[Intro Music]

00:00:08:11 – 00:01:02:25
Hannah
Welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. Diverse Educators is an intersectional community of educators who are passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Our vision: everyone is celebrated, in every classroom, in every school. Our mission: a collaborative community that celebrates the successes and amplifies the stories of diverse people. Our values: promoting acceptance, increasing visibility, encouraging celebration, creating belonging and enabling learning. In series one of the Diverse Educators podcast we have ten episodes. In each episode our co-hosts Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi will interview one contributor from each of the ten chapters of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto. Each conversation will reflect on how they found and used their voice, discuss how identity shapes them as an educator, share the challenges they’ve had to navigate on their journey, and identify the changes they would like to see in the school system.

00:01:05:12 – 00:01:17:07
Nick
Hello and welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. My name is Nick Kitchener-Bentley and I’m a lead practitioner and drama / inclusion teacher at Sarah Bonnell School. I am also on the steering group for LGBT ed.

00:01:17:24 – 00:01:27:13
Yamina
And I’m Yamina Bibi and I’m an assistant head teacher also at Sarah Bonnell School. I’m also a network lead for WomenEd in London. In this episode, we will talk to Dr. Shrehan from the Race chapter.

00:01:28:07 – 00:01:33:15
Nick
So let’s get straight to it then. Could you please introduce yourself for the audience in one sentence?

00:01:34:10 – 00:01:45:26
Shrehan
Yeah. I am a senior lecturer in teacher education at the University of East London and a co-founder of Phys Equity. And my specialism is PE.

00:01:45:26 – 00:01:52:06
Yamina
And we’d like to start by asking, what inspired you to write your contribution to Diverse Educators: A Manifesto?

00:01:52:06 – 00:03:04:28
Shrehan
I think that often PE is neglected from discussions around DEI in schools. People don’t quite know. How does it link? How is it inequitable in the first place? So it’s like an outsider subject and people are often, not through their own fault, like quite ill informed of what physical education is in 2022, what it should be. And they often think back to their own experiences in PE and quite largely they were negative and they think, oh, you know, maybe it’s still fitness testing, maybe it’s still skill drill game, maybe it’s the cross country, segregated sports and the focus on the physical. So I think quite often head teachers and those that are making decisions about, you know, EDI or book chapters and books that are coming out, they’re quite often talking about the other subjects and PE is not involved in that conversation. So I really, myself and my co-author, Laura McBean, we wanted to make sure that we were heard and our voices were heard and the book was the perfect avenue for that.

00:03:05:27 – 00:03:27:18
Nick
I really agree with what you said there. I think you get your voices heard really well and certainly whenever I hear you speak, actually, I think you really communicate what you’re describing there about PE and you make it very, very clear and understandable. So I always find that very helpful. And a question that I was really interested is about the whole chapter. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about the different themes that your whole chapter team wanted to explore?

00:03:28:11 – 00:04:35:06
Shrehan
Yeah, we wanted to explore the Eurocentric nature of PE, so what actually is that? And quite often that is enacted in schools through the sport choice. So very Eurocentric sports and you can see that like rotation of, you know, handball, athletics, etc., etc. But also the pedagogy in which a teacher selects for their instruction, which is really often teacher directed. You know, I say do this and you do it. And, and that’s a very white ideological pedagogy to use. And we really wanted to highlight ways in which you can move away from those things and have an anti-racist practice and include culture within the classroom because we are living, breathing, everything to do with our culture and our heritage. So they are important conversational points that shouldn’t be ignored within any educational space. We’ve just selected PE to explore it.

00:04:35:06 – 00:04:46:24
Yamina
I love that and I can see obviously the impact of that at SB. So that’s great to hear about. We want to also ask what are some of the key challenges for people with the protected characteristic of race that your team really wanted to address?

00:04:47:26 – 00:05:53:15
Shrehan
Yeah, I think often in physical education, people of colour are unheard and ignored, especially, you know, for example in the book we talk about Jamaica. If you’re from Jamaica where in the current, and I’m, I’m generalising here we’ve got spaces and pockets of fantastic practice going on in certain schools. Sarah Bonnell is a really good example where actually culture is, culture is centralised. So students aren’t being ignored because they’re being spoken to and they’re being asked about what they want to do through, you know, a negotiated curriculum or throughout the sports in which, you know, the school have selected for them to do. So, in terms of main takeaways, sorry, key challenges for people with this protected characteristic, it’s hearing people of colour in movement spaces but also a discussion on the Eurocentric activities and anti-racist pedagogical approaches.

00:05:53:20 – 00:06:37:28
Nick
Thank you and really good to talk about those spaces and how we kind of improve them. One thing that you write about in your section was the key takeaways for the reader, and I’m just going to read them out because I love them, and then maybe ask you if you would be able to expand upon them a little bit more and explain why you thought they were so important and what people could do with them. And so you said know your students – likes, dislikes, contextual information, prior learning and experiences. Share your curriculum ideas with students and negotiate delivery and avoid tokenism. Implementing a one off unit does not make your curriculum non Eurocentric. Which I think you were starting to talk about there which is really interesting. Could you maybe just expand for us a little bit please then on those takeaways and why they’re so important?

00:06:39:07 – 00:11:09:20
Shrehan
Yeah, I mean, knowing your students is essential. What I would deliver in East London versus Bournemouth, where I grew up, is totally different because we’ve got different challenges, we’ve got different contexts. Our students come from different places, they’ve grown up in different households, they’ve grown up in different houses actually, because they’re, you know, a flat in Bournemouth versus a flat in London is very different, especially if you’re growing up in Tower Hamlets, you know. So knowing your students is so unbelievably essential. Every single academic year I start with something called a student snapshot and I find out pretty much everything about my students. So next week I will go to Wales with my students. I know that 75% of them, their biggest fear of spiders. I know a large chunk of them, their biggest fear is failing and upsetting their parents. But I also know which religious holidays they celebrate, and I also know that some of them don’t like to be picked out, picked on in class. They don’t like me to direct a question to them. So I already know so much about my students and I haven’t even started teaching them yet. And that is something that everybody can do in any classroom and any tutor group across the country. The first day you meet your students, you can even just show a picture of you and your family or you and your dog or whoever and say, this is me, this is a little bit, you know, here’s the beach and I’m from Bournemouth and let’s learn about about you. Show me a postcard or draw a postcard. Tell me about yourself. And knowing them is so important because John Dewey, and I hate to pick like a white, you know, philosopher and educationalist here, but because it’s not very relevant but, you know, talks about we can’t really have knowledge unless we’ve got some experience. And so if you don’t know that student’s experience and something about their everyday living. How on earth can you even start to try and help them learn some form of content? So knowing your students is so unbelievably important. Before I even talk about, let’s do kinball or let’s do feminist self-defence or whatever. And you know, on the next one about sharing your curriculum ideas with students, negotiating delivery, I think it’s really good that, you know, you say to students, hey, listen, we’re going to do a sport education unit. This is part of something called a models based practice. And you can say it, depending on the year group, in lots of different ways so that they can understand. And you can say, right, this unit is all about responsibility and about being an authentic sports unit. So you’re not going to hear from me much. And that really sets up your unit with the students so that they don’t think that you’re going to be stood at the front all the time telling them. And it’s not going to be teacher directed. And I think that’s an important point as well, because quite often we don’t share that expectation with students. This is what it’s going to look like, and we shouldn’t, some students, they don’t like surprises. And then lastly, I’ve seen it so many times in schools, this tokenism, these like one off units. Oh, well, we’re going to do a Paralympics Day or in wider school, we’re going to do Black History Week or Black History Month. I mean, no, these things should be immersed within the curriculum every single day. And these one off lessons are tokenistic. And they highlight to students that everything else is normal. And on this one day is when we learn about this one topic. And I take the Paralympic Day as an example. If you’re doing a unit of football, why can’t you do goalball? Why can’t students wear blindfolds and they learn about a different game. And it’s, you know, volleyball, you can do seated volleyball at any moment of the unit. It doesn’t have to be in a Paralympic unit necessarily. So, yeah, I think hopefully I’ve given some people some ideas there.

00:11:10:03 – 00:11:36:17
Yamina
I love that. Thank you so much. I think you speak so passionately about that as well, which is really important. Part of your commitment to the manifesto in it, you ask for schools to essentially consider a revision of the PE curriculum, moving away from a focus on sport and competition to focus on movement, joy and culture celebrations. Can you tell us a bit more about your commitment to the manifesto and how you want to galvanise actions from the reader and from our listeners?

00:11:36:17 – 00:12:44:09
Shrehan
Yeah, I think I just want everybody who reads the chapter to think about ways in which they personally like to move because they, people that read the chapter might have had a negative movement experience, whether that be in school or whether that be in, you know, going to the gym. So I think anybody that reads it, I want them to go, oh, there’s other ways that I can move that I might enjoy. And then if they’re a teacher, maybe they can try and find ways that their students enjoy. Because I really think that’s the role of the PE teacher. The role isn’t to create these sculpted bodies or to fight an obesity epidemic in 2 hours a week. I mean, that’s nonsense. But the role of a PE teacher for me personally is to find ways in which young people enjoy moving, they feel a sense of belonging and authenticity within the curriculum and are able to carry that on throughout their life.

00:12:44:09 – 00:13:24:26
Nick
That phrase that you used there was absolutely amazing. You said about the ways that people who read the chapter like to move, and I think that’s such a powerful way of describing it. So thank you very much. Certainly something we should all think about and we noticed one thing in your chapter that you said was the work of recentering marginalised communities, voices and cultures is a process. One that is part of re envisaging a further education for our young people. However, it’s filled with possibility and hope. We know that your own work has been so incredibly powerful. So could you maybe tell us just a little bit about some of the impact that that’s had on some of the learners that you’ve worked with?

00:13:25:19 – 00:14:49:15
Shrehan
Yeah, I think that, you know, when you take this direction and you decide that you’re going to move away from very teacher directed, eurocentric activities. And we’ve given one example of something you can do. But kind of my thing that I always say to my young trainees is, you know, be the change. And I don’t know what that change might be. I don’t know, in the classroom, when students come together and they have a voice within East London versus Nottingham, what the outcome is going to be, and that’s the beauty of education. Every young person is different and the way in which they act and react in certain situations means that education is full of possibilities. So hopefully the impact of that is that we have students and young people that are creative, ambitious, wanting to learn and wanting to move, wanting to know more, can make links to what they’re doing in school, to their life, in society and outside of school. And hopefully everybody can work towards being the change in some kind of way.

00:14:49:15 – 00:15:25:26
Yamina
Thank you. I love that. Education is full of possibilities and I think that’s so key. And, you know, we noticed that you said in the chapter as well that actually, and you talked about it already, but that tokenistic curriculum, it doesn’t make your curriculum diverse. And you argue that our efforts should be seen as a holistic approach, combining anti-racist pedagogical approaches and a decolonising philosophy towards education. And this is with my curriculum leadership and my teaching and learning hat on. But what advice would you give to curriculum leadership teams and senior leadership teams in ensuring that this actually happens?

00:15:25:26 – 00:17:15:15
Shrehan
I think you have to look at the make up of your students and look at the backgrounds in which they’re coming from and the holidays they celebrate and the religions in which they also follow and celebrate and go back to who you’re actually teaching and who you are as an educator. Because what we see in schools is teachers that don’t actually live in the same area as their students, and they come into that area and they teach and then they go back to their nice suburb and their nice big house. So, you know, as a teacher, you need to do work as well. You need to learn who your students are. You need to acknowledge your own identity and whether that’s the same or different to your students, and what cultural negotiations and barriers that you need to come across and do some serious identity work. And then when you’re creating your curriculum, because remember for me, you can’t talk about curriculum unless you’ve explored ourselves and our students, then we can talk about the need. However, the need will always be dictated in some respects by our national curriculum and the things in which we have to teach to the test. Which, by the way, I’m not an advocate for, but hopefully our young students coming through will campaign and you know, they’ll be able to make some changes towards the way in which education, and I guess it’s not really education in many ways, it’s schooling, isn’t it? At the moment students are schooled and what we want is students to be, have education because it’s, school is so much more than teaching to a test.

00:17:16:14 – 00:17:24:24
Nick
I was really interested as you were speaking there about the things that need to happen. Do you think they are happening at the moment?

