 My guest today is Ross McGill, a man that probably needs no introduction, but I will give an introduction. Ross is the founder of Teacher Toolkit, the company he started in 2008 with a simple Twitter account. Ross is an experienced senior teacher with a career history spanning 25 plus years, working in state schools across London. He's also an award-winning teacher, author and blogger. He's frequently asked to speak at national conferences across the world and is asked to reflect on educational developments around education and policy. In 2015, Ross was nominated as one of the 500 most influential people in Britain for his influence on education, with his blog and resources having reached over 11 million people. That is a phenomenal achievement. Can I just say, Ross, that is a phenomenal achievement. My family won't speak highly of me compared to all these things written down. Well, I haven't even finished. He's the author of seven books, including Just Great Teaching, Mark, Plan, Teach, 60 Seconds CPD, and more, which you can find on his website. I know, I know, and one last thing, he's currently training teachers and studying for his doctorate at Cambridge University. Ross, welcome to the program. Oh, that last one, it reminds me, I need to get down on my research. I'm running out of time. I've literally got five months to upgrade. Crack on, crack on. Yeah, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I like the pressure. Great to meet you, and thank you so much for joining us today. That's my pleasure. Hello, everyone. It's, I think, you know, it's a great day as we're recording this in October. And after all, everybody's been through this year. I'd like to start with, could you share some of your tips for having a happier work life? Well, you know, I've been through the whole bell curve with workload as a teacher. And the blog, you know, became a full-time job at its own right, which I've tried to manage for easily five years on top of working 50 to 80 hours a week as a school leader. All my own doing stroke passion, I suppose. But I guess when I start to recognize that I was burning out and it started to impact on family as well as my performance in the classroom as well as my performance at home. Being a good dad and, you know, a husband and things like that. I, you know, recently, we got a border collie puppy and it's been the best thing that we've done. For me, especially, it's the only way that it gets me to switch off two walks a day. And lockdown, I did the kind of purchase on a bicycle. My boy got his bike upgrade, I suppose, off stabilizers in May of lockdown. So it was a good excuse to get myself a bike and then suddenly I could take the dog for longer and faster walks and border collies, as you know, got notoriously high energy. So it was good to kind of double up on my fitness as well as tie the dog out. So that's been the best thing for my own managing my stress recently. You know, and I'm 46 now, probably in my early 30s, I wouldn't have been interested in doing stuff like that. And, you know, your priorities and your people around you are different. So, you know, earlier on in my career, probably, you know, gym or out partying at the weekend with friends totally trying to separate myself from teaching altogether. But I think all in all that the advice I always give to teachers specifically is a hour of sleep a night, a large bottle of water on your desk and you're five a day. And it sounds silly, but it is critical. Absolutely, absolutely critical. And I like the doability of that, you know? Yeah, it's easy. And it's, you know, we hear it all the time with, you know, five a day, that type of stuff. And, you know, sometimes, you know, thousands of days in my teaching career, I wouldn't eat lunch. I'd go to work on an empty stomach and I'd come home on an empty stomach. So it's any surprise that you get, wanna get through. But, you know, that's the nature of teaching is very, very similar to the medicine industry I suspect as well, people working long shifts. Yeah, yeah, funnily enough, I was just on looking at Twitter before we started recording this and there was a tweet about that, very much about lunch, who has lunch, as if there's no expectation of having lunch. And as a well-being, I'm a well-being consultant. Well-being is my thing for 30 years, I've felt something. And it's just so critical. But we've squeezed it out of teaching and what's the answer there? How do we find time and space to take care of ourselves? I think, you know, and I'm far from innocent, but I would probably, you know, you go back to teaching research on well-being, you'd struggle to find any academic sources maybe eight or nine years ago, but now it's in abundance. And, you know, I suspect in the next decade, we'll really start to see research saying that happier teachers, schools with great well-being policies are producing better outcomes. The jury's still out for many people, but the real point I want to make is we have people within our own profession treating others as unprofessionals. So I'll give you one example that I heard recently, a teacher at home who's tested positive for COVID being asked to set cover lessons, which in the teaching sector, that's pretty standard setting cover lessons at home for most people, which saying that out loud is just bizarre, using your own phone to contact parents and children to check in while you're also sick at home with COVID. And that's a real question for school leader. So, you know, several questions. One, it's highly inappropriate, but two, why working at school and two, why do school leaders do that