 Hello everyone, this is Ross at Teacher Talk, the most influential blog on education in the UK. Today I am joined by Lisa Fathers. Lisa is the director of teaching and school partnerships at the Bright Futures Educational Trust. Good morning Lisa. Good morning, how are you Ross? I'm very well, it's lovely to connect with you at long last after all these years. Could you tell listeners a little bit more about who you are and what you do? I can, so yeah I'm Lisa, I'm based in the Northwest and part of the executive team on our multi-academy trust, Bright Futures, but I also lead the teaching school which is called the Alliance for Learning, quite a big teaching school spanning the whole of the Northwest really. We work with over 400 schools, we have a maths hub, a skit, trained teachers in early years, primary and secondary and we have a huge school to school and CPD offer as well. So I've got kind of a dual role leading that but also contributing to the exec level stuff on our trust as well. Absolutely love it, in addition to that I'm a Ross. You're busy, being busy is an understatement is what you're trying to say. It is, it is, but busy is good. Right, so what I'll always like to is just give a little kind of historical context. Could you describe your 16 year old self to listeners, what you like at school? So I was described by my teachers as bubbly which my parents translated as talking too much in class. I was quite overweight. I was, I had a large group of friends but I was moody. My parents would say that I was very moody but I wasn't really, really naughty. I kind of knew which side was the, you know, the right side of behavior and only pushed it a little bit. I hope that my daughter is better behaved than I was. And how did you get on with your exams? How did you get through that phase of your life? GCSE is all right. I knuckled down in the end. I had some really good teachers and, you know, I was under quite a lot of pressure from my dad because my dad is a retired head teacher and at the time he was still, I think he was deputy head around that time. So I almost rebelled against him a little bit because he put so much pressure on me to revise and work and he was a maths teacher so it was all about maths. So that's why I went down the English route actually in the rebellion. At what point in your life did the conversation about being a teacher happen? So I went to university and studied English and communication studies and I think it was in my third year really. I'd always liked, well I loved my subject and I'd always liked young people and children but I was wondering now and about whether to be a social worker or a teacher and I come from a long line of teachers. My aunt, two of my aunties are teachers. My dad was a teacher and I ended up just looking at the length of courses and to be a social worker it was two years and to be a teacher was one so that's what swung it. Fantastic. So tell me a little bit more about your teaching career, your journey and, you know, the kind of opportunities, the roles that you've had and the skills and those types of things. Yeah, so I did my PGC at Manchester University, English with drama, a big shout out to John Keane who I believe is still there and it was a real privilege actually recently to be asked to go back and share my leadership journey with some trainees and then I did my first 10 years at Big Mix Comprehensive in Warrington on the other side of Warrington, Great Sanky where I taught English and drama, had lots of different responsibilities there, I was really lucky and so I was, you know, I had a pastoral role, I had a department role, I even had a subcomment, short one at the local authority around PSHE and I think my favourite role when I was there was being the community outreach director and primary liaison and all that kind of stuff because we were especially at this engineering college, absolutely loved that and then I started looking for senior leadership jobs and at that school there were an awful lot of really good middle leaders so I knew that I'd have to look outside. So I then went on maternity leave with my daughter and when I was on maternity leave I secured my first SLT post which was in a schooling Trafford as assistant head and I was director of specialism and it was a sports college which was interesting because I'm not a PE teacher so it was up for me, it was all about how we use the messages of sport and wellbeing across the school and then I progressed to being deputy head, associate head teacher and then I was looking for a headship, I did a bit of interim headship stuff and then I saw this role which was at the time head of teaching school slash co-principal of Bright Futures and I took that job, absolutely loved it and the teacher school has now grown and obviously now I've got a slightly different title which is direct to Prior to COVID could you just give us a sense of the things that you would be doing at that strategic level you know for your in the director of the kind of ITT school? Yes so I would be going to meetings with lots of partners and doing some CPD delivery perhaps leading a team of system leaders and going into schools doing reviews, coaching head teachers overseeing a number of kind of regional projects and in a way you said what were you doing before COVID? I'm still doing all of that but I've obviously had to learn how to do it very differently. So on that note how's lockdown been for you personally before you talk about your work challenges? Personally oh gosh, honestly I found it really tough both my children were at home my husband was like a caged animal he's used to being at work all the time he decided to take up cycling and bought an awful lot of lycra in quite a short space of time yeah so he was out a lot on his bike and I was left to do homeschool and a