00:17:25:11 – 00:18:49:14
Shrehan
I think that in some pockets they are. I think there’s fantastic practice going on across the country and it might be in certain subjects. So for example, Sarah Bonnell PE are doing really, really well and I hear, through Phys Equity, other schools that are doing really great work within their PE departments. But I think on the whole teachers are overworked. CPD is often not that targeted or dictated to by heads of departments that might not have thought outside of their approach. And so if we want to make real and radical change, it always has to come from above, top down. And at the moment our national curriculum in PE specifically is very competitive orientated and many people don’t know the bits in brackets are just suggestions. So the bits in brackets say some example sports, for example, badminton, hockey. And what we’ve seen is quite literal interpretation of that. And that’s just happening in schools, the things that are in brackets. So I think work always has to be done from the top and that’s a very hard thing to change.

00:18:50:08 – 00:18:58:01
Nick
And on that, then in an ideal world, what kind of changes would you like to see happen in the school system regarding the protected characteristic of race?

00:18:58:27 – 00:19:34:09
Shrehan
I would like to see young people’s cultures and heritages celebrated throughout the entire academic year. I would like to see all students learning about black history, all students learning about Islam, for example. And I would like young people of all races and heritages to feel a sense of belonging in their school and to see educators that look like them.

00:19:35:06 – 00:19:49:15
Yamina
I love that. Just, I’m really moved by that. And actually, if we take it out, then, you know, we know there’s been quite a focus on race particularly. But in an ideal world, what changes would you like to see happening in wider society?

00:19:49:15 – 00:20:39:15
Shrehan
Well, I am an idealist and I know that we’re time restricted. But, you know, I would love to eradicate all social injustice. Of course I would. Our society is plagued with many socio cultural issues. 30% of our children are living in poverty and are hungry. These are basic needs that aren’t being met, and we can’t really talk about teaching and learning if we’ve got a student in front of us that’s hungry. So in wider society, lots needs to change. But we can start as educators in our classes by just having a packet of biscuits in the back and stop worrying about students eating in class. Because goodness me, there’s more important things in life.

00:20:40:21 – 00:21:01:21
Nick
That’s so good to hear and thank you so much. I completely echo with you with what you’re saying about the connection between wider society and education itself and the importance of those conversations. And so, yeah, I just want to say a really big thank you from my point of view. It’s been really interesting to hear all of your contributions as ever. And really good to speak to you. Thank you very much for that.

00:21:02:10 – 00:21:11:07
Yamina
Thank you. We’ve been Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi, the co-hosts of the Diverse Ed podcast.

[Outro Music]

00:21:11:07 – 00:21:27:21
Hannah
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Diverse Ed podcast. Check out the show notes for the recommendations of today’s guest. We’d love to hear what you think, so do leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with another author from our book Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.

[Intro Music]

00:00:08:11 – 00:01:02:25
Hannah
Welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. Diverse Educators is an intersectional community of educators who are passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Our vision: everyone is celebrated, in every classroom, in every school. Our mission: a collaborative community that celebrates the successes and amplifies the stories of diverse people. Our values: promoting acceptance, increasing visibility, encouraging celebration, creating belonging and enabling learning. In series one of the Diverse Ed podcast, we have ten episodes. In each episode our co-hosts Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi will interview one contributor from each of the ten chapters of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto. Each conversation will reflect on how they found and used their voice, discuss how identity shapes them as an educator, share the challenges they’ve had to navigate on their journey, and identify the changes they would like to see in the school system.

00:01:05:14 – 00:01:18:01
Nick
Hello and welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. My name is Nick Kitchener-Bentley and I’m a lead practitioner and drama / inclusion teacher at Sarah Bonnell School. I’m also on the steering group for LGBT ed.

00:01:18:17 – 00:01:28:29
Yamina
And I’m Yamina Bibi and I’m an assistant head teacher also at Sarah Bonnell School. I’m also a network lead for Women Ed in London. In this episode, we will talk to Dylan from the gender reassignment chapter.

00:01:30:12 – 00:01:44:00
Nick
Okay, so, Dylan, one of the things that we like to do at the start of each podcast is just to get the contributor to talk a little bit about themselves. So I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself to the audience in one sentence, please?

00:01:45:05 – 00:02:06:01
Dylan
I’m Dylan Ahmed and I am a trainee teacher training to be a PE teacher, so still in uni, and I am a member of Phys Equity and a youth leader for Phys Equity and we look at diversity and inclusion, especially in PE.

00:02:06:01 – 00:02:13:02
Yamina
Thank you so much. Congratulations. So what we want to ask first is what inspired you to write your contribution to Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.

00:02:14:19 – 00:03:37:04
Dylan
So for me, I only recently left secondary school a few years back and I got really into networking as soon as I left through the Twitter world. And I came across Hannah and looked at Diverse Ed and got quite involved through Phys Equity as well. And I realised that it was having great contributions from so, so many teachers. But then I was looking and I was like, there’s not much youth involvement so far. Like people who had recently been students, recently gone through the school system and experienced it from that point of view. And I was like, I have so many experiences to talk about, so many things I’ve done through school that could help teachers, people like me, training to be teachers, to have a deeper understanding about it. And I got involved with Diverse Ed and started doing a couple of panels and I just got so into it and loved what it was doing and so many people started to interact with me and ask questions. And yeah, I kind of just went from there and got involved, and it was just great working with my chapter as well.

00:03:38:10 – 00:04:10:16
Nick
Thank you for that, Dylan. I agree. It’s really powerful to have such a mixture of different voices or people from different sectors of education, you know, whether you’ve just recently been to school like you’re describing or people that have been working in schools for a long time. So yeah, it’s really good to have that diversity of perspectives. And you just touched on something that I think is really interesting also, as well as your contribution, that of the whole chapter team that you’re working with because we were working collaboratively weren’t we? So could you maybe tell us a little bit about the different themes that your overall chapter team wanted to explore, please?

00:04:11:20 – 00:05:38:01
Dylan
So as a team, we looked a lot at trans and gender diverse inclusion across the curriculum and different year groups. So we’ve got a chapter based on primary school education. We’ve got a couple of teachers talking about their interactions with staff and how it works in their own work life and their experiences with that. A few of us talking about students, bringing trans and gender diverse students into the discussion rather than talking about them, but not to them about their own identities. And a lot of what we wrote about did focus on taking the ideas that are in the media right now, especially right now. There’s so much discourse, a lot of it negative, and trying to steer away from that, steer away from that discourse and start talking more about just basic respect, humanity, not politicising this whole idea of teaching people about what it is to be trans, to be gender diverse, and just looking at it from a completely different perspective to what we’ve been seeing in the media recently.

00:05:39:09 – 00:05:53:18
Yamina
I love that. Thank you so much. And I think you just kind of really linked to our next question about what are some of the key challenges for people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment that your team really wants to address.

00:05:53:18 – 00:09:21:05
Dylan
So some of the things like I’ve just mentioned, the media has been portraying recently, is that we are being so politicised. We have become this point of discussion where it’s like they’re trying to draw out so many negatives that most of the time just don’t exist. A lot of, for me, especially going into PE, a lot of the recent rules in athletics and just lots of sports where there’s loads of bans going on and trans athletes having more restrictions. It’s something that’s just been really upsetting for anyone to see, especially being in the community ourselves, and in the chapter we were looking at, especially in schools, how I think I mentioned in my chapter one point, whenever it is discussed in schools, or at least when I was there, it tends be a topic of debate rather than something we’re being educated about. And the idea that we’re always being debated, our own identity, is something that people can argue back and forth about, and we’re just sitting there. No one’s really listening fully. We can say what we want, but it’s just being looked over because there’s so many loud voices going over the top of us because people enjoy seeing these arguments. Like for us to see what it’s like, why there’s some things that they say that are negative. Like a lot of the discussion around people not liking the idea of gender neutral toilets, things like that, where we just sit back and read, like we can say what we want, we can say that we’ve had our struggles with going to a public toilet, and being scared of being harassed or literally being kicked out of the toilet by someone, which are lived experiences for us. Like a lot of the people that I’ve spoken to have had similar experiences where they feel so scared about a simple thing like that and they’ve had really bad experiences. And we’re getting, we’re still getting put in a negative light about it because people are making other ideas up, which aren’t fully backed by lived experiences of people being like people are going to dress up and predators are going to go into the toilets. This is something I see every day when I’m on Twitter, like someone arguing about that where there’s little to no evidence about things like that and it just comes back on us, like, what do we do? And a lot of this chapter, we were like, we need to try and address it in the best way we can to enlighten people and not make it something that people can argue about. Let them see our stories and what we actually have to experience just to be able to live on a daily basis doing basic things.

00:09:22:19 – 00:10:48:09
Nick
Thank you for that, Dylan. I think you’ve spoken incredibly powerfully about the experience and the frankly disgusting media oppression that we’re seeing at the moment, the narratives that have been playing out that have been damaging to real people. And I think that that will resonate with people who are listening. So I just want to thank you for that. It’s incredibly important that we all speak up for trans people. And in my mind, and as a cis, white, gay man, I’m part of the LGBTQ+ community, but I’m aware that I have a lot of privilege, and I know that it’s really important that everybody takes a stand here in this moment because, as you say, it is unacceptable and in your chapter, Dylan, you write really powerfully about some of the problems of the things that are going on in the school system specifically and what needs to happen. Yamina and I have been looking at some of the different parts of the chapters. And one thing that we were really interested in was your key takeaways. So I’m just going to read out your takeaways that you write at the end of your chapter and I was wondering if you could maybe expand a little bit about them and explain why that’s important. And so you wrote that transgender and gender diverse children exist at the margins of our schools. Not enough is being done to bring transgender and gender diverse children into the discourse. Opportunities are missed every day for adults to make things better for transgender and gender diverse children. Could you just expand a little bit for us on this and explain why these takeaways are so important to you?

00:10:49:16 – 00:16:41:04
Dylan
Yeah, so I think all three of them do go quite hand-in-hand with each other, the first one being that trans and gender diverse people exist in the margins of our schools. And I think that’s something that really resonated with me and my experience within school and going through school. When I came out in school, I was the, as far as I know at least, the first person in that school to come out as trans and it was quite a big thing because a lot of teachers didn’t exactly know how to go about it. As supportive, supportive as many of them were, no one knew what to do. It became a thing where I, as the student, had to take responsibility for myself, feeling safe within the school. I had to take that responsibility of going to senior leadership and being like, look, I want my, I need my preferred name on the register. And that whole process took between, that started in year nine that process, and just before I left in year 11 was when I got my name actually on the register and just things like that, things like I was very lucky with changing and I was very close to my PE department. It was, I wasn’t too bothered about the changing rooms, but then there were a lot of people that came after me who were but they were too scared to really say anything. I think I was quite lucky. I had a very good relationship with the majority of teachers in general. I found it a lot easier to speak to them and get things done. We got a transgender policy written while I was in Year 10 or 11, I can’t fully remember, which I did side by side with one of the senior leadership members. And as great as that was, that I was able to do that, I don’t think it’s fair that that responsibility was put on a student. It could have, it could have been someone else. It might not have been me. It might have been someone else who just doesn’t have a great relationship with teachers in general. Doesn’t feel confident enough to bring these things forward and in the long run, with the teachers not fully knowing what to do about that at the time, that student would have felt so much worse off if they came out and nothing was done because they wouldn’t go forward and do it themselves, which is not something they should have to do. And I think that’s the most important thing about when I talk about trans and gender diverse people being in the margins of our schools. We are everywhere. Like if you see or not, if we’re out, if we’re not, things should already be in place for us to be comfortable, personally, as someone who is quite an advocate, it was a great feeling to get those things done in the school. But at the same time, the amount of effort it took, it was mentally draining. It was in like the most important years of secondary school, like year 10 and 11, when I had GCSEs, you know loads of stuff, year 11 I missed loads of school basically just because of that. I’d come in for PE and basically that was about it. Like I remember that was my safe space. That was my one safe space. I’d like, sometimes I’d missed the whole day, know I’d have PE period five, sneak in through the visitor’s gate just for that. And then looking back on it now, if it were different, if those things that I had made come, come to life had been in place prior to me coming out, I think my school experience would be completely different, especially in later years of secondary. It’s just something that I think is so important for every school to hear because now being a trainee teacher, I’ve just done my first placement recently and I’ve only been out of school for three years, maybe three or four years, but the school that I’m at now, they’ve already, they already have these things in place. And I’ve had students who I’ve taught who do identify as trans or gender diverse. And it is such a different situation for them. And I’m looking at it now like, wow, I wish that could have been me and it is great to see it starting to be implemented in some schools. I don’t know if I just got a school that happened to go through the same process that my school did, or if it is something that’s just happening generally in schools now, but I can see the difference it makes. I can see how it would have made a difference when I was in school. And I think that’s why I think those takeaways are so important. The responsibility shouldn’t be put on the students when they’re already having such a tough time because we already know how much just the identity of being trans or gender diverse goes hand-in-hand with a lot of mental health issues.