to teachers and then worry we have a recruitment crisis? And there's no perfect solution, but you know, some of these simple human attributes are being lost and squeezed and whatever the word, but just, you know, we're doing very inappropriate things to each other. So, you know, teachers want to be trusted and respected, but yet we do these things to each other. So it's any wonder that parents and politicians don't give us the respect that we desire because we don't respect each other. Mm, big, big subject there. So how, where does that start then? Does that start with respecting ourselves and our boundaries? Well, you think of all aspects of school life. The government underfund schools full stop. You know, only today there's an announcement coming out that they're now canceling all the kind of budgets for training and whatever else and recruitment, despite seven years of missed recruitment targets and a decade of underfunding. But we all know through COVID unemployment figures out today, 1.4 million people and 9 million people still on furlough. There's been a huge shift of people going towards teacher applications. So, you know, if I work with Office for National Statistics alongside the government, I say, look, we've got loads of people covered over the teaching. We're not gonna have this recruitment crisis. Let's get rid of this funding here. And we cannot have a world-class education system on a shoestring budget as simple as that. And we all know that research always says the quality of teaching matters. But if you just getting people to get their QTF status and then stick them in the classroom, whether it's through a fast track route or a bit more deep and meaningful, without the kind of support around them, especially in the first couple of years as we know with teacher attrition. We're just repeating the same old, same old. So, you know, the vast majority of these politicians do not have a scooby-doo. And what's the answer there is? Well, the answer is highly complex. You know, I guess that's why I started blogging because I wanted to share the reality. So now, 12 years later since I've been blogging, you've got all sorts of people doing it in any industry, whether it's on the front line of LHS or undercover as a police officer. And it just raises awareness. And people become, people grow a kind of popular fellowship, I guess, through being known, being liked for their contents and providing some reliable data that challenges orthodoxy, I suppose. And I think that's what I've done. And you can't, you know, you might be social media, not everyone can like or will like you, not everyone likes what you have to say. But if you can find your own allegiance, whether it's with Toby Young and his free speech union or whether it's with teacher toolkit and on the voice of teachers to have a better kind of working conditions, then you'll, if, you know, going into a kind of my blogging theory, I suppose, when your content's regular and consistent and it's practical for the people that you intend it for, then it will naturally grow in popularity and that's snowballs and that's what's happened to me. I read something that you wrote recently that leading a school through COVID is like riding a ghost train. You know it's gonna happen, you just don't know when. Yeah, now that's not mine. I like that analogy from a colleague that I connect with on LinkedIn and I asked for her permission just to share that. And it's the best analogy I've heard. And, you know, it's rabbit and headlights for many of us. But that was the night, I've had a few analogies and that's been my favourite one that's stuck, that, you know, you're gonna get someone jumping out on you and we've all been there with my siblings or children or some mates on a ghost train. You know the jump's gonna happen, but it happens when you least expect it and that is pretty much like COVID. I think, you know, one million kids, I think, out of school at the moment in England's and we're not even in the depths of winter yet. Yeah, yeah. And what, let's talk about COVID then. What's it like? What are the threats now to teachers, to pupils and young people? What do you foresee in your, you know, in the... Well, you know, some rhetorical questions. If you take pupils out of a school and move them somewhere else, what makes the school? Is it the building or the community? And, you know, what will schools look like in 50 years? Will it be a building or, you know, if I was proficient at football and I was travelling the world with Arsenal or West Ham, I'm logging into tutoring lessons and virtual lessons and, you know, if you think of your kind of Moodle and Blackboard systems with university, we've been teaching online for nearly over 20 years now. Schools with lack of funding and not necessarily teaching online or no huge desire to, have obviously been caught unaware through no fault of their own. But this whole notion of virtual schools and teaching online, obviously now everyone's doing it and we're all up to speed and we've still got a few little things to go and now it's an expectation of government and off state, I suppose, that you will provide us but the reality for teachers is I've got 30 kids in front of me, two of them are at home self-isolating, I've got a time to teach them online and set work and interact with them but at the same time I'm with my class five hours a day. So that's the real threat at the moment. My insights, teacher marking is the greatest burden all teachers face, that workload issue. Right now it's shifted to planning or adapting resources to online in particular or that recovery