full-time job you know it wasn't all bad there were some nice bits as well that you know there was that period of time when the weather was really nice and we had some nice family time but I found it quite a challenge particularly with my eight-year-old son who just wanted to go on his Xbox and it was just like you know in the end we managed about two hours schooling with him a day and it reminded me you know how much respect I have for those early years and primary teachers out there. Yeah absolutely we went through that whole bell curve I got the lycra out I tried I did virtually nothing my wife did the vast majority why I tried the work coming in and thankfully switched to online but you know the initial excitement about homeschool and shouldn't dissipated into maybe a couple of hours a day and then towards the summer term became a real struggle and we're qualified teachers and we're exactly so you do think the vulnerable children parents out there and what a tough gig it would have been and you know your thoughts on the narrative about delivering remote education and laptops and all those types of things. I think that skills have to have a plan well they legally do now don't they but I think that having that backup plan is really useful and I think that we all learned a lot in the last six months and I think that Oak National Academy is a really useful resource as a kind of thing to go alongside what individual schools are doing and I think that the skills that are doing it really well are those that have got a sensible approach in terms of workload as well because you know what I've seen at the moment is teachers managing the the children they've got in front of them at the same time as having to do cater for the children that are at home as well so I think you know everybody can't do everything what were your what was your trust's initial pressures at the beginning and how did it adapt from you know March towards July how was the story. I think at first there were some teachers that adapted really easily because there are you know like in every profession there are some people that are easier adapting than others to change obviously and there are some teachers that have got an awful lot of digital expertise and they couldn't very quickly think inevitably about how to change things up whereas perhaps you know I'm not in the classroom anymore but if I was you know I'm in my 40s and it took me a while to get to grips with some of the technology that I've had to use to the cpd so I think it's peaks and troughs really and I think some of the challenges for us in some of our schools was around the disadvantage and the children that didn't have access to laptops, iPads, even wi-fi and you know when we won't talk about it I'm sure today because there's too much other stuff to talk about on the list but you know when we think about some of the children that actually are thinking about where they're getting their next food from it's no surprise that having you know access to remote learning wasn't the top of the priority list so we've had to work with that and be creative and we had a lot of teachers. Sorry I'm interrupting, it's half term fee today isn't it? No next week. Oh you've got another week to go so what's the mood today with your with the body of your staff teaching stuff? So we break up today in most of our schools honestly people are absolutely exhausted like never before I mean people are always tired at this time of year and we normally limp don't weigh that last week towards half-term but I've never seen anything like it and I think that the head teachers are really tired as well because really a lot of senior teams all they've been doing is managing track and trace internally in school and that pressure of knowing that there's all that other stuff that that people are not getting to and I think the reactive nature of how things are at the moment it's just so tiring. Yeah the best analogy I heard was a bit like being on the ghost train one you know you're going to be it's going to happen you're committed to the ride but it seems in this case that it's a long ride that we're in for and we don't know when it's going to happen and that that challenge of managing kids at home as well as on physically has become just a daily burden I know when I was doing cover as a deputy it's probably one of the hardest jobs to do you know strategically as well as day-to-day management because often the next day something would happen and all your strategy we've got at the window so I can only imagine now with COVID yeah we just a never-ending chore and I want to talk about workload and well-being you do a lot of work so I want to talk about your the Greater Manchester Mentally Healthly School Programme that you do can you tell listeners more about that? Yeah so this was really exciting a huge project across Greater Manchester so it was called the Greater Manchester Mentally Healthy Schools and Colleges Programme and it was funded by health so we had I can't remember the exact figure now but quite a lot of money to roll out an innovative kind of preventative programme so what we did was we got my teaching school the Youth Sport Trust 42nd Street place to be and obviously our health colleague around the table and said right what can we do and to cut a very long story short what we did was we provided 135 schools with a kind of package so four members of staff got mental health first aid training the Youth Sport Trust did a lot of stuff with students in terms of leadership of mental health and leadership of well-being and place to be just kind of senior staff training and to help schools have a strategic plan for mental health and well-being and 42nd Street provided some one-to-one counselling support for those students that needed the most support and actually the impact has