00:16:42:22 – 00:17:46:29
Yamina
Thank you so much. All I’ve done this series is cry, so I will burst into tears soon, but I’m holding it together today. And I think what you said is so powerful and so important, that lots of that work does tend to fall on the minoritised person or the minoritised groups and your experience there is so hard hitting actually. So as teachers, it’s really important for us to reflect on what we’re doing and whether we are creating that sense of belonging is actually what you talk about in your commitment to the manifesto where you ask teachers, actually school leaders, to look for opportunities to give transgender and gender diverse children a sense of belonging. So we wanted to ask you, Dylan, how do you want your commitment to the manifesto to really galvanise actions from the readers? Because we can hear from what you just talked about in terms of the key challenges, but in terms of our readers and our listeners, what do you want? What actions would you like to see and what changes would you like to see essentially in terms of any teachers who are listening right now?

00:17:46:29 – 00:21:32:00
Dylan
I think the one basic thing is the sense of understanding and respect. And it sounds so simple. It sounds so simple. But there’s been times where I’ve been told that I’m accepted and they respect me. But then it was contradicted with the actions of, no, you can’t have your name on the register. Or I had an experience when I was first asking about my name. Yeah, it was year eight or nine, I want to say year nine, where there was some of the leadership members who were telling my other, my other teachers who were gladly calling me by my name, gladly using my pronouns, were being told not to. I found out from one teacher and I was, I had no words. And that’s what I mean by just simple understanding and respect, like calling someone by their name, using language that makes them feel accepted, makes them feel like they belong in that place. And of course, alongside that, the actions that you do, having things in place in schools where students, if anything, can get a note by their name on the register, if not, have their name changed because of different reasons. There might be, and I think, like I’ve talked about in my chapter, the whole curriculum in general, it’s hard to change a whole curriculum. I know that. And it’s so ingrained in schools, especially with such a heavy focus on exams, but if not changing the whole curriculum, stopping lessons from being tokenistic, stopping lessons on trans identities, from being those one offs that become debates, even if it is slowly implemented throughout in subtle ways even, it can be something like mentioning a role model in that area, in history, in maths, in English, whatever it may be that happens to have a trans identity. It can be the subtlest things that make a trans student go, oh, I can identify with that. And even to those who aren’t teachers listening, those who might still be in school, those who are parents, whatever, it may be listening to that person. If there’s someone in your life that has come out as trans or gender diverse, listening to them, not arguing about them or questioning them, trying to understand what they have to say and giving them that space to be themselves, to talk, not having to hide who they are and not using headlines from the media to come back at them like, oh, well, the news said this. So yeah, like in a nutshell, it’s all about actions, respect and understanding.

00:21:33:10 – 00:21:41:02
Nick
Well, that’s three very clear things, isn’t it? Thank you for that. Actions and ideas and understanding. No, I’ve forgotten. Would you say it again, Dylan?

00:21:41:02 – 00:21:44:01
Dylan
Actions. Respect. Understanding.

00:21:44:14 – 00:22:32:04
Nick
Actions. Respect. Understanding. I’ve got that, good. So I’m just writing this down because it’s so interesting and I love what you were saying there about like the simple changes that can be made and what needs to happen with the curriculum and also just the importance of listening to people. I think, you know, frankly, that’s something that we can all do, isn’t it? And when Yamina and I were reading the chapter, a phrase that really jumped out was, that you used that I thought is just an amazing phrase is gender euphoria. I thought, what a brilliant phrase, let’s use that more. And I just thought, I was really interested by it and you said we should look toward how we can create moments of gender euphoria. Dylan, I was wondering if you could maybe tell us a little bit about why gender euphoria is so important, what it means, and what do you think educators can do to create gender euphoria.

00:22:33:10 – 00:27:45:27
Dylan
So, gender euphoria is the idea of feeling so affirmed in who you are. You get these moments of happiness from those direct actions. So for me, like an example would be when I first came out and someone first used my name, or first used my pronouns and the, it’s just that automatic smile on my face. I’m feeling like I had been accepted and someone saw me for who I am. And I think the reason I chose to write about it was because when I would read about other trans identities, there was a strong emphasis on gender dysphoria, which is the opposite. So that feeling of not feeling like yourself in your own body, people misusing pronouns, not using your name. And I thought to myself, as hard as those times are, and they are, it’s something that doesn’t really go away. What can schools do to combat that? And I thought about those moments of gender euphoria, which is talked about a bit, but it’s not talked about much. And I want it to be talked about more because those positive moments have such an impact on a person. Like I can pinpoint most of those positive moments from secondary school, whereas the moments where I might have been called the wrong name, I know it happened, but I can’t pinpoint it. Being able to pinpoint those positive experiences gives a bit of hope. It gives that sense of everything is going to be okay. It might not be fully okay right now, but people are starting to understand and maybe soon it’ll be different because that’s what it was for me and it still is a lot of the time. I’ve nowhere near completed my journey and those moments where I’m given that bit of hope are so important to me and I know is so important to loads of trans kids, loads of gender diverse kids, that sense of social transition. So being able to have your identity seen in a social setting is a massive thing, especially right now with people who are looking to medically transition. The waiting list for the NHS is ridiculously long. Last I looked at the waiting list was, well, online it says that the waiting list is 30 to 36 months to get your first appointment. That’s what it says online. I’ve been on the waiting list since I was 15. I haven’t got a first appointment yet and I’m going to be 20 this year. A lot, because of that, a lot of people go looking into private care, but then with private care, money issues. So it’s just a big circle that’s going back and forth, which ones better, there aren’t any amazing options. Private care is quicker but it’s very expensive. NHS, you’re waiting so long and that’s just due to the fact that there’s not a lot of people trained to administer things for transitioning. For me, a lot of gender dysphoria comes from not being able to medically transition yet because of obstacles in the way, whether it be waiting lists, money issues, whatever it may be. So those moments of gender euphoria solely come from social interactions and a lot of the time those moments were within school. So I think it’s just important to highlight that because even I hadn’t really heard about gender euphoria that much. So I think getting more awareness about it and what it can do for a person is so important because again, it’s quite a simple thing to allow a student or a teacher, whoever it may be, to feel like there’s hope.

00:27:45:27 – 00:28:40:10
Yamina
I love that. I love gender euphoria. It’s so positive in the way in which it’s reframed. And you’ve done that so beautifully. So thank you, Dylan. And actually, you talked about this earlier about real representation and being able to identify it in terms of the curriculum and what really stood out to us was you essentially mentioned about the gender diversity. It’s always existed within many other cultures. And you mentioned the Hijras in South Asia. And I can’t remember, I think it was an Arundhati Roy book actually where I first encountered Hijras. We had never really heard about it before either. I was really annoyed, like why hadn’t I been taught it before. And the question we wanted to know is how important is it that school leaders ensure the curriculum really highlights that gender diversity exists across the curriculum? And how might they support middle leaders who are in charge of the curriculum, perhaps in creating that inclusive curriculum?

00:28:40:10 – 00:32:31:15
Dylan
With that, I think it’s the first, first and foremost, the senior leaders and middle leaders actually learning about it themselves because no one, no one knows about it. Like you said, I’m also from a South Asian background. I didn’t know much about Hijras either. And this kind of links back into looking at decolonising the curriculum because when I was looking at it, a lot of it comes back to the British Empire and trying to erase that from the history. And it is amazing to see that there is such a rich history of gender diversity across the world. And reading about it myself, I was amazed. I think in terms of supporting middle leaders, it would take quite, it would take someone who knows exactly what they are talking about. They need to fully know the background and history of it because say something like Hijras, they are, used to be a long time ago before the empire, very accepted in society, in South Asian society. But now it is the complete opposite because new ideas were brought in and things changed. And I think even my, say my parents, they would have that negative idea of it because that’s all they know and they don’t know the rich history of it. I would say middle leaders go into things like workshops, someone coming forward and saying, look, I want to implement this, I want you to learn about this. Really trying to give an overall kind of, what’s the word, trying to think of what overall perspective of everything that’s happened. Because I think if you just go online and if you go online and look up Hijra or Two Spirit or whatever it may be, I think the first things that tend to come up are the negative things, which goes hand in hand with the media today and the attack on trans and gender diverse people. So it’s I think is dangerous. Just to mention without any backstory, it’s dangerous to just be in a lesson and put something on the board like, oh, look at these different people for a student to then go home and Google what Hijra people are, how are they treated, and see all the negatives of it. It’s not something that should be tiptoed around or just mentioned off the bat. If it’s going to be mentioned, it’s something that needs to be properly talked about and looked at in depth and look at all the positives that came before the negative discussion around it.

00:32:32:21 – 00:33:13:19
Nick
Yeah, love that and love that clarity as well. And important, I think, for all people in schools from senior leadership down to consider genuine authentic representation to create something that’s really, really like a clear way that you’ve expanded on that example. So thank you for that. Yamina and I are really interested in your perspective on the changes that need to happen. I think you’ve told us very clearly about some of the things that have been going on in schools and the current context within education and beyond that. But in an ideal world, what changes would you like to see happen in the school system regarding the protected characteristic of gender reassignment?

00:33:14:17 – 00:38:04:00
Dylan
I mean, ideally every school should have a policy in place, specifically protecting trans and gender diverse students, which in that policy would cover things like changing for PE, their right to have somewhere to change where they feel safe and comfortable. It would have things regarding name changes, and with name changes safeguard being around that in terms of a lot of trans students aren’t going to be out to their families. It might not be safe, they might not be ready. But one thing that happened to me when my name finally got changed was a letter I got sent home that said Dylan on it, and I was like, after all that, this has happened, which is something that could have been stopped if that had been properly put in place, and a way for every teacher that that student has to know what name, what pronouns to use for them without that student having to go to every single teacher individually, because that is exhausting having to, and it might be easier if it’s a teacher your close to, yes. But if you’re in a lesson and you have to tell that teacher, even if you’re not that close to them, it can be really awkward and really hard to do. So, yeah, something where all the teachers that student wants to know are informed and then of course, just generally speaking with the curriculum, like I mentioned before, being able to implement discourse around identities without having to debate them, not making them tokenistic, like not just a one off lesson on gender, something that’s going on throughout the school year and within different subjects. And then talking about teachers who identify as trans or gender diverse that I as of yet, sooner or soon enough I will have once I’m a teacher but don’t have as much experience obviously on that front. I know a few other people have written about it in the chapter, but having that environment where staff are aware when they need to be, people are confident, feel safe talking about it, like knowing that other staff know about their identity and having something in place to protect staff if they want to keep their identity to themselves and not wanting other people to know, and I won’t talk too much about this because I can’t really say much about it. But I know there’s also been a lot of discourse around staff who identify as trans or gender diverse and how they interact with students, especially non-binary staff who might want to use different, I don’t know the word for it, but you know, when you use. Ms. Mr. It’s not pronouns, it’s something else. But people who want to use things like Mx or Mz and them having some sort of protections in place in case that that itself brings about some sort of questions from students, and staff need to know how they go about that, how they do that in a professional sense, but keep safe at the same time.

00:38:04:00 – 00:38:15:14
Yamina
Thank you so much for that. It was really broad as well, to broaden things out a little bit more we wanted to ask about in an ideal world, what changes would you like to see happen in wider society?