curriculum. So those are the kind of immediate threats. I think the long-term threat is we've got a perfect opportunity to overhaul assessment in particular and we're just going to go and do what we've always done. Kids are going to sit exams in a hall then they're going to be ranked and filed from top to bottom and we're going to just keep perpetuating this myth that exams are the best indicator of performance and our disadvantage or people bringing kids to really work harder than most to try and even get an opportunity to get into college or university or whatever it is. So that's currently I see the kind of biggest threat stroke regrets to the education system as we know it. And in terms of this ideal opportunity to reform the system, where do you think we're missing a trick there? And I know that we're straying a little bit from well-being but I think all of these things impact well-being so directly and so powerfully. It's worth the discussion, I think. What trick are we missing and how could we not miss it? How do we... I think as ever, people will say this in any workforce. It's when the government have a disconnect from people on the ground. So all the kind of things that I read and are part of or was part of when I was a teacher is when teachers are around the table in form and policy, the kind of, I guess, the announcements or recommendations are a bit more respected if the general population of that particular industry are aware that there are people represented and not just union representation. So I think that's the trick but we're all working under new circumstances. We just haven't to respond very quickly and who would want to be the prime minister? I mean, you're going to get it in the ear from all angles regardless of what you do. But when you think of other departments such as Gavin Williamson and whoever else doing their bits, I'm sure they've got the same pressures and whatever political ideology you have, you're always going to get it in the ear for whatever you do. But I think my preference, particularly with education and teacher well-being and disadvantaged pupils is we need to get to a place where education policies is a kind of cross-party political interest stroke protection and that we have some common goals. But I always ask this question, which is fantastic. Do you believe in some people succeeding or just some? And there will be some people that will just believe just some. So if you think of grammar schools and whatever else, there you go. And then we think of parents that might be on high salaries and send their kids off to certain schools. They don't necessarily want roughs from people premium background who carries a knife in his pocket and difficult circumstances at home. So this illusion of parental choice, I believe all schools are good regardless of off-stead gradients. The bottom line for parents, I guess, is safety and happiness and then getting an education that will lead towards a career that the children choose. There's so many forces, opportunities into college, industries, perceptions of skills and all those types of things. I don't know what the answers are. And certainly through COVID, it's gonna make it even more difficult. I think I was reading the research by Education and Dynamic Foundation that are disadvantaged kids. I've seen a decade behind it, but I've actually read something somewhere. I've got to dig out the source, but I think 500 years I've read somewhere for disadvantaged kids to catch back up on the work that we've done over the last 10 years. I'd love to check that source. Can you say that again? I think 500 years seems far-fetched, but I'm absolutely certain I've read or heard that somewhere that that's how long it would take. The work that's been done over the last 10 years to get to level the plane field with disadvantaged kids has been undone and it would take that length of time to get back to where we were. But I'll say it with caution. I'd love to check the source, but regardless of the timeframe, we all know that our disadvantaged pupils are gonna be pushed really further behind, but things like the National Cheetah Room Programme start in and other things that are gonna help. I am optimistic in some aspects, but that announcement just that I've read before we came online about the training budgets being taken away because we've now got loads of people that want to be a teacher. We can't achieve this world-class education system that I think we all want, not just if you're on Gavin Williams' team. Talk to me about what your insights are from social media, Ross. What do you... Oh, we have to start. So it will... I'll just do it in parent time, just in what's a kind of a snapshot of... Oh, so my Twitter channel is the easiest place to go to. In a normal month, I get 10 million impressions. So that's how many people will see my tweet on their device. Right now, that's dramatically reduced to about two or three. And for me, predominantly the vast majority of people are teachers that follow me, 75% are UK audience. So if it's dramatically reduced, I'm always thinking, am I sharing the wrong things, not relevant, that type of stuff? And I understand I'm not in the classroom. I'm not necessarily sharing things that teachers may be talking about currently, but the resources I share, I do think will make a difference. But I haven't done this for a long time now. It suggests to me that the working habits of teachers, which is pretty much shaping and influencing my own academic research, is that you come home, seven o'clock at night, kids to bed, have a bit of tea on the sofa, watch, go back