been huge and it's made a real difference in terms of culture and ethos but also what we're seeing now is that some of those students that were trained have gone on to continue to be real ambassadors of mental health and actually you know we didn't know the pandemic was coming at the time we did this but it really helped set the schools up to have a a bit more of an infrastructure around those things and a bit more expertise and I mean I won't bore you with the stats and stuff but I'll just tell you very briefly a story about one of the the thing that one of the real highlights for me was there was a little boy from a primary school in Bolton and he's not taken his hoodie off for a couple of years and when he came to one of these mental health conferences that we ran he wanted to put on the special GM mentally healthy schools t-shirts and his teacher said oh no but you know he's just not going to take his hoodie off and because he really wanted to be a champion of mental health because he knew how much he found it a challenge he took his hoodie off the staff couldn't believe it and that was the beginning of him growing as a person really amazing and what impacts this project had on your staff you know for workload their workload and well-being yeah so it's hard to say because in terms of collecting the data of long-term impact etc that's that work still being done but you know anecdotally people felt that the mental health first aid helped them focus on their own mental health better because part of that course really is helping you think about yourself and how well you are and how much stress you've got in your own bucket and what your own coping strategies are to allow you to help other people and I had a number of emails from teachers during that training period saying you know I know this sounds really dramatic but that that training course saved my life you know it couldn't have come at a better point it made me stop it made me reassess you know I stopped doing some things that I didn't need to do anymore um you know I started doing a bit more exercise so yeah it was really nice so um on that note you know I know you get a lot of satisfaction out of leading ITT and I've been thinking about emails this morning that non-stop burn of deleting and replying to emails um what would be your kind of workload top tips just before we talk about your ITT work in terms of teachers managing their mental health over the half-term and trying to slowly switch off and recharge you've been in the game long enough what would be your recommendations well I think it's a difficult question what I would say is that some of the top tips come from the way that school leadership is so for leaders it's about having a really sensible um you know approach to workload and market strategies and and also it's about role modeling expectations so um you know a lot of our head teachers will role model leaving school on time on a Friday because that you know by by itself as an action gives permission for everybody else to do the same it's about not sending emails really late at night um and expecting a reply um it's it's about the culture it's about the culture of the place and I think if you've got the right culture that allows people to say I'm struggling right now um I can't cope with this I need a bit of help I'm not going to be able to get that marking back in or actually you've asked me to do something and I can't meet that deadline that I think everything else falls into place in terms of an individual um for for kind of you know main-scale teachers or or new entrants to the profession I think it's about having a really sensible approach to other working day and you can only do what you can do within a certain time and you know you shouldn't be working till God knows what time at night you know you you have a working day and you try and do you know what you can in that time to the best of your ability I do think time management is important and you mentioned emails we can get sucked into being ineffective at doing all the jobs if we've got our email screens open at the same time and sometimes I have to just shut that down and I have a dedicated time of day where I'll clear emails off um I also think that social media pulls people in isn't it so putting your phone in a different room why you do a specific task for an hour you probably get a lot more done if you've not got your phone with you and some of this is the same advice that I'd give to teenagers as well you know it's common sense isn't it but I think there are some kind of strategies that you'll know of yourself in terms of reducing marketing and things like that so whole class feedback um you know not marking every piece of work really thinking about the things that that you can pick up and talk to people about rather than sitting there with a pen um does that help yeah no it does it's uh loads of strategies so in terms of your IT work um we just fully came online said that you're very satisfied with that work so tell us uh give us a little kind of overview of the things that you're doing the projects you're working on how you've also supported all your trainees or your you know your groups of people through Covid particularly okay so kind of under the umbrella off the teaching school there's an awful lot of different things going on so you mentioned projects then so just to give you a little bit of an insight into some of the projects before we talk about the ITT and the work of the skit so we are currently a DFE RSHG train the trainer hub so we're currently giving training to 400 schools around the new RSHG curriculum and working with head with heads of PSHE finding that really what really rewarding because um what it does is it brings people together and it allows everybody to say you know we don't have all the answers but what