00:38:15:14 – 00:40:55:18
Dylan
I have to bring it back to the media again because it’s such a, it’s something at the forefront right now. Every time I go on Twitter, every time I turn on the news, I’ll see something else. Trying to put a negative light on us. And ideally, I just want people who are actually from the community, from the community that have lived experiences to be able to be in the spotlight in those discussions. It shouldn’t be people who are cisgender, arguing about what they think is right and wrong for us. Because every time I see someone who is trans speak out, any trans athlete that has tried to speak out about the situation with the sporting bans, they are just met with so much criticism, they are met with political ideas, met with people being like, you don’t know your facts. It’s not scientifically right. We’re, it just completely disrespects the whole community. It, wherever we try and stand up for ourselves and whenever we try and put ourselves in the spotlight it’s muted by so many people who are in power. And and I think we need a platform where we are just as loud as all these people are. And we can talk about our lived experiences without being attacked with scientific facts or other people’s opinions on it. So yeah, I think a lot of people are trying their best. It is such a strong community and people are fighting where they can and it is just a matter of who’s going to listen.

00:40:55:18 – 00:41:25:03
Nick
Yeah, thank you so much for speaking out yourself and to everyone who contributed in your chapter as well, because I think it is a very powerful chapter. People should read and people should listen to the conversation we’ve had today, it is incredibly vital and we are really, really grateful for you joining us this morning and speaking to us. So I just want to say a really, really big thank you for everything that you said, really, really grateful. Thank you.

00:41:25:03 – 00:41:35:07
Yamina
Thank you so much for joining us. We’ve been Nick Kitchener-Bentley. And Yamina Bibi the co-hosts of the Diverse Ed podcast.

[Outro Music]

00:41:35:07 – 00:41:51:21
Hannah
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Diverse Educators podcast. Check out the show notes for the recommendations of today’s guest. We’d love to hear what you think, so do leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with another author from our book Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.

[Intro Music]

00:00:08:11 – 00:01:02:25
Hannah
Welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. Diverse Educators is an intersectional community of educators who are passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Our vision: every one is celebrated, in every classroom, in every school. Our mission: a collaborative community that celebrates the successes and amplifies the stories of diverse people. Our values: promoting acceptance, increasing visibility, encouraging celebration, creating belonging and enabling learning. In series one of the Diverse Ed podcast, we have ten episodes. In each episode, our co-hosts Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi will interview one contributor from each of the ten chapters of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto. Each conversation will reflect on how they have found and used their voice, discuss how identity shapes them as an educator, share the challenges they’ve had to navigate on their journey, and identify the changes they would like to see in the school system.

00:01:05:12 – 00:01:17:13
Nick
Hello and welcome to the Diverse Ed Podcast. My name is Nick Kitchener-Bentley and I’m a lead practitioner and drama / inclusion teacher at Sarah Bonnell School. I’m also on the steering group for LGBT ed.

00:01:17:26 – 00:01:27:16
Yamina
And I’m Yamina Bibi and I’m an assistant head teacher also at Sarah Bonnell School, and I’m also a network lead for Women Ed in London. In this episode, we’ll be talking to Julie from the disability chapter.

00:01:28:10 – 00:01:32:12
Nick
Julie, could you please introduce yourself to the audience in one sentence?

00:01:33:04 – 00:01:40:09
Julie
Oh, one sentence is easy. I’m Julie Cassiano, head teacher at a school in Northampton.

00:01:40:09 – 00:01:47:07
Yamina
Thank you so much. And what inspired you to write your contribution to Diverse Educators: A Manifesto?

00:01:47:07 – 00:03:00:23
Julie
I saw the, so Hannah Wilson put a tweet out requesting people to contribute. And it was probably about maybe six months prior to that that I wrote, so Angela Browne had a women’s group. You were part of it, weren’t you? Yamina, were you? No. Okay. And it was a group, a private group on social media, women could make contributions, writing blogs about personal experiences and where they could be shared and commented on in smaller groups and lots of women on Twitter were in that group. And I happened to write a blog about my experiences with mental health in my earlier life. And I’d never realised up until that point that mental health was even considered a disability, which seems awful now. And that’s what inspired me, I already had something that I could work with and just put my name forward and Hannah got back to me and said that she’d like me to contribute.

00:03:00:23 – 00:03:21:02
Nick
We’re glad you did put yourself forward because it’s amazing. And yeah, your chapter is really, really interesting. We were interested a bit about the overall chapter as well as the individual contributions within the chapter. And so maybe could you tell us a little bit about some of the different themes that the whole chapter team wanted to explore?

00:03:21:23 – 00:05:16:15
Julie
Yeah. So that was really important as well that we met as a group. And so Ruth was our team editor and we did spend some time talking about how to, in order for the whole chapter to come together, we obviously didn’t want any overlaps. There were a couple, but they were still personalised within that. But I know that there was learning disabilities, ADHD, there were physical disabilities, and there were a range of disabilities that were discussed like neurodiversity, mental health. I do believe that there was another on mental health, but it was on a very different path to mine. So Ruth coordinated that in order to ensure, but she also gave us a very clear structure in terms of how we presented our individual contribution so that the chapter flowed really well. But one thing that was positive, a real positive aspect is because we’ve met via Zoom is we got to work as a team in terms of uploading what we wrote, helping to contribute in terms of editing. And there were a couple of us, including myself, who at times found the process quite reflective in terms of when you get writing about something so deep and personal, you actually have to go through a form of self supervision and then that comes out in the writing and then you have to kind of remove that part of the writing which we supported it with. And then we were able to kind of talk about those aspects during the Zoom group meetings, which was really good.

00:05:16:15 – 00:05:42:15
Yamina
And you are right, I was part of that daily writing challenge about that and actually I found myself having to remind myself a lot. You do end up writing about things that are so deeply personal and almost remember those feelings and emotions. And that’s something that we want to explore, is that what were some of the key challenges for people with the protected characteristic of disability that your team in the chapter wanted to address?

00:05:42:15 – 00:09:07:18
Julie
Ableism, really, awareness, microaggressions and particularly mine was from an employer. Most of them are looking at it from different angles in terms of the education workplace. But I tried to, there are elements of mine where I’m speaking to somebody who may have a mental health condition and giving advice on what they need to do. But I’m also aware of psychological safety for an employer. So there’s an element of difficulty. So it needs to start. And as a headteacher I feel that I needed to use a platform, my voice, to say, actually it sits with us as the employer to be educated, to be knowledgeable, not just about ableism, and that was one aspect of the book, but in terms of ensuring that you’ve got a safe space where everyone belongs in terms of inclusion or setting. So I wrote from a headteacher perspective in terms of what you can do to include somebody who has a diagnosis of a mental health condition. But there’s two aspects that employers need to explore, and that’s somebody who has a long term diagnosed mental health condition. But there will always be people who go through elements of glitches. So there’s wellbeing, and there’s a lot I’m seeing on Twitter that, some people who don’t possibly understand or read a lot about it. You could kind of get confused in all the different layers. So wellbeing is the protective aspect in terms of how you can protect your staff from the workplace becoming a factor that causes mental health. Then you’ve got people who may have something that’s happened in their lives that then has caused, if the social environment nurture the person, could be a short term mental health condition, something like bereavement and if people around the person who is bereaved put in all the protective factors, then they could, you know, they can generally, that will be a bridge that they go through with all the support. And then you have someone with a, you know, within psychology it’s debatable whether it’s cognitive or biological or socially impacted, but you will have someone with a diagnosed condition, someone with like bipolar or someone with OCD or etc.. And it’s about knowing all of those different layers of what reasonable adjustments need to be made in order for that person to contribute effectively within your organisation. And I know I’m not diagnosed, but it’s very obvious I’m on the pathway for ADHD as well as I do have OCD. And I know that there’s so much to my OCD that make me effective. Like that overanalysing that my brain goes through makes me a very strong senior leader. I see things way before others do, those meteors that are coming, because of my overanxious brain. So I scrutinise everything deeply. So there are huge benefits to including people who have different disabilities. And that’s really what we’re all trying to achieve is understanding that these people do belong, they have something to offer, and it’s our job and our duty to give reasonable adjustments to ensure that they are included.

00:09:07:18 – 00:10:13:01
Nick
Thank you for that. That was a really powerful analysis of the situation of what you’ve written about, what was at stake for people. So thank you. I really found that interesting. And I also want to say that I loved hearing about your writing process as well. That was very interesting to me. So thank you for those. And we were also interested to comment about people’s takeaways that they’d written and within their chapters. I’m going to read out if it’s okay to get the takeaways that you write and then just ask you to maybe reflect a bit more on that and expand on why that was so important here. So you said that discrimination and prejudice behaviours cause mental health difficulties. Consider intersectionality, research the work of DC and Ryan’s 1985 self-determination theory and studies into neuro plasticity to understand how these improve motivation and wellbeing in the workplace and discuss with your senior leadership team how to create a safe working culture for those with a mental health illness. Really interesting takeaways. Could you just expand a little bit more on them?

00:10:13:09 – 00:16:53:01
Julie
Yeah. So again, if we start with neuroplasticity, that’s exporing people who may have mental health conditions due to trauma or socially inflicted, and so much research has said that the brain hence the plasticity, actually the newer neuroscience states that people can, the brain can start to repair and heal where commonly it was seen as, okay, this is a condition that’s been caused. It’s damage from trauma. We can medicate. We can treat, but we can’t cure. There’s still a lot of, it’s a very, very, I’m no psychologist and I’m not going to go too deeply into it. I’ve literally just on a very brief level, but generally saying that with those right, I think the right vocabulary to have out there is the positive protective factors that we can do in order to enable somebody with a mental health condition which trauma is, as well can be part of, can be included and again, neuroplasticity is saying it’s a very large theory but the small part of it is explaining that the brain can heal itself, meaning that some of these symptoms or difficulties can improve over time, which if they’re in the right environment to heal. SDT – self-determination theory is something I’ve been studying a lot throughout my masters, and I’m exploring it through an element of continuous professional development at the moment, and that it’s actually, it’s all about motivation and drive. And it’s a theory that links to Maslow’s needs and self actualization. And it really is about three core aspects within the workplace and teachers coming to the classroom. And those are providing space where people have autonomy, where they belong and I always forget the third one, but it’s a place, the autonomy where people get to make decisions and be part of whatever environment there is within the classroom that children are getting to make choices regarding their learning whether it’s their target setting, and all of these leads to a healthy mindset. And so there’s autonomy, there’s a sense of belonging, which is really important and key. And I’m trying to see what the third one is. Competence? Yeah, it’s competence. It’s being able to, see I was being a teacher, you know, that thing where you miss one and hoping that the learners will contribute. That’s what I was doing there. But yeah, yes, they need to be able to feel that they can do their part, that comes, you know, where they’re at the actual point where they’re not over challenged but they’re not under challenge to the point where they feel that they can’t contribute. Those three contribute together to make a healthy, so that leads into the intrinsic motivation and a healthy mindset to be able to contribute what it is that you’re asking someone to do. And then the final point, I wanted to make, I can’t remember how you worded it in the chapter, but it was about coming away from, okay, some employees would argue, well, there’s all these different characteristics and I can read this book and there’s all of this stuff I’ve got to learn. But there’s time and all of the other difficulties that come with being a head teacher, but generally, if you explore the book and you go through the themes from an employer’s perspective or as a peer on peer colleague generally, it’s taking the time to understand, to listen, and to give someone ownership over what their difficulties in any given situation are and to not minimise people’s lived experiences. But that’s something that really gets under my cage, is that we deny people’s lived experiences. So saying no, that doesn’t exist here in the UK and actually we are really good at it, you know, we’re far better than… that’s not good enough. And if you’re an employer to minimise people’s experiences or there’s too much complaining, you know, if we take that into the classroom, we have high expectations of our children and we want them to get better. I’m not going to sit with the teachers and say class 1D is lower than us so we can just sit back, relax a little bit now, can we? You know, we don’t do that. We drive to be the best. And yes, there are some strong aspects that within this work in terms of the UK or England, but there is so much more to do that what’s key is allowing the person a voice to express how they feel, to take what they say seriously and to allow them to tell you what they want. How are they going to feel? No employer has ever had to sit and say to me, okay, so you have an OCD diagnosis. So I’m going to need to. I need to present myself in a safe psychological space where an employer, where I feel comfortable, an employer, I can say, okay, I have OCD. These are the things that I find difficult, and this is how the workplace can include me. And I need the employer to be reasonable. And in doing so, you get so much more out of the employee. You know, I have often found reasonable adjustments are really important to me, having individual plans for certain members of staff who need it, regardless of what their inclusion need is, that they can completely know I will, in my workplace, make reasonable adjustments in any form and to the point where I can’t make them where they become not reasonable. And that will come with very strong rationale and staff know that. So they will come. And I’ve never in all of my career had anybody take advantage because of that. And that’s in the theory, we’re very the opposite. We think, no, we can’t do that because people will take advantage. You know, we can’t have a relaxed absence management policy because people will take advantage. And I’ve often found it completely the opposite. The more autonomy you give people, the more respect you give people, the more reasonable adjustments you make for people when required, the more you get out of the workforce.