to be with all the COVID stress. People don't have time for social media at the moment because they're just anxieties much higher. So that well-being aspect of school life is a bit more stressful. The example I gave you earlier, I might have COVID, I might be self-icentered, or I might be in school teaching socially distance with 20 kids in the classroom, but 10 at home. And I'm having to do a double-up act of delivery online in the classroom and at home as well as physically in school for five or six hours a day. And then the kind of surveys that I've been conducting, planning and meetings have now become the biggest workload issue. And it's just how our professionals respond into the pandemic, I understand it. And it's never an easy feat for any school leader to reduce that burden on teachers. But it always goes back to, if you give education to your panel here or there, then if that went to schools, you can reduce teacher contact time. So they have a bit more time in a day to do their marketing and planning rather than doing it at home on a Sunday. And it goes back to something that said earlier in the podcast, we treat each other like this. If I keep asking you to reply to an email after school hours or do your marketing or call these parents at home on your mobile phone bill that you pay for, we're just perpetuating the expectation that this is what we'll do. Whereas if we all said no, and we did it in school hours, we'd suddenly shift the influences of the profession versus funding and the terms and conditions of the job. You know, when I first qualified to be a teacher on blackboards without computers, the kind of workload dialogue didn't include emails. Whereas today we all know that we are spending night and day in front of a device. And if we're traveling work during norm stands, swiping left to delete all the emails to try and keep up and reply before we even get to our office. So there's lots of research on email culture now that, you know, out of office responses, great source in Germany, that if you email me over the teacher holidays, your email's automatically deleted, it notifies you and it actually sends it again when I'm back in the office. And I love that. And it's little things like that that can help improve our own understanding of each other's well-being as well as our own and our expectations of working and how we want others to also work. But there's a great TED talk by Nigel Marsh about well-being and it's a good 10 plus years old. But when I watched that, it really was a eureka moment for me. And he said, if you do not define your own version of work-life balance, someone else will define it for you and you might not like their definition. And it really resonated with me. So from that point, I deleted the apps on my phone that connected me to work. I've came up with other little simple ideas for me to at least have a reference point if I needed to do anything. But I really started to take control of, you know, particularly the notifications because I had, you know, the school leadership life stuff going on as well as four or 5,000 tweets a month. And that's just Twitter, never mind my website, you know, the cart checkout stuff and all the other platforms as well. So I had to take back control. And what would you say to somebody listening to this? Who is a teacher, maybe a middle-leader, maybe a senior leader, who is saying, yeah, that's easy for you to say for me to put these boundaries in place. How do I actually do that? What advice would you give to somebody to say, I need to take more control of my... Well, you know, my best friend's father who passed away about 10, 15 years ago as the best piece of advice he said to me was, people do what they want to do. And that's it. If people want to work 80 hours, they will. But at some point, each of us will have, I use the word crisis loosely, a mental health crisis. God forbid that we do, but if it does come to you at some shape or form, it's either going to impact on you personally or the people around you. And we all have different forces in our life, whether it's happiness with your home circumstances or not or kind of things lurking behind the scenes. But people do what they want to do. So if people want to work, if I run home at 3.30 to go and pick up my son on the school run, I shouldn't give that perception or be given the perception that I'm lazy and I'm running home because I might run home, do the school bit, put him to bed and then at seven or eight o'clock I'm catching up with my emails and I want to work then when it suits me and my work, I'd rather not suit you somehow. This is a deadline just in any industry, not just teaching, but the challenge with teaching is it's always imminent, particularly with cover lessons at the moment during COVID. That increases anxiety and stress and all sorts of things compared to, like you and I sit in the home now without 30 kids around us. And you don't have five hours of lessons tomorrow with 30 kids in front of you. It's a huge stress. And that Sunday night, feeling a lot of teachers will know what that feels like. And if you're a former teacher like myself, to remove that, it's a huge burden lifted. And I'd only say now, this is my fourth year out of the classroom full time. I find Sunday nights are a very happy place, whereas for 25 years, I wouldn't say all of them, but the vast majority were not very comfortable circumstances. And I'm talking like meeting your friends for dinner, popping to the cinema on a Sunday night, I would never, ever have done anything like that, probably in the last 10 or 15 years of my career because