing or you will get a detention’, and I went; ‘what about him?’. Then Paul said ‘dickhead’ and I said ‘shut up you knob’ and then I just got really annoyed and walked out. I went for a walk to find Mr A cos Mr A is a teacher I can talk to. I think if it weren’t for Mr A I wouldn’t be in this school, I do the detentions for him in his office and he keeps me out of trouble. I don’t like it but people know I’ve got a really short temper.

Steve was among a group of young people I interviewed at the point of his return from exclusion. What he and others told me was that:

• they either experienced a loss in the moment of the exclusion, or felt that they were going to lose something – it could be physical safety, emotional security or a sense of belonging
• many of them had experienced a real loss in their past, whether from moving house, bereavement or illness in the family. The emotions associated with those were usually expressed as anger and fear.

Another theme that came up was around how masculinity affects the way in which boys express emotion. Masculinity was constructed around the idea of:

• being in control
• exerting power
• having a fight
• protecting something or somebody.

For these boys, to say that they felt scared or nervous was not part of an acceptable image of masculinity. And so they turned it into anger.

Some of the girls who were excluded regularly had developed similar behaviours – being hard, not showing that anything hurt – because they needed to be that way if they were to survive at home. However, part of the construction of femininity was that girls were allowed to talk to other girls. This opened up the possibility of finding other channels for their feelings.

As I listened to young people telling me their stories, they were able to talk about how scared, frightened and sad they had been. What made it possible for them to do that was my being calm, non-judgemental and empathetic.

This made me realise how unhelpful to young people were some of the things that we did at school. We are a very hierarchical school. We also encourage competition. Students in PE were being told that the ones who got to the top of the ropes first were the hardest.

That kind of language played into the images of masculinity that made it so difficult for these boys to find positive ways of dealing with their emotions.

I started the research because I had come from a school where the young people would fall silent when I walked into the room, to one where that just didn’t happen. As a result, I would find myself shouting, feeling stressed, thinking I had lost it.

As I explored what I could do differently, I realised that the young people made me feel scared. Instead of showing that to them, I became angry with them. So there was a parallel process going on. They dealt with their fear by getting angry. I did the same; so we just ended up shouting at each other.

But what these young people really wanted was

• for me and their other teachers to be real
• to know a bit about us, whether we were feeling angry, grumpy or sad
• to be listened to calmly, clearly and without judgement
• to be cared for and to feel that we can be trusted to look after them.

They also wanted a model of how to do things differently. If they are being shouted at, they switch off. That is what they are used to. There is nothing that we teachers can do which they haven’t heard before. It is much more interesting when we model talking calmly.

All the young people I interviewed were able to be reflective about their own behaviour. Given time to work it out, they could give you a clear account of why they behaved as they did. Once that understanding had been shared, you could start talking with them about what would make it possible for them to behave differently.

What I learned from that was that I have to:

• pay attention to how I am feeling and how that is influencing the people around me
• work on building positive relationships and solving conflict in a positive way.

That came back to me taking time to look after myself and being aware of what was going on for me. Only then could I be available to help students form the attachments that they needed if they were to learn and grow.

Julie Leoni

Looking back, I don’t feel strongly or anything. If I’d had better parents, then I’d have been shown a better way. If I’d been to a different school, then it would have been different.

If my mum had been better, I would have had a better chance. If the school had been better, then they would have been able to teach and handle the kids better. You can’t just blame the school. There were a number of things wrong. Like I started to meet boys at a young age: so then that was part of it, reeling me away from school. Then my mum not telling me what to do, that started me reeling away from school. Then the teachers who made me not want to go to school – so it was a bit of lots of things.

But I am sad about all this in a way. I wish I never left school and that I would have got back in. But then you end up getting yourself into so much trouble, and then you just can’t.

My research involved people like Kirsten, the girl speaking above, who left her school in Bristol with no GCSE qualifications at all, even though she had achieved average or above average performance at primary school, in English, maths or science.

Some 40% of those who left without any qualifications were in this category. When you scale this up nationally, you are talking about 30,000 youngsters leaving our schools without any qualification, of whom 10,000 will have achieved well in the primary school settings.

When I stood down two years ago from being head of Cotham Community School in Bristol, I wanted to find a way of addressing my concern about the group of young people who are within our schools but who somehow cannot engage with learning, despite all the efforts that people make to help them.

Quite often, these youngster are called disaffected. My instinct was they were disaffected because they had lacked affection in the past, and in the present faced significant emotional, social, environmental demands. They were probably youngsters whose early attachment at infancy had been less than secure. And at secondary school level, they were acting out a remembered hurt.

My view was that these issues of affection impacted on their identities as learners. The lack of resilience that is generated by insecure early attachment makes secondary schools as we have designed them far too complex for these particular youngsters to be successful.

In the course of the research, I asked young people to tell me of their experience of being educated at primary and secondary schools. As I listened to them, I went from feeling shocked to being extremely angry on their behalf. Their stories are an affront on young people’s right to have a good education in our school system.

