Leadership for children - why it is so much more than being the 'cloakroom monitor'
Claire Stafford
Curriculum & Leadership for Children Expert
Over the last few years, Children’s Leadership has become my passion. I am fortunate to work for a Trust who, when you have a bright idea, give you space to run with it and create something brilliant and this is what we have done at Transform. We have always focused on developing adults as leaders and through the research project carried out by the team behind Transform Applied, we have been able to really unpick why our approach works. I have always been a strong believer in using what we know about effective teaching and learning with children, with adults as part of our CPD, so surely this approach would work the other way too. Why couldn’t we adapt the brilliant work that we were doing to develop adult leaders, and apply it to our work with children?
Our Leadership for Children programme was initially born out of an over-excited chat with my colleague Liz Barratt following an Oracy Conference down in London. We were inspired by hearing the children from School 21 talking so passionately about their education and it was clear the impact that developing their communication skills had had on their confidence, behaviours and identity. Sat in a bar at the train station, waiting to come home, we enthusiastically drew up plans for a number of sessions using the Future, Engage, Deliver approach which we had developed under the guidance of its initial creator, Steve Radcliffe in his book ‘Leadership; Plain and Simple.’
We started our Leadership for Children Programme in September 2018, working with two Pupil Parliament representatives from each of our schools. We focused on developing our own leadership identities, raising aspirations and helped them to bring about change in the community through charity projects. They were encouraged to share their learning back in school by leading assemblies and presenting to Senior Leaders. We evolved the programme through the first year across six sessions, inviting in inspirational speakers and local leaders from business to tell their lead learner stories. At the same time, I developed a programme that was given to our Trust schools for them to lead, which would ensure a better foundation for our Leadership programme the following year.
Calling this a programme however, is misleading. It makes it sound set in stone and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Although we had an initial outline, the more we grew and developed our work with school leaders, the more we could apply our learning to our work with the children. Our second year was very different. The learning that had been identified through the FED Leadership Project with our TSA schools, ensured that we could focus very heavily on three key foci: identity, behaviours and confidence, with Oracy Development and Global Citizenship as the vehicle and context. Before Covid hit and put an early finish to this cohort, six of our children had presented to over 200 leaders from education and other business sectors at our annual Leadership Conference, sharing what they care about for the future. In a Greta-esque turn of events, they flipped the conference on its head and questioned the moral integrity of the adults in the room by asking ‘what are YOU doing about it?’
The majority of our children are from areas of high social and economic disadvantage. When they started out with us, they were able to talk about the issues that the world faces, but the drive, passion and above all ability to communicate this effectively was not there. I have delivered generic ‘off the internet’ leadership programmes before with children and the outcomes have been satisfactory, but there is something crucial about understanding the identity of the young leaders that you are developing. You have to know their story, their community, in order to fully appreciate what they care about and what their barriers are. It has to be authentic. We tapped into the narrative of our children, made them consider what they wanted for a better world, gave them the leadership confidence and behaviours to believe they could make a change and then ensured they had the tools to communicate it.
Years ago, as a class teacher, I somewhat embarrassingly used to think I was doing a good job of developing ‘leadership’ in my children by giving out roles and responsibilities in the classroom and around school, such as the cloakroom monitor or responsibility for making sure the pencils were all sharpened etc. But this is purely operational with no clear vision. Scarily, it also gave children a false idea of what leadership is. When we first asked the question ‘who is a leader?’ worryingly the children identified them as loud, primarily male world leaders and could not comprehend how they, as children from a variety of multicultural backgrounds, could possibly be one. This broke my heart a little, and made me determined to ensure that our children could not only see themselves as leaders with a clear vision, but also had the knowledge and understanding to question, challenge and hold others to account for their actions.
In my role as Curriculum Lead for our Trust, my passion for developing children’s leadership underpins so much of the work that I do. I want our children to know and own the future that they want and have the tools to overcome any barriers, regardless of their situation. I also firmly believe in the importance of a robust body of knowledge that underpins this.
Our children no longer see leaders as lone wolves who shout loudly- they see themselves as global citizens, who put others first and use their leadership identities, confidences and behaviours to bring about positive change in their community alongside those around them. They themselves are leaders growing their own community of other leaders and that gives me a whole lot of hope for the future.
As the inspirational Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:
‘Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.’
For further information on our work with leaders at all levels and to read our national Leadership study in full please get in touch with me or one of the team.
Claire Stafford, Associate Headteacher with Transform Trust, October 2020