of the, I'm a design and technology teacher, so if you go out and have a glass of wine or something, I'm not saying you get the shakes, but you've got to be, if you're using machinery and you've got 30 kids in front, you've got to be on top of your game, so just that. But then if you're going out and you're having that meal with your friends to try and improve your wellbeing, you have a late night during the working week, you're 11 o'clock and you're at the house at half six and at your school desk by half seven. To be one step ahead of the kids and you've got 30 emotions in front of you, it's high pressure and it's not like being a pilot or a doctor, I appreciate it, but it's a difficult profession and it's very easy for teachers to burn out. I do think how on earth did I manage 25 years? Yeah, I know, it's common and I see it, I'm in schools well online or in schools a lot and I see it and it's heartbreaking because then we're losing so many talented people. We need to be looking at this in different ways and as you say, it's not an easy situation to resolve its complex. I fully appreciate that. Oh, where to go, Ross? Where should we go from here? Yeah, what's life like for you as a blogger? It's good fun, I'm just looking to the side of me now. I mean, I've naturally, through no fault of my own and no desire, I'm in pretty much the world of kind of education, PR and marketing and although I enjoy it, I don't want it ever to be the only thing I do. My passion's in the classroom with teachers and kids and before lockdown, I was doing that in schools all around the world so I can't wait to get back out really. But the push-pull challenge for me was doing my own stuff, sharing resources and ideas and opinions on my blog, writing my books and my research when I can get down to it. But I get a lot of product placements, I suppose, as the official type or I guess that kind of influencer type and I've been doing it for seven or eight years and it started through companies offering me some freebies to trial and returned to tweet or blog about it and now it's probably five years ago, it started to be great things for the school, where it's be saving the school 20, 30,000 pound in various products and site licenses just for me to share the resource or blogger journey of how we used it. But the issue was it blurred the lines of my work and my blogging life and the school would benefit but I would be doing the work after school hours. So sometimes it would suit the school and then I could kind of half do a tweet or a blog at my office desk after school hours or more often than not, it was at home till midnight or on a Saturday or Sunday, it just became too much. But you know, working with UNICEF, Microsoft, the Department for Education, not yet after but that day will come, I'm sure. The Red Cross and anything and everyone, the education and downward foundation and just thousands of different software companies. It makes my lens wider just like the blogging data does, it tells me what teachers are reading as well as me being in school. So I kind of got that macro lens of the teaching community and in also different countries in the world. So professionally I've been to about 15 countries in the last two years. So my insights, which is what I tried to put in my book Just Great Teaching, which is trying to unpick the challenges all schools face but how they deal with them in their own context, whether it's a country or a part of the UK or a particular building or particular school structure whether it's grammar independent or what have you. So yeah, my blogging life, when people ask that question, why not a head teacher? You know, and I've done various acting, very temporary kind of acting headship roles in my cover for the day or a week or a term, nothing significant but I've been a virtual head teacher when I look at my blogging life and trying to analyze it, things that I've seen and the people that I'm dealing with whether it's parents, students, off-stud inspections or just the teacher wanting a resource on my site. I've been managing my website as a virtual head teacher without really realizing that's what I've been doing. So that data I've been collecting on a daily basis has been very fascinating. So the blogging, I got probably a tipping point in 2014 where I used to love coming home from work and the blog was just a hobby and it was an escape and I think my boy was probably, what was he, three years old so it was just something to do because you don't necessarily get out and see all your mates as much as you used to so it was just something to do at home on the sofa, on the laptop and through no fault of my own or maybe it's my fault, it's become a full-time job. So now probably about 40,000 teachers have a login inside the site and they're doing all sorts of interesting things behind the scenes and that's led me to kind of data protection, privacy policies, legal expenses, copyright issues, the whole spectrum which I never thought a blog would take me into so I now have to be quite careful because it started as a Twitter blog, free blog just like anyone else but now it's developed into a company, a business and it pays my salary, it funds one or two kind of entrepreneurial and charitable endeavors and when there's a little bit extra cash in the bank I can kind of go off to the far reaches of the UK and work in some disadvantaged areas that can't necessarily pay your usual CPD, never mind whether I'm cheap or expensive and just to get out and do some work that's of value I suppose but I need to put food on the table and the blog has given me another