we are going to do is work together and work through this collaboratively and I think that those partnerships and networks are really important um in terms of our ICC work so we've got a skit and the reason that we train early years primary and secondary is because we believe that there ought to be a really strong pipeline of new entrants to the profession in all those phases and the reason that we started early years which was our most recent one is because you know as a parent that is the most important part getting it right early on you know catching the children early and you can only do that if you've got really highly skilled practitioners in that area and for me having you know high quality teacher training for early years practitioners is crucial um and then we've got primary and secondary and we have some niche roots into teaching as well so we do the research in school we're currently just looking at the teaching apprenticeship routes um we've got a brilliant skit team and in terms of you know job satisfaction you know it is the best profession in the world I'm still really passionate about being a teacher and being in education um you get the chance to make a difference every single day and so many people go to work and can't say that um so for me it's really really rewarding when I've got you know a load of new trainees and I know that they're really excited about their careers and then you know they do a year with us and what's really nice about our program is that they're actually in school from the beginning um and that that brings a lot of strength because we've been amazing tell me some of the projects that you're you're working on you know what before or during COVID I'm sure but just give us a little overview of some of the key things you're doing oh god I've got a massive long list so we are a girls football super hub right um so yeah we've been designated by the FA so that's about innovation and partnerships and really improving access to not just increasing participation of girls football but also thinking about the different careers in sports so we're using our PE sports hub to try and galvanize interest in and partnerships from schools in that um what else we're supporting probably uh about 30 schools at the moment with different um schools to school support packages um and I have oversight of those at a strategic level um I was at camp during COVID particularly so during COVID um so we still continue to support schools and what we found was that some of the work that for example might be around helping schools improve curriculum or subject knowledge in an area um or perhaps change a strategy or a policy we were able to do some of that remotely um in terms of training as well we we managed to move 90 percent of our training online and I must admit I started off lockdown saying nothing beats face-to-face CPD absolutely nothing there's no way that we can do x y and z online you know it just won't work you can't build relationships and to a certain extent I do think nothing beats face-to-face CPD but I have to admit I have been pleasantly surprised by how how much you can do online actually um and also using some of the functions on some of these platforms enables that dialogue that I didn't think existed at the beginning to happen so um I mean I've been doing webinars for 10 years but obviously through COVID myself everything's online and uh even new clients or new schools and you know by you know week five or week 10 you know when you're checking in with people every week you start to you know digital friends uh and it's it's very much what you can achieve uh through a computer link um we're we're kind of getting to our 20 minute barrier and this is where I start to throw in loads of interesting quick fire questions Lisa to you and my my aim is to catch you off guard oh god but um what I I'm sure you're familiar with Timmy Mallet I like to kind of just get people to respond really quickly have a little bit of fun and but also there's lots of important things we've discussed uh and and some very serious um and important topics such as teacher wellbeing and teacher workload um so if you're happy for me to kind of plow on with some of them um let's let's get started so um my first random question is if I went to I've been to Warrington for um gone maybe 15 years or so um where would we go if I came you know obviously with COVID aside but uh where would we go out to to look around the town look at some historical insights if we had 24 hours together okay well first of all I'd take you to the spin class that I teach um that's at the local gym so you might want to get your liper out then we might go into Warrington town centre and go to the museum um I might take you down the the main street where the golden gates are then we might go and do a bit of shopping and then we'll head back to Stockton Heath where there's loads of lovely restaurants and we'd be able to sit not socially distance and have a bottle of wine how's that fantastic um if you did it all again would you teach train to teach PE or train to teach English and drama still train to teach English and drama I was absolutely hopeless at PE and um any of my PE colleagues would look howl at that question uh what books are you reading at the moment so I'm currently reading a book called Bounce uh about talent development um my husband's a performance tennis coach and he read it and I'm putting it back to you yeah that's it but you'll enjoy it um what's on your desk today what's your project to finish for the half term oh god you don't want to know so I don't know if you know much about the changes to teaching schools but uh there's some national changes come in and teaching schools um our ending next year and teaching school hubs um are being rolled out so I'm in the process of writing uh bid