In thinking about how things might be different, I became very interested in Boston’s small school movement.

These are state-run schools which typically have no more than 300 students. No teacher teaches more than 70 children a week. No young person between the ages of 11 and 14 experiences more than four teachers a week.

The schools have also pioneered new approaches to authentic assessment, where students speak about their learning in front of their parents, carers and peers. They speak of what they have done and describe why it is important to them.

The staff group is small enough to hold the whole of the school in the minds and in their hearts. Attending one of their staff meetings, I said to the principal ‘How often do you meet?’
‘Every day,’ she said.
‘You have a staff meeting every day,’ I responded quizzically.
‘Yes, we do.’
‘What do you do?’
‘There is only one question. I need to know which children in school have not been seriously engaged in learning today.’

That’s what happens. The children’s names come out. Somebody will say, ‘I will go and visit the home tonight. We need to know what is going on in that family.’ Somebody else says ‘we all need to meet and greet in a positive way tomorrow morning’. Then the more strategic resourcing to meet the needs of that child can be made. It is not rocket science. It is about knowing that children with exceptional need need exceptional input.

I think we need to recognise that difficult behaviours young people confront us with are actually information for us as teachers about the needs of those children. If we are made to feel angry by the behaviour that children present to us, that tells us about the intensity of that child’s need.

I am not arguing that we should not sanction behaviour. However, we do need to understand what it means and put in place programmes to support the children who are acting out this remembered hurt in ways that we don’t always find socially acceptable.

I am particularly interested in whether we can start designing and organising our schools based on the principles that lie behind attachment theory

. In Bristol, we are doing further research on the way our understanding of attachment might inform the organisation and design of secondary schools.

We are working on a model of a learning and research community which uses young people’s voice and their experience as part of the design background for the community.

And we are researching the notion of urban village schooling. Instead of building a large academy in a deprived part of a city, why don’t we scale it down and have three or four urban village schools that do connect with each other but actually provide the holding, the reliability, the consistency that these particular young people need. I believe we will find that this is something all young people need.

James Park, Antidote’s director, and Marilyn Tew, Antidote’s development director, then discussed what was emerging from the school that had used the school Environment for Learning Survey (SEELS) during 2006.

Taken by over 8000 students across 25 schools nationwide, the surveys shows that student well-being – as measured by the quality of relationships between teachers and students – declines steadily between the final years of primary school and their first GCSE year.

The central finding from the surveys is that, between Year 5 and Year 10, there is a 25% drop in the degree to which students experience the school environment as one that enables them to feel capable, listened to, accepted, safe and included (CLASI). The level drops from a relatively rosy 82% in Year 5 to a worrying 58% in Year 10, then starts to pick up so that around 70% of reports in Year 12 are of students feeling CLASI.

What this tells us is that, as students start work on their GCSEs, over 40% of them experience a low level of well-being. Their experience of secondary school has not fostered in them the sort of emotional state that fosters motivation to learn and to get on with each other. It may be the focus provided by exams is what leads to things picking up slightly in the subsequent year, but the consequence is that a lot of learning opportunity will have been wasted in the preceding period.

The dimension that dips most significantly is ‘included’, which reflects students’ sense of how they are viewed by others and how strong a sense of connection they feel to them. In year 5 the picture is relatively positive, with 77% of children saying they feel connected to adults and children in the learning environment. By Year 10 this figure has dropped 31% to only 46% of young people reporting a sense of connection to those with whom they learn.

It might have been expected that the most significant decline would have occurred with the transition to secondary school, when students move from being the most senior in their age group – with all the responsibility and status that is involved – to a position at the bottom of the age hierarchy. In fact, there are two significant dips – in the last year of primary, and the second year of secondary. It looks as if the anticipation of the move to secondary create a sense of diminishing importance that being top of the school does little to allay. That feeling abates a little as a result of the effort schools put into ensuring a smooth entry into the new phase, but the decline then accelerates in the following year.

Although the figure does start to swing back between Year 10 and Year 12, it does not make it to anything like the Year 7 level. Students seems to be saying that their sense of how they ought to feel connected to others in their schools is not matched by their experience. They would expect to be taken more seriously than they are.

There is currently considerable concern about the effect on young people’s learning of the shift from the relative intimacy of primary school to the hustle and bustle of secondaries. Given this concern, it is of interest that the sharpest drop in well-being picked up by the Antidote surveys happens not between Year 6 and Year 7, but between Year 7 and Year 8.

The reason for this may be that the new opportunities offered by secondary school – to make new friends and do different things – provides enough excitement to carry many through their first secondary year, compensating for whatever may be felt to have been lost.

In conversations with Antidote, students say things like:

This school is better than my old school. The lessons are much more fun and so are the teachers.

The teachers are very friendly and helpful. The lessons are fun. You learn something new everyday.

I think that this school is quite good and most of the teachers are very nice compared to the horror stories I have heard.

It is afterwards that the growing disappointment with what is on offer really starts to bite.

