#WomenEd Blogs

by Ben Hobbis @MrBHobbis Are you a new leader who likes the idea of leadership but struggles to find the balance between teaching and leading?  Are you someone who wants to be a leader, but not knowing how to get there, feeling a bit stagnant?  You might be a developing leader but in the wrong organisation?  You might not see leaders...

by Miriam Hussain @MiriamHussain_ I became a leader in my teacher training year and those first few years of leadership are what I reflect on the most. Initiatives that I did well but more importantly what I could have done better.  Here are my top thoughts.  Mostly, I reflect on how I could have worked smarter and not harder. Communicati...

by  Angela Schofield @DeputySchofield  Kindness – the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. Never more needed than when things are going wrong. So today, I want to talk about the F word. Failure.There are a lot of supportive conversations around failure, and I absolutely agree that failure is a learning moment. There'...

 by Ben Hobbis @MrBHobbis

I think I’ve always been an ally. But I don’t think I realised this until this academic year. 

So, what is an ally? An ally is any person that actively promotes and aspires to advance the culture of inclusion through intentional, positive and conscious efforts that benefit people as a whole (Atcheson, 2018). It is important to remember gender equality is a matter that affects us all and reducing gender inequality is something that we all need to work on. Men can do this by being an ally.

by Vivienne Porritt @ViviennePorritt

We started WomenEd because women's voices on twitter were often silenced, harrassed or our views were not valued. It's one of the reasons we included a mic in our logo. So we encouraged women to tweet and to write blogs to tell our stories and share our lived experience. 

One of the reasons we wrote 10%braver: Inspiring Women to Lead Education was to ensure the voices of our community reached women who are not on twitter. And over 30 voices are included in Being 10% Braver which, joyously, is published this December - you can pre-order and it's a great Christmas present! And we are delighted to share more opportunities for our community to write and to be heard.

By Kiran Satti  @KSunray3 'Intersectional feminism centres the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context.' UN Women, 2020 Intersectional Feminism at its core invites connectedness. However, there is an hist...

By Dr Jill Berry @jillberry102 After I contributed a chapter to the first #WomenEd book in 2019, we were asked to film a short video of ourselves holding the book, wearing the 10% Braver tee-shirt and explaining how we had been brave and what we might do if we were braver still. I said I'd been brave when I completed my doctorate and wrote a book a...

By Amy Jeetley @amyjeetley

I’ve always prided myself on my sharpness of mind, clarity and understanding. I could pick up things quickly, work things out at a fast pace and recall many things. Over the last couple of years I’ve seen a decline in all this. I was thinking something is wrong. I started losing my confidence, and felt I was incapable of doing things I could a few years back.

by Tara Bryan @Bryan_Amethyst

I’ve got no shame in saying it: I love Calamity Jane. Doris Day was my first heroine before I even knew what a heroine was, and even then I instinctively recognised in Ol’ Calam’ herself something that would often be a hallmark of the characters that Doris Day played in all of her films.

She would always seem to play a woman often confined by the expectations of her time, her place, her job, her society, but through sheer charm, force of personality and feminine wiles she would always manage to outfox and outwit the men around her, who would continually underestimate her.

Sure, she would always end up married, or with the guy in the end, but not before the audience knew that she would spend the rest of their lives together running rings around him and getting exactly what she wanted. A woman after my own heart! Even that song… ‘A Woman’s Touch’. On the surface a silly ditty about two women who decorate a log cabin with trinkets, knick-knacks and chintzy sprinkles, a song that seems so patronising and twee about what a woman can be… but I saw it differently. It was a song about self-sufficiency and how to live a life without needing a man to make all her decisions.

Yes, she ended up with the man who didn’t deserve her, but we knew after hearing that song that she was only doing it because she wanted to.

By Sue Plant @PlantPlant4Sue

I have been reading a lot recently about ethical leadership. It coincided with preparing to speak at the 5th UK #WomenEd Unconference. I haven't been reading just for that purpose though, it is something that interests me and therefore I want to know more. The more I read, the more questions I have.

by Rachel Stone @SBMCoventry   #BirthdayCelebration

Well, here I am writing a blog for the first time.

Why now? Well, probably because I have always been encouraged behind the scenes by Hilary Goldsmith, aka @SBL365, since I joined #SBLtwitter but politely ignored the challenge, until now. It has always been on my tah-dah list to write a blog post, but I have just never really had the confidence to do so. My fears? Would others find me interesting? What could I say to make a difference to someone else? Am I gifted enough to be a writer? I have read so many great things that have made me punch the air in delight for the genuine achievements of some School Business Managers. How could I possibly compete and make a difference?

By Claire Price   @claireprice1

These last few days have felt insurmountable.

Last Monday, on the 25th May 2020, the world witnessed the death of a black man at the hands of the police. Videos of the death of George Floyd circulated and we felt diminished and we felt angry.

On Tuesday, the government finally published their report into the impact of Covid-19 on health outcomes on BAME people in the UK. The report described the problem but failed to address why this may be the case. Given the huge disparity in deaths of health care professionals from a BAME background compared with their white colleagues, this seemed to be a staggering oversight.

by Tracy Goodyear @Miss_Goodyear

It’s 5pm on Friday 5th June and I’ve decided to stop and to just do some thinking. It’s all too easy at a time like this to just carry on, to take action, to plough on through until the bitter end. It’s far too easy to forget to take stock of where we’ve been, what we’ve achieved in these extraordinary times and to plan some next steps, knowing that the future seems so uncertain.

by Keziah Featherstone @keziah70

One of the fundamental responsibilities of any leader is to look after their staff team. Even in relatively normal circumstances that’s difficult; recently it has been a momentous challenge.

I’m the Head of a large secondary school in the Midlands. I have 130 staff – and because we are under a BSF contract I don’t employ the cleaners, caterers or site team. Like most schools the vast majority of the team are female; in addition a significant number are part of the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities. The staff team span all ages, some have underlying health conditions and many are parents or carers.

by Charlotte Belmore @charliebelmore

The area of ‘white privilege’ is the uncomfortable elephant in the room that is not going away anytime soon. The idea of racism for many conjures up images of angry white men shouting offensive slurs with many seeing it as something visible and easy to spot. However, this is not the case as modern racism is more subtle and presents itself in ways that you might not expect.