applications out of bed yeah I've done many bids of my career and what would be your top tips for people wanting to go on a subconment or schools looking to develop the range of flexible working for staff uh first of all I'd say that spending time in another school is the best cpd that you can ever have so uh whether that's short term to comment or long term to comments I think that you get so much back uh you see your own school through fresh eyes when you go back to your own school um and even in the most challenging schools that you might end up supporting there are always absolute golden nuggets of good practice um in every school so I would be fully up for that in terms of flexible working I think we've learned a lot about that through COVID actually um you know I you know my my team are all working remotely at home they're working really really hard um there's you know some flexible things there that you wouldn't have thought so you know I could take my dog for a walk at lunchtime then come back and carry on um and I also think that flexible working is something that we ought to think about as a a good employer for our staff that parents um particularly women um what advice would you give your 16 year old self? Be less moody and realise what great parents you had okay um thoughts on the early career framework I think it's a brilliant framework um I think that that that idea of supporting our early career teachers for for five years instead of one or two um is really important if you think about the numbers of you know teachers leaving the profession uh we really like it we think it's very helpful um homeschooling um lessons learned what what advice would you give for everyone else you know the possibility of lockdown and isolation still taking place to be kinder on ourselves in terms of that perfectionism yeah absolutely to be kinder to yourself to um you can't replace a teacher so just keeping some learning ticking over um is is good enough um and actually having some time on your own during lockdown I think you know for your own sanity is really important um what's your biggest career achievement you're most proud of? Oh wow um probably the growth of the teaching skill because I think it's you know partnerships um and networks and collaboration you know I think that they're the things that improve schools because you know you can't do it on your own and it's about building it together and I think probably one of my biggest achievements is that I've brought schools together I've brought people together in a sustainable way. Fantastic um now I know you're already doing your dream job but if you had that off the wall job that you could have done what would it have been? If I've had a decent singing voice I would have loved to be a spy skill but I don't um I always thought that I might be an actress recently I've considered it you know changing career and going into politics because I think that that there are some people that I could do a a better job than them. Fantastic um cognitive science and research and all this wonderful explosion across the profession your thoughts? I think that you know being able to to do stuff that you know has an evidence base and that somebody else has already done some research around it and so that you know the impact it's going to have on the parameters it is really really important and I think it gives you power um I like the idea of teachers as researchers as an ongoing thing you know being curious and that's something that we're trying to embed embedding our training teachers. And what's your number one tip for new teachers to the profession getting immersed with research? Join the Chartered College of Teaching. Okay now your warrant and last word is your kind of football loyalties line that part of the world. Oh gosh so my daughter supports Manchester United, my son supports Nottingham Forest because that's where my husband's from. I've always quite like Manchester United but don't tell anybody. Okay let's not tell anyone okay um who do you recommend I interview next and why? So I would recommend that you interview Eva um John Stevens who's my CEO because he is amazing but in an understated way um or um Cal Hodgson who is the principal at Seedomat Academy in Garten um he's a new head and he's doing an amazing job. All right you're gonna have to put me in touch with both of them and we'll see what we can do um working listeners find out more about your work your professional work as well as maybe personal like Twitter channels things like that Lisa. Yeah so um the teaching school website is alightsforlearning.co.uk I am on Twitter at Lisa Father's AFL and the teaching school is tagged into that so yeah you can find me on there. And my final question um what would you hope to be your legacy? Gosh that's a tough one um I hope that schools continue to work together uh in a collaborative way um and that that actually that there's more priority given to uh teacher-teacher training um you know I've been very disappointed this last week to see that the bursaries for next year in terms of ITC have been reduced so you know I hope that that being a part of my legacy is that there's a continued influx of teachers to the profession in great Manchester. Lisa thank you very much I'm definitely going to be checking out more about this you know your greater Manchester mentally health program sounds fascinating and highly complex and of great value to our young people um it's almost half-term um I wish you all the best and get lots of rest and all the amazing work that you're doing in your trust so thank you for sharing thank you for your time and thank you for all the amazing work that you do to nurture the next generation of teachers and I we I hope to catch up with you physically. That would be lovely thanks very much Ross. Thank you Lisa.