00:16:53:12 – 00:18:08:11
Yamina
Yeah, I love that. I’m just, I’m. Yeah, Nick and I just giving you a round of applause. I think what we think is, is so powerful is that you’re talking from your own lived experience. And so, I mean, I definitely have suffered from it. Well, not the word suffered, but that’s what we say, don’t we, say suffered like that was such an automatic thing. You know, when my mom passed away, bereavement, you know, I think it was the week after I was back at school, I was in a new school. I had to start. I was starting senior leadership and it was tough. And I think what you said earlier about bereavement can be almost like, you used, almost a transition. I think that’s really powerful what you said and having organisations that really support that to support you is really important. And you say that in your commitment in the manifesto, what you say is that a school is designed to fulfil human and societal ambitions, but we need to be committed to social justice and creating a world where everyone can fit in safely without prejudice. I love that. We love that. We want to ask you about your commitment to the manifesto and how you want to galvanise action from the readers and the listeners.

00:18:08:11 – 00:20:53:26
Julie
Yeah, so generally I’m quite active in my social media in terms of knowing that I’m in a place of privilege, in terms of, I’ve got a platform, I am in a senior leadership role that comes with a lot of decision making. So I am a member of Diverse Ed, Women Ed, a few organisations, and I use my platform freely to share. I think I’m sure all of us are part of the group, the DEI group, Yamina, I know I know you from a group. That’s what I know. I’m just not sure which group it is, but yeah, there’s the DEI group, there’s two I’m part of that Hannah leads on. So I actively contribute and share blogs on my platform or, you know, give my opinions and engage and read and then support others. And from that way, I’ve got quite a network of people who are contributing to this work in all forms on all of the characteristics. And they know if they send me a DM and say, can you share this, they know it’ll get shared. Yes, I’m a head teacher. Yes, I’m connected to my school. I don’t fear, because I’m so passionate about the work and I am responsible for the children and the families that I work for. It’s my duty to not only consider the wider, my platform, Twitter or the wider, but I’m constantly conscious that I want to present myself in a way where my community is proud to have me as the head teacher. I have a very, very diverse community, definitely family and children who represent all of the characteristics and they need to know that the headteacher is a voice for that. And that is definitely something I’m starting to get feedback from parents about. And so I use multiple platforms to state that’s who I am. These are my, this is how I feel about things. So taking part in podcasts like I said, sharing things online because I have quite a large following. So I’m happy to share people’s work on my platform and being an active voice. So if I’ve seen something in the media, I will actively share it and say and call it out. And I will attend Diverse Ed conferences and support new voices that are breaking through and generally just try to keep active and not let that calling out die out. Because I think we’re at a really pivotal place at the moment where people are starting to listen and we just can’t let that go.

00:20:53:26 – 00:21:33:15
Nick
Thank you for talking about it and why it’s so important because it is and it’s essential we do talk about it and it’s really, really valuable work. So thank you for that. And in the chapter we actually notice that you said about microaggressions and you said, how can you challenge mental health microaggressions being used in your school, thus protecting the dignity of those disabled with mental health? I mean, the word dignity. I mean, how powerful is that? And you’ve clearly done a huge amount of work to create positive environments with respect to mental health and indeed other elements of diversity in your own work. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about the impact of such work that you’ve been able to have?

00:21:34:06 – 00:26:57:15
Julie
Yeah, so impact is a little bit difficult because then I don’t want any sort of member of staff that I’ve worked with, if you like, to feel that I’m sharing their story because it might be quite obvious in the multiple workplaces. I can give some overview, but I would like to touch upon this word dignity actually, because you raised that and that’s a word I use a lot in the workplace, often with all layers – governors, stakeholders, children, that in every single thing we do, we have to consider the dignity of the person or of the situation that we’re dealing with. So let’s just say within school cultures, you know, there can be this tendency to let’s just say one of the things that probably rattled my cage quite a bit is the gossip culture that can be surrounded with education in terms of sometimes within, I don’t want to go too much, I’m thinking of parents listening, but there can be certainly, certainly not in my school currently, but I have seen little pockets within other settings of where the staff room may become a place where we talk about the situations within families, etc. and that is something at senior level we need to address because I always stop and say, have you invited somebody to share their story with you? And if you haven’t, then you don’t know how they’ve ended up in that situation. And it can be anything from decisions that they’re making that might not be perceived to be ethical. It might be that they’re users of some kind, you know, criminal activity, but it’s not our job to judge. It’s our job to find out how they got themselves in that situation. It’s about social change. So coming back to that word dignity in terms of the protected characteristics, it’s about, you know, being considerate. Have you heard this person’s story? Have you contributed to ensuring that that person feels that this whole culture has psychological safety in terms of feeling that they can talk about that and how that impacts them? Have we built, which I don’t believe many schools have at this point, have we created a safe space in terms of where we individually support each other through those aspects of difficulties. In terms of microaggressions, I’ve mentioned this before, you know, there’s so many in all of the different aspects and some of them are so deep rooted into our language that many are unconscious. And I know we’re challenging unconscious now was saying, well, it just needs to become conscious within the rhetoric. Nevertheless, it’s about language, the way language, you know, I say this with children who swear in school, that if actually that’s how they are socialised and that’s the embedded language that’s being used at home to just turn around and now start disciplining children. Because they need to become consciously aware, then you need to go through a process of intervention of removing that. I have lots of children when they first start school, that is just the normal, you know, they will just say, I’ve had an f-ing great day or it’s just so embedded naturally into their language that we start, we use a different approach. I’m not going to give you a detention for that because you’re just flowing with language that has been taught. If you’re going to swear at me, you’re going to tell me to f-off. That’s different. You’re being aggressive towards me. But if they’re just flowing with that language, it’s about what intervention are we using to ensure they know that language is wrong. So that’s something that’s going to take a very, very long time to update people with what language is quite offensive and shouldn’t be used. I think racialised, racial microaggressions should be far more obvious and those ones should be challenged. In terms of ableism, so I refer to a number of discussions I’ve had with people. So some people will say, oh, that’s the OCD in you. I don’t find that offensive. Personally, I actually think coming from a place where, you know, mental health was something you had to be really careful not to expose. It was seen as a dark secret, if you like, for people to go around randomly diagnosing themselves with conditions proudly, it makes me think, oh, well, we’ve moved on, haven’t we? You know about the condition, you know how it manifests and you’re not shy to put the stamp on yourself. So however, I have to be very mindful. That’s my opinion and that may not be for somebody else. So we need to be aware. So I think it’s just about exposing these. And like I said, things change. There are new ones. I think it’s just about educating people about, it’s the same thing with swearing of children. It’s about putting interventions in place where people know microaggressions are a thing, educating people on it, and allowing people to become more consciously aware of their microaggressions and not being fragile. If you’re challenged on a microaggression that you’ve used, I think that’s the biggest issue.

00:26:57:15 – 00:27:38:04
Yamina
The idea of fragility is so key and sometimes it’s linked to, so intrinsically linked, with our ego that it feels personal when we challenge someone, we must take that away because that inner work is never done, I think you just spoke so powerfully about that. So thank you so much, Julie. And we noticed that in your chapter you write so positively about the leaders in your first school and how they had implemented without perhaps even realising the three fundamentals of self-determination theory, which you talked about earlier. We wanted to ask you if you could expand on what specifically did they do that had a real positive impact on you and your colleagues so that those who are listening or who’ve read the chapter might be moved to action by it?

00:27:38:04 – 00:31:13:00
Yamina
Yeah, yeah. I often feel, I always talk positively about my first school experience. I worked under two very, very good heads, but I worked more closely as a senior leader with the second head. And yeah, I definitely have become the leader I am because of what I saw in terms of his approach to leadership. And once I joined Diverse Ed and started reading about the strategies that leaders should use, I often found myself saying, oh, I’ve seen that model. I’ve seen that model. oh, I’ve seen that model. And it meant, you know, since I always knew and I always said to him he was a very, very good senior leader. And the team, the deputies, that he had working with him. But everything comes from the top, doesn’t it? The culture comes from the top. So definitely the team that I worked around with stayed because they embodied and embraced his ethos. But it did come from the top and he absolutely at no point felt any fear to call out any form of injustice or any non-inclusivity or microaggressions, and I was actually witness to that. And in doing so, he would never do it publicly. When I say witness to it, I would notice impact changes because of a certain situation. It was always done very respectfully and it was yeah, it was just in terms of, you know, I went back and explored to help others because it wasn’t really something I sat and thought about was actually at the age of 25 and my life was upside down. I had a condition I was struggling with. I had nobody besides my inner family that I lived with. I didn’t have anybody I could rely on, the medical professions were beyond not very good at the time. So I’m hoping they’ve improved. My mum and dad, bless them, were as supportive as they could be but as a generation they didn’t really understand. Paracetamol and hot water bottle and you’ll be fine kind of thing, loving but just didn’t understand and yeah. I just didn’t, you know, I mean, how did I get from that point to, 20 years later, which is, you know, being able to get my degree, be able to be successful in teaching, to be able then to move into a senior leadership role. And by the age of 35 I was the head teacher, erm assistant head teacher. So 20 years to get the education, to practice being a teacher and get to that role, that’s a short space of time. What had happened is, in that period of time too, in order to enable that to happen, and I reflect heavily on there was definitely different aspects of my home life that made things easier for me and I don’t want to neglect that. But career wise it was that setting. It was just such a wonderful place to work and to grow, so inclusive. The head teacher there is so, you know, empathy and compassion is the biggest aspect of his leadership. He leads with the heart and I always said that, he leads with the heart, heart, head, heart, head, I used to say. So heart, then you would have to rationalise, back to the heart, checking in and rationalise again. And I guess that’s where I learned to lead myself.

00:31:14:00 – 00:31:43:13
Nick
So great to hear that and to hear, it’s just lovely, it’s just really lovely and really, really important to hear about those positive experiences and what goes on well in those examples that you’ve experienced, and then that you’ve created as well. Great. So thank you for that. We were wondering, in an ideal world, maybe building on some of the successes, what needs to happen within the whole school system regarding the protected characteristic of disability.

00:31:44:11 – 00:33:49:12
Julie
I genuinely, genuinely believe that one aspect that I don’t think is is clear enough is, I don’t think that within our frame, I know Ofsted is a grey area. But you know, I want to stay positive about Ofsted, in terms of my experience with Ofsted, it’s generally been supportive and positive etc. But I don’t want to go into that debate. There are difficulties around Ofsted. However, I do think there is a framework that assesses the education system and is it assessing the right areas? And I actually, often I’m not sure why our equality policy isn’t sitting with our safeguarding policy very, very tightly and why that doesn’t come through keeping children safe in education. So that’s on a children’s perspective because they go on to be the next generation, the next generation. So we need to be ensuring that our inclusive practice is very well known with the children so that they go on to be global citizens. But we also need to be protecting their safety. Non-inclusive policy or practices, it is proven, go on to create mental health difficulties, which is a safeguarding issue. So I’m not sure why they don’t come together. I feel the Equality Act and the SEND code of practice are two policies that link heavily with safeguarding. And I think those three policies need to be at the forefront of every induction at the start of every year and filtered through and revisited. And I do feel that there should be core elements of, I believe inclusion should be a factor on the framework. I think we have personal development and behaviour and attitudes. I believe that that actually could probably become one and that actually part of the framework should be inclusion and that should be heavily on the Equality Act and SEND and it’s as simple as that for me. Head teachers do what Ofsted say because they fear it, and it’s the way to move forward in my opinion.

00:33:51:00 – 00:34:02:12
Yamina
Thank you so much. And we were curious as well to know if we zoom out a little bit. In an ideal world, what changes would you like to see in wider society beyond school and organisations?