conduit to do that and probably about 2007, in fact early maybe 2014 my blog was turning over an advertising income that was equivalent to my teacher salary sorry, school leader salary so it's a huge sum of cash so a long story short when I lost my job to teaching and took redundancy and then had to sell my house to claim my debts my blog gave me an opportunity to reinvent myself and then soon it started to make an income and then the books and things and I thought well that's a good way to pay my debt so it became part of survival more than anything if we'd strip everything away it was to survive and feed my family then when I got back into school it started to pay the bills and then maybe pay a holiday and then after five years of not having a holiday when my son was born premature we got our first holiday off to Portugal my book royalties paid our flights so that was a real win and then last six, seven years it started to become a place where I can employ five or six other people and just try and share my wisdom and support teachers and challenge policy where I think best fits so that yeah, it's kind of snapshot of where I am day to day right obviously now I'm home full time but I would probably say 75% in schools and probably 25% at home but I'm trying to get a balance before lockdown to do both so I think going forward post pandemic whenever that happens for us all I'd like to sustain that 50-50 split because I do enjoy the website but it's nice to get out and see people and see the reality Definitely, definitely Prior to this I was looking around your website and I noticed a blog about your childhood experiences do you want to share a little bit about that to explain to our listeners what happened Yeah, sure, so I'm a sexual abuse survivor childhood male sexual abuse didn't tell anyone for 32 years I mean I told close relationships probably less than one handful but speaking out first started with the police and then with my mother and then kind of immediate family and then go into a place where so if people read the blog they'll see that it kind of starts off with a safeguarding perspective as a teacher and how organizing a safeguarding event at my own school as a school leader sitting on the table talking about it or not me specifically but the trainer at the front of the room talking about that you know some people in this room may have experienced it and then to hear a colleague next to me and say yeah right under his breath and for me there to not challenge it as a school leader number one but two as a sexual abuse survivor maybe think right I need to sort this out and that was in 2011 so we're looking at six years later before it even got to a place so it's been a big journey for me for 32 years you know seeing comments from Boris Johnson about sexual abuse historical cases and shouldn't waste police funding on that all these types of things all the kind of Chelsea Stoke City football cases and the more people speaking out particularly social media I've been a real help to kind of bring that energy up to the surface I suppose but I guess the best thing for me was a non-verbal signal but the doctors really I think I was just going for a general kind of cold or tonsillitis checkup and in the men's toilets there was a poster male sexual survivors survivors UK's the charity a London based organisation and they just had a green badge and I think I parked that for probably this must have been maybe even 10 years ago so it must have parked it into my psyche then saw it again and then as more things brood along I contacted them and then they sent me a huge bag of green badges and then one of my own ways of starting to learn to talk about it was wearing the green badge on my suit so you might find one or two pictures on my website or social media with a green badge on my lapel and I wore it because I knew one day someone would ask me and the funny thing is although it didn't happen on the high street it was one of our best friends that came around to our house at the time and just fleetingly was that and there I was in front of my wife for the first time having to tell somebody and I did it and then I just literally I was like 30 seconds away from running out the door anyway but I did it comfortably, calmly jumped out the door walked out the tube and thought that was a big step so that was part of all the healing process I suppose but what I wasn't prepared for was the flurry and I'm talking thousands of messages publicly and privately of other people disclosing so apart from me having sympathy in signposts and various websites some of this it's all relative I suppose experiences but abuse is abuse some of the stories are just shocking and had mums leaving me voicemails on the phone saying my son's just read your blog and we've discovered it's my husband or another chat has kept it quiet for 60 years so I think just by speaking out it's going to help others and I know that when I wrote it it did have a huge impact I don't necessarily tweet it and share it often but I have it quite proudly on my personal Twitter as I just kind of signpost so people know that it's part of my identity and I live with it from the age of 13 so that's all through school unnoticed all through university with all my friendships growing and university trials and tribulations all through my professional career as a teacher and I think also being out of school I know recently before I left full-time teaching I started to slowly talk about it subtly in some conversations with individuals but then going public on my site knowing the platform I had I thought it would be a missed