The dimension that makes the smallest contribution to the decline in student well-being is ‘listened to’. This dips by only 18%, from a high of 86% to a low of 68%. Apart from the dip between Year 7 and Year 8, the figure is relatively stable. The positive reports on this dimension may reflect the increasing sophistication in many schools about gathering student views through school and class councils, so that students at least feel that their opinions are being heard. What it also suggests, though, is that listening to students views may not be sufficient to ensure that schools are able to address their learning needs.

Relationships have a profound impact on student well-being and capacity to learn. It is when young people feel that their teachers are competent, supportive and caring that they are most likely to be engaged in learning. They need to get on with their classroom peers if they are to stimulate and usefully challenge each other to higher levels of achievement.

It is worrying, therefore, that the Antidote surveys report a 24% decline in the way students rate their relationships with adults, from a high of 74% in Year 5 to a low of 50% in Year 10. Also, the rating for relationships for peers declines by 13%, from 72% to 59%.

Relationships with friends, by contrast, are relatively stable between Year 5 and Years 12. While this may be positive on a personal level – it indicates people have supportive relationships to help them through their time at school – its effect may be negative on classroom harmony and efficacy. An attachment to one’s friendship group can get in the way of students being able to work well with each other. As one student taking part in Antidote’s original research reported:

I don’t like grouping up with other people that I don’t know in lessons. I just stare them and do nothing. It makes me feel like: No, I’m not working with them. I don’t like them. I just stay away from them.

Some will dismiss these findings as simply the result of adolescence. In reality, they show that young people are experiencing a high degree of frustration with the way they are being asked to learn, and how schools are organized. This vindicates the insistence of the Gilbert review on teaching and learning in 2020 that there need to be changes to ‘the way the education system operates and to the practice of many teachers.’

Peter Sharp, director of children’s services for MouchelParkman, recommended having a learning partner to help you influence your organisation to move in a more emotionally literate direction

My organisation is currently contracted to provide workforce development for the new healthy schools scheme. Together with people at the Department of Health, we are determined to try and put back some of the work on adult emotional health and well-being that seemed to become lost as healthy schools moved on. For me, taking care of the adults working with young people is the first and foremost task. Sometimes, though, it seems as if it is the last one.

We are all change agents in our schools, units or local authorities. We sometimes find ourselves up against people who can only be described as ‘toxic leaking cynics’. They are the people in staffrooms who say ‘we tried that in 1983 and it didn’t work then.’ There is at least one on every staff I have ever visited. It gets more difficult when there is a handful of them.

It’s worth remembering, however, that they are never the majority. Most people want to be given the permission, the time and the resources to work in a different way.

All my work on emotional literacy – whether with a local authority, a school or a staff group – has involved working with a small group of staff, enabling them to talk about their predicaments with each other.

Most of us have precious few opportunities to hold real conversations with each other. I think, though, that is what is needed. When Tim Brighouse was director of education in Birmingham, he made it is his business to allow every teacher in the city to work with teachers in other schools – to go out and observe them, then to sit with them and talk about it. Having those conversations enabled people to change thoughts and actions.

The reason the emotional literacy movement is on the up is because it has pulled together those of us who feel we have been denuded of our ability to use the affective domain in the service of raising standards effectively and humanely. Because the Zeitgeist is that cognitive intelligence rules okay. Cognitive intelligence is the be all and end all.

People in the emotional literacy movement are asking: What is my potential for having influence? What can I and one other achieve? And only then exploring what we can do to improve organisations.

The strength of this movement is because it is bottom up. We are saying we want more of this and we want to take responsibility for making it happen. We want to reconnect with why we came into education in the first place. That reconnection with the motivation for coming into teaching is the bit we are helping to nurture.

Change starts with one person. The most powerful thing I have done is to find a learning partner. A learning partner is someone you respect, who respects you. You need to tell them why you are choosing them. You agree to embark on a learning journey that is focussed on personal and professional development.

Typically this will involve meeting for about an hour every 6 – 8 weeks and keeping a shared record of your meetings using a Learning Log.

I then suggest my team do the same. If I had said to my team I was asking them to find learning partners, they would say it is good enough for us but not for these guys up there.

Possible objectives for learning partners

• Further development of self-awareness
• Getting to know your learning partner
• Feeling creative
• Feeling supported
• Shared problem solving regarding current areas of work or development
• ‘Insight learning’ that comes about as a result of discussion
• The ability to think insightfully about complex issues
• The ability to take innovative, and later take, coordinated action
• The ability to create a network that will allow self and other teams to take action as well

Learning organisations

Learning partners can form themselves into learning circles, to work in teams on shared aims and objectives.

The merits of a good learning circle are that it is non-hierarchical. You leave your title at the door and come in representing only yourself. You collectively identify what the objectives are for your future meetings and over what time period you will meet.

Once you have got observable and measurable objectives, then you can go on wild excursions, have fantastic discussions about anything you like, as long as someone in the group sees it as their responsibility to pull you back on track to achieve your learning objectives.