00:34:02:12 – 00:36:39:13
Julie
Wow, that’s a big question, isn’t it? Do you know, we’ve implemented into our school character education and I believe that we really just need to work on individual character within ourselves. And I think and again, we do much of this within our curriculum in our school, but I’m not convinced by looking at social media and within politics that people actually know how to listen. Do we know how to listen to other people? And I talk to my sons about this a lot. When you become a leader, predominantly a large part of the role is to just sit and listen, listen to lived experience, listen deeply. And I’ve been coaching some leaders that say sometimes when you listen, you’re going to hear things you disagree with. You’re going to hear things that may touch sensitive issues within yourself. You may feel annoyed or irritated by someone else’s opinion. Also, you need to allow those behaviours to just sit, not react, and then you need to go away and think about what evidence is there out there to back up what this person says and you go through it. You go through a complex process of taking in what somebody has shared with you. And then you come back and you really appreciate that someone has moved your thinking on, has taken you in a different direction and made you see life in a different way. You may not still fully agree and you could rationalise that, but we just don’t listen. We are very reactive as a society. I think we’re quite selfish as humans and actually in my research that I’ve been studying, it is innate that we are built as selfish humans. We need to learn how to become selfless. And I just think that we need to learn how to challenge and debate in a respectful way. We don’t need to troll. We don’t need to. We just need to communicate. And actually, some challenge is a positive thing. It’s part of learning. Feedback is love, I read once as part of emotional intelligence, and we need to not take it personally. And I think if the whole world, I’m not saying I’m perfect, I just read a lot. This is other people’s work, this isn’t mine and this was modelled to me in a previous school. But I just think it’s as simple as that. Listen, listen to others. And how can you use that story or that example to better yourself and to understand others?

00:36:40:24 – 00:37:15:29
Nick
That is so good. Thank you. You know, as you are talking, as you’re talking now, it was just amazing. I was thinking about Yamina and I was thinking you see lessons she does and she’s a really, really good example of someone who is doing everything that your talking about and I just have to say that is absolutely true. And your words are so important, and so, so helpful, and I know that they will be really gratefully received by people who are listening to this as well. And so I would to say a huge thank you both from me and Yamina, it’s been amazing to hear your contributions. Really, really good to speak to you. So. Yeah, thank you very much for that.

00:37:16:09 – 00:37:24:23
Julie
Thank you, Nick. Brilliant. Thank you. Well done, Yamina. Well done for leading the way.

00:37:24:23 – 00:37:33:28
Yamina
Thank you so much. We’ve been Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi, the co-hosts of the Diverse Ed podcast.

[Outro Music]

00:37:33:28 – 00:37:50:07
Hannah
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Diverse Ed Podcast. Check out the show notes for the recommendations of today’s guest. We’d love to hear what you think so do leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with another author from our book Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.

[Intro Music]

00:00:08:11 – 00:01:02:25
Hannah
Welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. Diverse Educators is an intersectional community of educators who are passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Our vision: everyone is celebrated, in every classroom, in every school. Our mission: a collaborative community that celebrates the successes and amplifies the stories of diverse people. Our values: promoting acceptance, increasing visibility, encouraging celebration, creating belonging and enabling learning. In series one of the Diverse Ed podcast, we have ten episodes. In each episode our co-hosts, Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi interview one contributor from each of the ten chapters of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto. Each conversation will reflect on how they have found and used their voice, discuss how identity shapes them as an educator, show the challenges they’ve had to navigate on their journey and identify the changes they would like to see in the school system.

00:01:05:25 – 00:01:18:11
Nick
Hello and welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. My name is Nick Kitchener-Bentley and I’m a lead practitioner and drama / inclusion teacher at Sarah Bonnell school. I’m also on the steering group for LGBT ed.

00:01:18:26 – 00:01:29:09
Yamina
And I’m Yamina Bibi and I’m an assistant headteacher also at Sarah Bonnell school. I’m also a network leader for Women Ed in London. In this episode, we talk to Shaun from the Sexual Orientation chapter.

00:01:30:09 – 00:01:34:21
Nick
Okay, so Shaun, could you please introduce yourself to the audience in one sentence?

00:01:35:15 – 00:01:50:11
Shaun
Hello, everyone. I’m Shaun Dellenty. Dr. Shaun Dellenty now, I’m a teacher, school leader and international advocate for LGBTQ+ inclusive learning communities. And I also wrote the Bloomsbury book Celebrating Difference: A Whole School Approach to LGBTQ+ Inclusion.

00:01:51:21 – 00:01:54:11
Yamina
Oh, I love that. Congratulations, Dr. Shaun.

00:01:54:21 – 00:01:55:11
Shaun
Thank you.

00:01:55:26 – 00:01:59:24
Yamina
What inspired you to write your contribution to Diverse Educators: A Manifesto?

00:02:01:03 – 00:03:32:04
Shaun
I guess what inspired me to write was really reflecting upon where we are right now and kind of where we’ve come to. Since I finished writing my own book in 2009, it was a great privilege to be invited to write for the book, but I guess I kind of wanted to put up a bit of a red flag really, because with my work around the UK and internationally it’s become very apparent that there is pushback from some quarters on LGBT+ inclusive education. And when you are, when you’re kind of working across a range of territories, like I do, very early on in my journey, I started to attract unpleasantness, hate, death threats sometimes and repeatedly was labeled as a pedophile and a groomer simply for wanting all young people to be safe in all schools and indeed all teachers and parents and carers. And what became apparent through my international work was that that was really starting to boil up. Particularly in places like Hungary and the United States. And I guess I wanted to put a red flag up with this chapter and say, look, I’m not saying this is going to happen, but it could happen. And we need to look to the past at the times of Section 28 to learn lessons and to consider where we all stand. If at some point in the future, we are told we are not allowed to support LGBT+ young people, which I hope we won’t be. But what if we were? So that really inspired my contribution to the book.

00:03:33:22 – 00:04:18:28
Nick
And thank you very much for that, Shaun. That’s really powerful. And I don’t want to say shocking actually, because I’m not really shocked, to be honest with you. I think that some of that stuff is out there and obviously it’s happening and people are, you know, having to experience that. So I’m sorry that you’re doing that. But in terms of the work you’re doing, I know what a positive impact it’s having. And I’m very grateful that you do what you do. And it’s really, really powerful. And also, from my point of view, I’d like to congratulate you on becoming a doctor. Well done. We wanted to broaden it out and tothink about the overall chapter, sexual orientation. So could you tell us from your perspective a little bit about some of the different themes that the overall chapter wanted to explore?

00:04:19:14 – 00:10:10:16
Shaun
Yes, of course. I mean, it’s a lovely, vibrant chapter with multiple perspectives, which is what we want. I think the tone is set very nicely by Professor Jonathan Glazzard. His introduction really looks at the context around the Equality Act 2010, which of course we can’t assume will always be in place, but right now it is, and relates that directly to the toxic legacy of Section 28. And interestingly, that’s a theme that emerges throughout a number of the chapters, including my own, and it really does serve, I think, his introduction serves as a very prescient reminder that we shouldn’t take our current freedoms for granted and that progress can go backwards. It’s not always linear. He also introduces the concept of minority stress, and on that link, I think, that we all hold dear between LGBT+ inclusion and social justice more widely. Now, Amy Ferguson’s chapter really touches on the power of authenticity and the power of being empowered to be able to bring our whole selves to work should we choose to. And how that can then enable stronger relationships. And of course, as we know learning communities are built on strong relationships. So it’s about nurturing stronger, authentic relationships and fostering academic success. But of course, that really important sense of well-being and belonging. And Andrew Moffat and his chapter builds very much from his No Outsiders work and uses some really nice practical examples from his books and his texts in terms of how books and texts can be used to explore personal development strategies, for RSE and citizenship. So that’s really practical chapter. Daniel Tomlinson-Gray, founder of LGBT Ted, I think that’s how you say it. I always say it like it’s a teddy bear. I like saying it like that, so I’m going to say LGBT Ted, there we go. It’s kind of cuddly in that way. He very much comes at, approaches his chapter from the point of view of running a charity that has had funding from the government, which was then pulled away and the challenges that it brings. He also reflects upon, you know, as I’ve alluded to, the kind of shift in the political landscape over the last few years and where that might go in the future. But most significantly, the fact that any strategy in education needs resources and funding. Carly Hind’s chapter, I think is really powerful. It moves on to thinking about how we can avoid tokenism. And I think as we get further down the road with LGBT+ inclusion and education, you know, things like LGBT+ history month are fabulous, but they are a starting point really. And, and what we don’t want to be doing is kind of tick boxing and doing tokenistic affairs. So Carly really touches on the need for whole school approaches to LGBT+ inclusion and representation, but really informed by rich opportunities to listen and learn from young people. And I think that’s such powerful advice. And that leads very nicely to Jac Bastian from Diversity Role Models, who again looks at the power of sharing lived experiences and personal stories, and how that can build empathy, how that can build connection and again, forge stronger relationships. Lisa Jordan, her contribution, I think is really powerful in terms of exploring how we can, if we’re allowed to be and we want to be, serve as LGBT+ role models in schools and in workplaces, but that could also bring challenges and that we might not all be ready to step into that place or want to step in that place. And if we do, what do school leadership teams do to support us as professionals? Mahlon Evans-Sinclair, I found this particular chapter really, really exciting and really interesting and thought provoking. It really explores the themes in an intersectional way, themes of sexuality, of masculinity, and of blackness. Looking at the complex connections between sexual orientation, gender expression, gender stereotyping and race, and really encourages us, and I think this is so important, encourages all of us to kind of check our own bias, our own prejudices, not just in terms of non-LGBT+ people, but also in terms of being LGBT+ ourselves and how complex and layered our identities can be, but also our interactions with other members of a school community. Mayur Gupta brings the notion of career pathways and raising aspiration and I think this is something perhaps we don’t talk enough about because historically I think we’ve been so focused on kind of anti-bullying and visibility and not actually kind of thinking what happens to our LGBT+ students when they leave us, when they go out there into the workplace. So his contribution is really powerful about preparation for life, work and career development. And there’s some practical tips in that, making links to successful LGBT+ individuals and businesses and diversity networks in order to spin successful narratives. And then there’s a contribution from somebody called Nick Kitchener-Bentley, you know, and again, what I loved about this is it really does emphasise some of my kind of favourite themes from this work, really the power of sharing stories, the support we might need to do that because not everybody is ready to stand up and share that story. And actually, when we do stand up and share our stories, we don’t know how that’s going to affect us and affect other people. And what I love about this contribution, particularly as an equity card member and as somebody that trained and worked as a professional actor, is the power of theatre and drama and assemblies and public speaking in terms of sharing stories and collaborating and all of that building back into that theme we talked about earlier on social justice, LGBT+ inclusion, diversity, equity and inclusion. That’s what it’s all about.

00:10:11:21 – 00:10:38:14
Yamina
I love that Shaun and you summarised that so well. And yes, we know our lovely Nick has contributed to that chapter. And personally working with Nick, I’ve seen that work come to life and how powerful it’s been as well. And with all of those voices in the sexual orientation chapter, those voices are so powerful in helping things change. We’re also curious about what some of the key challenges are for people within this protected characteristic that your team really wants to address?