opportunity and plus good therapy for me I never really pursued counsel which I don't necessarily regret I've just think I've learned to deal with it to a place where I'm now managing and I did all the right things police and what have you tried to hold the person to account so yeah, I think that's probably a whistle-stop tour of how, why, what and who and stuff like that Thank you for sharing that, Ross and what would you hope that people listening to this would do either on their own behalf if they've experienced something like this or in a safeguarding issue if there's a safety... I think one is there's always going to be someone else sadly who's probably experienced the same thing as you so there will be someone that's ready to listen or can share their own story or experience of how they learn to deal with it whether it's privately or then when public you know, I don't... I guess being able to talk about it it's just like I'm doing now it's good therapy for me but otherwise it just would have been then a conversation I never spoke about, ever so that'd be my advice there'll be someone out there that can help there'll be definitely a charity I think it raises awareness ultimately what we're trying to do is educate the next generation so that these things stop happening but recently there's just something in the press about the Church of England these things are horrific there's no place for any forms of abuse in our society particularly in a leading country such as ours but it just makes your heart sad that whether you're an adult or a child it's just not a very nice thing to do to another human being so I hope that people listening maybe get some reassurance That's about it, are you ready? I'm so scared, I'm so scared I'm so scared, I'm so scared I've been demanded to go and play football with my son there but yeah, that's why Freddie's my inspiration as well I want to make the world a better place so I can only use my own resources which are my own stories here he is again Do you know how I want to play football? Because you're always on the computer and I don't want to play football You think you're going to sit here and don't do any work? Anyway, yeah I hope it kind of signposts people to speak out or to support other people that do and actually genuinely listen to them but it's not, you know often the critique is why did it take 32 years? Well, because it did it's taken me that long to process it and you know, we all have different cultural capital some of us have got good schema where we can use different resources know how to talk to other people whether through learning needs or whatever take a longer time to process it so I think we should respect people regardless of how long it takes them Absolutely, and it's the most private thing and there's no expectation for anybody to publicly declare something that's happened to them privately it would be my wish that they would get support Yeah, I guess my one regret is you know, 32 years ago is very hard to track any evidence so, you know, if people are listening where something has happened recently and I know a lot of people might have various risks associated, you know, threats to life and stuff like that so that's obviously different context but the sooner you speak out, report and share evidence with the people that need to know the better for you bringing these people to justice would be my top tip Yeah, thank you Is there anything else you'd like to mention before we wrap up? You know, I just want to say really that, you know teachers are doing incredible work right now and you know, earlier in the pandemic where we saw a lot of politicians and media great teachers for sitting at home on full pay and not offering, you know, that remote learning the reality versus the perception is always very different you know, teachers are working flat out in any industry you'll get one bag of egg here or there or a bad example, you know but on the whole teachers are through kind of the characteristics are incredibly generous and hardworking people and sometimes whether it's school leader I say that cautiously but all whether it's government try to take advantage of that and you know, I think we should, you know particularly now, so we're in October and schools are open, kids are in school thank goodness mental health and all this exam debate up for grabs you know, the anxiety on teachers still today and the kind of little notice of you know, lockdown aside but a little notice about exams or how things are shaping out it just doesn't necessarily give them the respect that they deserve as a qualified profession and you know, if we look at all OECD countries across the world, you know teachers in England work the highest number of hours and are paid one of the lowest salaries and we need to change that and this political rhetoric about world-class education it's just nonsense so to teachers listening you're doing amazing work I think blogs like myself and anyone else anyone else that can share their stories and get the reality out to change perceptions only a good thing I think so yeah, huge respect to our teachers working there Yeah, for sure, here here Thank you, Ross I've been speaking with Ross McGill you can connect with Ross on Twitter at teachertoolkit and his website is teachertoolkit.co.uk where you can find out more about his membership site his five-minute lesson plans or five-minute planning books, blogs, podcasts and much more, Ross thank you so much for all you do in education genuinely you're a force for good and it's been... it's been a privilege speaking with you, thank you Thank you very much