00:10:39:24 – 00:14:52:09
Shaun
Yeah, I think what was really interesting, what struck me immediately and again, it was, it’s shocking how often we find ourselves going – it’s not a surprise to me, you know, that tells you something in itself. So it wasn’t a surprise to me to see how often Section 28 came up. You know, it came up in the introduction. It came up in my section and it comes up in a number of other sections, that shadow of section 28, of course, it was a long shadow. It was a toxic shadow. And I still think in some respects it’s still there. Of course, what’s at the edges of that shadow now is the possibility that something like it could come back. And I don’t think we expect it to be quite there so quickly again, that’s shocking, frightening concerning in itself. And we need to be ready for that, however much we can be ready for that. But also things like the failure of the LGBT+ Action PLan. You know, I was there in 2018, I think it was, you know, at the launch of the action plan and heard various MPs spouting rhetoric which they’ve now gone backwards on and failed to act on, you know, and I just think that’s such a waste of public funds, but it’s also incredibly disappointing and again, was I surprised? Sadly, I wasn’t. So a lack of resources, you know, withdrawal of funds and an inconsistency, I think, that came over as a strong theme, and inconsistency in terms of teacher training and readiness, not just for teachers, but for anybody that goes to work in a learning community. You know, when I’m out training around the UK and around the world, I always ask for a show of hands at the start of my training sessions, you know, hands up. Did you ever have any training on LGBT+ lives, histories, experience, societal contributions when you were at school yourself and rarely do people put their hands up. And of course, I never put my hand up because I didn’t either. But then I will ask the same about initial teacher training. And yeah, we get a few hands up now, but the majority of people just kind of sit there looking a bit awkward through no fault of their own. So we know that there’s still a huge deficit. We know that there is some great practice out there, but it’s very inconsistent. And I think that notion of inconsistency of preparation, but also inconsistency in terms of delivery of whole school approaches to LGBT+ inclusion, really came out strongly from a number of the chapters. And this notion of authenticity and kind of almost feeling, particularly as we’ve had more out teachers, almost like a bit of a peer pressure really to kind of come out and serve as an authentic role model in school. And not everybody wants to do that and not everybody’s ready to do that, and not everybody feels supported to do that. And sadly, sometimes people can’t do it and it can go wrong for them. So what happens then? So I think, you know, I could really feel those concerns within this chapter as well. And I think linked to that, some of their contributions, I think there was a sense of their awareness that we are really still trying to play catch up and actually in the space we are trying to play catch up in now is becoming much more of a challenging space. So we acquired it kind of playing Whac-A-Mole, if you like, but actually now we’re kind of being whacked a bit harder from external forces as well. And often, you know, if you think about this work, often in schools, it can be landed or left to one person, one passionate individual or one steering group, one department, when actually it’s something that involves everybody within a school community. So when push back happens, you know, when we’ve got culture wars in inverted commas, when we’ve got the toxic discourse about trends going on, on social media and in the media itself and from some of our politicians, if you’ve just got one passionate individual or steering group trying to take this work forward, which is safeguarding, let’s state what is, it’s safeguarding. It’s keeping people safe. Then that puts a huge load on that individual or that steering group. So it’s got to be a load shared by everybody.

00:14:52:09 – 00:17:17:16
Nick
Shaun, I’m really, really struck by how clearly you’ve been able to put the state of play and how clearly you’ve been able to put the way that it feels right now to be someone who is LGBTQ+ in education, I think you’re describing it very, very accurately. And that really resonates with me in a way that does feel challenging. And I, like you said before, the red flag that you’ve waved in your chapter makes it very, very clear. And some of that has grown, hasn’t it, since actually the book itself was written. So I find it really, really powerful from your response there. What you do, though, I think it’s really helpful and your own contribution is you talk about how we can therefore take positive steps and what needs to happen. And there are some really, really valuable things that I think that everyone needs to hear. And so what I’m going to do, Shaun, if it’s okay, is just read out your key takeaways for the reader. I think they are really powerful and once I’ve read them, I would love to hear a little bit about what they meant to you or why that’s important, if that’s okay. You wrote, Shaun, while whole school approaches to LGBT+ inclusion should explore with all stakeholders the intersections between protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010, whilst also exploring the intersections between LGBT+ and non-LGBT+ identities and experiences, school leadership teams must establish a moral rationale for LGBT+ inclusion, in addition to educating all stakeholders as to the statutory rationale and communicate it upfront and on an ongoing basis. Legislation can change, schools must be courageous in riding out changes in societal attitudes to minority groups by culture, ethos and policies, meet everyone in the school community as they are with compassionate listening and amplify lived experience to develop empathy across school culture, use of up to date bullying and attitudinal data is vital, knowing with precision how biases and prejudice exist within schools, and sadly they do, grounds your aims and lived experience and affords you a robust moral arguments for your ongoing diversity and inclusion work. I mean to me when I read that, I think, wow, you really saw things coming. But I think that you put it very clearly, what people can do in a positive way. Could you just expand a little bit on some of those takeaways and explain why you consider them to be so vital?

00:17:18:13 – 00:23:22:24
Shaun
Yeah, I think let me start with the rationale first, because that was already kind of leaping into my head as we were talking earlier. You know, if you think about, you know, if the Equality Act was compromised around sexual orientation or gender reassignment or if it was taken away completely, what would we have to justify LGBT+ education? Actually, let’s take that label away and let’s replace it with safeguarding because that’s what it is. And actually, if you look at the latest version of keeping children safe in education, you know, it directly refers to the actions that schools take to prevent prejudice and discriminatory bullying, which I think is a positive step that it’s in there. But to me, you know, as far back as 2009 / 2010 when I started my own work in my own school as a result of data around homophobic bullying, I looked at that data and went, this is a safeguarding issue. Children are suffering – not on our watch. And really, for me that was, that was it. So to me that was the only justification and the rationale that we needed to go on a journey. Now what I’ve encountered along the way through my work, I’ve seen lots of brilliant practice. I’ve seen some patchy practice, some inconsistent practice, and I’ve seen, sadly, some times where it’s gone wrong and often where it’s gone wrong, the school didn’t take the time to kind of lock down the rationale and from a moral point of view, it’s around safeguarding, around kindness, compassion, inclusion, anti-bullying, and also from a statutory point of view and kind of do that as a whole staff and then express that, communicate that with clarity and transparency at the outset of the journey to all of the stakeholders and inevitably, if you don’t take the time to do that, you’ll have people in your own staff who might have their own prejudices and biases, who just don’t get what you’re trying to do. We don’t get that it’s safeguarding. And that creates a space in which their own prejudices and biases might grow and foster, and that can cause problems further down the line, similarly with parents and carers and colleagues. So the more time, the more strategic we are at the very outset and going let’s look at the problem, let’s look at why it happens, let’s look at what we’ve got in our arsenal to justify our journey and then essentially go on a PR journey. For me, it’s about PR, it’s about absolute crystal clarity. This is why we’re doing this work and this is why we’re not doing this work. And actually, if you take time to explore the nots, you can actually take each of the kind of top ten standard challenges, barriers that people put up. You know, you’re sexualising my children. You’re trying to groom them, you’re trying to turn them. You know, it’s about knowing that that’s out there and then working with that in advance to kind of disempower those and I think what it does is it gives you as a school, as a school leader, a kind of grounding. And we really need that grounding now more than ever in terms of we’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do and it’s safeguarding. If we haven’t taken that time to communicate that to all stakeholders, we really can’t then blame them because they probably won’t have had an education themselves about LGBT+ people. We can’t then blame them when their own prejudices and fears and misconceptions and myths start to come into play. So I think now more than ever, that initial step is more vital than ever. And I think intersectionality, you know, I didn’t even know what that word was until about five or six years ago. But what it did do was it really forced me to kind of look at people as people, because I think I’ve been forced into sort of looking at gay people and looking at trans people and looking at black people, looking at Muslims and wheelchair users. There’s something about a diversity journey that kind of forces you to do that in the initial stages. But for me, I always bring it back to being a school leader. For me it was always about being present with who was in front of me and meeting them as they are. And that means that there are multiple aspects of their identity and that I have to try and meet those needs with equity. That’s why we became educators, isn’t it? But I think the language of diversity and inclusion, as it was a few years ago, kind of forced us all into silos. And the great thing about the Diverse Educators book, a manifesto and why I kind of alluded to it in my kind of follow up tips, if you like, was that I think people don’t understand, through no fault of their own, that diverse experiences in terms of privileges, in terms of discrimination, that one individual can face. You know, when I’m out training, I share a story that happened quite recently to me where I was attacked in the street and held up against the wall of the Houses of Parliament by Britain First protesters and got accused of being a Muslim terrorist who was going to bomb parliament purely because I’ve got a beard. And, you know, I never expected to experience that particular kind of prejudice in my life. But it happened. And actually, you know, when it happened, it was quite scary. But after it happened, I was very grateful for that experience because then when I got back on the tube and was surrounded by people of lots of different cultures and faiths, you know, I just sat there and thought, is this how it is? Is this how it is when you’re wearing a symbol that’s associated with your religion or you’re wearing a headscarf, whatever it is, is this how it feels? So it opened my eyes. It connected. You know, it was an empathetic moment. Had that not happened, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to feel, which kind of brings us back to the power of stories, the power of empathy, the power of lived experience. And I do think, you know, even for somebody like me that works in this field, it’s hard to empathise with people that are very different from us. So we need to build those connections, those strong relationships that I keep banging on about.

00:23:22:24 – 00:23:53:15
Yamina
I just yeah, I’m completely moved by it. I think today I’ve just been crying a lot, but in a positive way, I promise. I’m just so moved by what you’re saying, and I think I have to tell you, because I talked to Nick about this all the time. There was this one session. It was the first ever Diverse Educators conference up in West Oxfordshire where we got lost. And I remember Nick and I going to your session and it just changed me. It was the moment when I realised that it was so much about the whole child. I’m going to be cry again. Sorry, guys.

00:23:53:15 – 00:23:53:26
Shaun
Now you’re setting me off.

00:23:55:03 – 00:24:37:12
Yamina
You changed me, the way I looked at this. I’m going to stop now. But I genuinely changed the way in which I thought about inclusion. And so much of my story had been, yes, I’m a hijabi Muslim woman. And that’s really hard. And then actually going, hold on, there are so many people out there with intersectional identities who are really struggling as well. And that’s where we are so similar. So I love the idea of meeting people where they are because, you know, we’ve since then tried to do a lot of work around inclusive allyship. And that’s the reason why, because you started that Shaun and I wouldn’t be, and that’s an inner work I’ve done for a very long time. So I’m sorry.

00:24:37:21 – 00:24:38:17
Shaun
Thank you. Don’t, don’t apologise.

00:24:39:04 – 00:24:40:27
Yamina
And I’ve actually got a question to ask.

00:24:41:14 – 00:25:11:08
Shaun
Thank you. We’ll get to that in a minute. I’ll just dry my eyes. Thank you so much. Yeah, I remember that day very well and yeah, I remember that day. It’s yeah, it’s such a privilege when people share their personal story with you. And I’m very, very moved and very grateful to you. But most of all, I’m really excited to hear what you’ve been doing and how you’re changing the world, because that’s what it’s all about. So love, gratitude, respect and solidarity with you.

00:25:11:10 – 00:25:21:05
Nick
I have to say, it has done so much and it is helping within our school and our journey and to be honest it means a lot.

00:25:21:17 – 00:25:42:13
Shaun
I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of you. You know, both of you. I’m so proud of, you know, the whole Diverse Educators network. You know, I kind of wish you had been around when I first started my own work, really, because it was lonely, really. That was the word. I kept coming home and thinking, this is really lonely. So it’s wonderful now that we have these networks and these connections.

00:25:42:13 – 00:27:51:04
Yamina
It always reminds me of my, so when I was working in my NQT school, I was the only kind of teacher who was essentially a hijab wearing Muslim. But I remember a student coming up to me and saying, you know, he was a student in my year 10 class who I absolutely adored and just sat one day and just said, oh, this is who I am. And I remember the day before his head of year saying to me, I think something special is going to happen. Just be aware of it. And I was like, I don’t know what you’re talking about and I hadn’t expected it because I just built this relationship with this wonderful student of mine. And when he told me, I was like, oh, okay. Well, you know, it’s who you are, great, you know, for me it wasn’t a big deal, but I could understand why. And I remember going and speaking to the deputy head teacher at the time, and she said to me, how much of a privilege is that for you, particularly being you? And I didn’t really understand. So it’s like I’m just human. And I guess what she was saying is, as a visibly Muslim woman, you know, a lot of people might not see that and see you as an ally and see you as somebody safe to talk to. And I thought that moment was like, oh, okay. And I hadn’t realised that was a big deal because I’d been facing a lot of Islamophobia in that school myself from parents. And I think that was what connected me and that student because he’d clearly felt something, an affiliation, it’s just wonderful. But yeah that’s like with you Shaun and with Nick obviously but you know, the question, so we were really interested in your commitment to the manifesto where you said, I’m just going to read this out to you, if that’s okay. Learning communities, without exception, must pledge to support and represent all their diverse stakeholders, including those currently failing or falling within the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010. They must pledge to continue to do so should the Equality Act 2010 be part or fully repealed. Schools must stand for their diverse stakeholders not because of political direction, but because it is the compassionate and humane approach, respecting human rights and the right to an education, safe, free from bullying and discrimination. What a wonderful commitment to the manifesto, but could you tell us more about that and how you want to galvanise action from readers of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto, but also from our listeners today?

00:27:51:28 – 00:31:19:28
Shaun
Yeah, I think, you know, my advice would be, you know, if you haven’t done it already as a school community, you know, do sit down, come up with your, come up with your rationale, know why you’re doing it, communicate, make sure it’s on your website. But then imagine, you know, imagine, think ahead, think six months ahead, think a year ahead, think five years ahead. And hopefully this will never happen, but it might, imagine that the Equality Act goes. Imagine that something like Section 28 comes in and sit down and come up with your ten bullet points. This is why we do LGBT+ inclusive education in our school, and obviously that can be linked to your vision, your aims, to your ethos statement. And obviously, I mean, I say obviously it might not be obvious, that’s probably not the right thing to say. But, you know, it’s linked to safeguarding. It’s linked to compassion. It’s linked to preventing bullying. It’s linked to authenticity. It links back to all of those themes that these wonderful contributions have made to this chapter. But I think right now what we can all do is a little history. We can all look back to the story and the time and the experience and the learning of the Section 28 experience, and really steep ourselves in that and understand why that happened, where it came from, and how people challenged it, how people challenged it in schools, how they challenged it in networks, how they challenged it by forming connections and networks, by writing to Members of Parliament, by meeting with members of the House of Lords, by speaking out in the media and through trade unions. We may, for any number of reasons in the future, not just this particular issue, might have to make our voices heard to effect the change that we want to see and the compassion and kindness, inclusion that we want to see in schools, in education. So I think these are useful strategies for any of us working in schools across our entire education careers. And, you know, back in 2008, I was working as a class teacher and as a deputy head. I really didn’t value my own voice, particularly at that point. And I have to say, and believe it or not, I’m quite naturally shy. A lot of what you see publicly, I’ve kind of had to learn by watching other people, if I’m honest, and I never thought that by speaking out I could make any difference whatsoever. But what I learned was once you’ve got your data, you know, if you’ve got your data as a starting point and you’ve got your rationale clear and communicated that grounds you, that gives you that grounding and that enables you to weather storms. And some of those storms can be really, really hard, but it gives you a place to go back to. This is why we’re doing it. This is our data. This is what’s going on nationally. This is what’s going on internationally. And what happens through that, in the same way that school policies and parent home school agreements, they can be used to depersonalise conflict. And that’s really one of my major learning points. I guess the root of my advocacy is it’s not about falling into personal conflict. It’s about finding strategies that we can use as a starting point, as a grounding point for conversation and expectations. You know, and in all of those, all of our schools, are basics. Expectation should be kindness, compassion, safeguarding and inclusion.

00:31:21:09 – 00:32:03:22
Nick
And it should be. But it isn’t always because you actually wrote and we noted in this chapter, you said, educators can choose to validate, celebrate, educate and keep safe some school stakeholders or all school stakeholders. And they can go either way. And we, you know, it’s really interesting because you’ve done an inordinate amount of work professionally to support LGBTQ+ equality in education. I was just wondering about the impact that that work has had and why, when safe, successful, positive environments are created for young people and indeed for staff, what does that do for them?

00:32:03:22 – 00:34:15:17
Shaun
I think well, any number of things. I think it helps things like attendance. I think it helps reduce bullying. You know, it helps in terms of just being able to focus on your learning. You know, just the old saying, you know, I don’t have to think about, I don’t have to feel nervous about walking through the school gate or looking at my mobile phone or coming into the school. Because I know we’re cool here with being an LGBT+ person, being whoever you want to be. That means I can focus on my learning and focus on my studies, and that hopefully means I’ll have the best chance of life. And I think the most successful manifestation of LGBT+ inclusion that I see is where it’s really led by young people, you know, and as one of the contributions writes in this chapter, you know, the value and the power of listening to young people and valuing their lived experience. But more importantly noticing when it doesn’t align to our own experience, you know, I’ve got an LGBT+ youth group at my own school and often their experiences are very different from my own and the experiences that I had growing up. When I hear them, I’ve got a choice of kind of challenging them and kind of going, oh, you know, that can’t be true. Or I don’t, you know, I’m getting a bit funny about it. Or going, that’s really interesting. Yeah, my experience was different from that, but I’m interested in your experience. Tell me more. It’s that kind of open, more open mind and open heart, isn’t it? And that kind, compassionate curiosity to their experiences. But then being able to kind of translate those experiences into messages that can be taken to the whole school community. So again, we’re building those connections, those strong relationships and building empathy. So for me, it’s where it becomes student led. And I think it’s also where, you know, quite rightly students are going, no, we don’t want to do Black History Month, we don’t want to do LGBT+ history month. We should be doing that in every minute of every day, in every single lesson, policy, assembly and strategy, and they’re dead right. That’s how it should be. So that for me is kind of the, you know, that’s where we’re getting to in some contexts, where we go to then, who knows? That’s the really exciting bit if we’re allowed to get there, but we might have to kind of fight to get there.

00:34:16:17 – 00:34:35:27
Yamina
I love that. And I think something I really picked up on is when you talked about, in the chapter, when you first piloted your LGBT+ inclusion training and how a minority of parents really interpreted that, as you called it, as an agenda. And I was really curious about that, actually, about how you challenged it and how others could go about challenging it, too.

00:34:37:04 – 00:38:39:22
Shaun
By establishing and writing down what our agenda was and not being frightened of having those conversations, because it was very clear that the majority of the parents, I don’t think any of them ever had any education themselves about LGBT+ inclusion. And that’s not their fault. That’s just the education systems that they went through. And that creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum comes misinformation, fake news, prejudice, intergenerational prejudice, faith based prejudice. And I don’t apportion any blame for that or judgment. And actually, because I don’t, that makes it easy to kind of sit down with people and go, I can see that you’ve got concerns and thank you for coming and sharing them. Now let’s talk about what we’re actually doing and why we’re doing it and what the potential impact of that is going to be on mental health, on levels of bullying and so on. And so on. So again, it’s almost, you know, if I look back now, I seem to remember sitting down as a leadership team and I’m sure we kind of came up with a four-page document that was basically going to be our response if it blew up in the press or parents complained, and actually we never had to use it. But the very fact that we sat in a room for half a day talking all of that stuff out meant that we had a consistent grounding in terms of being able to justify it from a moral and statutory point of view. But it also meant that when we, because I did a bit of training with them as well, when parents did come in and kind of spout some of the myths and misconceptions, we were empowered to kind of notice and kind of be able to go, okay, you know where that’s coming from, we can work with that one rather than kind of getting drawn into it on an emotional level, if that makes sense. So we kind of just saw the justification, the logic for it, if you like, and took out that judgment and then were able to take it back to our policies. And actually, the day that I came out in an assembly in January 2010, wherever it was, the next morning, I had a group of parents knocking at my door that wanted to come and talk to me. And I kind of automatically went on the defensive. And it was a group of Muslim parents and they, and they said, we want to talk to you. And we just want to say to you, oh, I’ll get emotional again. We want to say to you, thanks for what you did yesterday, because what you’ve done is sent a clear message that whoever you are in the school, you’re welcome and you’re loved and you can be yourself. And that will keep children like you safe. But it will also keep our children safe as well. And that’s the kind of school that we want to go to. And that was, you know, that was my kind of first experience with parents. After I’d come out and it hit the press. And to me, I will never forget that. And I’m very grateful to them. That was such a joyful moment of acceptance and it was so important. It was always important, but it underlined the importance and for those of you who’ve got to know my work for a long time, it used to be called inclusion for all. And that was because it was not, my work was never about making a school safer for one group of people, a minority group. It was always about making it safer for everybody because that’s my job, you know, as a teacher, as a school leader, it’s all or nothing. And if it isn’t, go and find another job, you know, in my opinion. So I couldn’t just come up with a strategy that just flew a rainbow flag, although we did have a specific issue that needed that to be done, but that flag also then needed to broaden out to have every unique, diverse human individual that would ever walk through the school doors, represented and validated within it so that everybody knew that they were loved and they were accepted, but that sometimes there might be aspects of their personality or their culture or their faith or their appearance that some people might not get. And we understand that, and we’re going to work with it positively. And for me, that’s always been the bigger picture and always been the bigger, bigger win. It’s about being kind to everybody.

00:38:41:00 – 00:38:48:06
Nick
You are such a trailblazer, Shaun, honestly. I can see Yamina is crying over there.

00:38:48:06 – 00:38:51:07
Shaun
Sorry, Yamina.

00:38:51:07 – 00:39:30:27
Nick
In all seriousness, so much work that has gone on from you has had impacts far, far beyond your own immediate context. And so many of us, myself included, couldn’t have done some of the work without you doing some of that. So thank you so, so much. And I’m really, really grateful. And the last thing I wanted to ask about was something we spoke about before in terms of the current context, but we wanted to think about what changes need to happen in a positive light. So in an ideal world, what changes would you like to see happen in the school system and in wider society regarding our protected characteristic?

00:39:31:24 – 00:42:32:28
Shaun
Okay. So I think the notion of training comes out strongly from the chapter, but you know, it’s been an ongoing kind of comment that I’ve made over the years. You know, I think if we had high quality, regularly updated training for everybody around LGBT+ identities and added more broadly for anybody entering education, but also, you know, for people like school governors, management boards, dioceses, all of that and that it’s, you know, it’s strategic, it’s ongoing. It’s good quality, it’s consistent. There’s the word coming up in the chapter, you know, the inconsistency. So I think that would be high on the agenda. I think schools could benefit from making greater links to business diversity networks. There’s lots of business networks now, diversity networks, affinity networks that are full of role models. And, you know, they’re not just LGBT+, you know, I worked in Parliament until quite recently and we had Parly out, which was the LGBT+ network. We had the race network, women’s network, disability and so on and so on, you know, and often they are out to work with community projects and schools. So do research and do reach out to them. I think we’re all kind of crying out for a clearer playing field in terms of trans and non-binary inclusion. Will we get it from the current executive? I’m not holding my breath. So therefore again, we need to keep going back to safeguarding, to meeting the needs of young people with equity, but also remembering that, you know, gender reassignment is a protected characteristic of equality still to this day, I think we need a curriculum that explores human potential for prejudice and bias from the outset by exposing us all to multiple perspectives, identities, cultures and faiths from the very beginning, but then using things like philosophy for children to kind of unpick that in terms of how we respond, react to that. And I think the big mistake maybe the education systems make is just by going in our school, we’re a lovely inclusive school, we’re not racist, we’re not sexist and kind of instructing us not to be those things when underneath it we’re human beings and of course, we all are. So I think it’s much more honest to go, this is who we are as human beings. Let’s learn to notice these things when they arise and work with them positively. And as I’ve kind of alluded to earlier on, I think that kind of move away from themed days over time because for some schools right at the beginning of that journey, they’re really powerful. So I’m not saying wipe out LGBT+ history month, of course I’m not. I’m saying let’s aim high, let’s aspire for better, and let’s aspire for LGBT+ people to be represented and included in every single minute of every single day. And yes, they might be black, they might be Muslim, they might use a wheelchair, they might be neurodiverse, who knows? They could be any number of things because they’re a complex, unique human individual. And that’s a brilliant thing.

00:42:34:18 – 00:42:51:01
Nick
What a point to end on. Dr. Shaun. Fantastic. You’ve made, yeah, you’ve made us feel a lot of emotions today. And I know that we’ll have got a lot from that. And everyone listening will as well. So I just want to say a very, very big thank you.

00:42:51:14 – 00:42:59:24
Shaun
My gratitude to Diverse Educators, my gratitude to you both, my love and my best wishes. And I’m very proud of everything you both do.

00:43:00:23 – 00:43:11:11
Yamina
Thank you very much, Dr. Shaun for being with us today. We’ve been Nick Kitchener-Bentley and Yamina Bibi, the co-hosts of the Diverse Ed podcast.

[Outro Music]

00:43:11:11 – 00:43:27:22
Hannah
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Diverse Ed Podcast. Check out the show notes for the recommendations of today’s guest. We’d love to hear what you think, so do leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with another author from our book Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.