What does love look like in your classroom?

It has been an interesting week, mostly. The least interesting thing about it (by a long way) has been a visit from Ofsted to inspect the University of East London ITE provision that has sucked the life out of us all and added enormously to workload. It was my 8th Ofsted and I imagine will be my last. We have been wonderfully led in the inspection, and the at times heroic efforts we have made together will be the great and long lasting benefit of Ofsted trespassing on our patch.

But the week has been framed by four interesting experiences that have strengthened my conviction that Ofsted (as a representative of the neoliberal thought-world governing English education) is barking mostly up the wrong tree. The crass disrespect for schools, parents and teachers (never mind children) shown by this morning’s DfE announcement about retaining the four-grade system is a case in point. Never mind barking up the wrong tree. Simply barking.

The first experience was a visit to a student teacher in a school in Ilford on Tuesday morning. The class was not the best behaved and I was interested in the relationship of my student, an effective and hard working beginning teacher, with her ill-disciplined class, and during the feedback and conversation afterwards, I asked her: ‘What does love look like in this classroom?’ I didn’t want an immediate answer, but it seemed to me that it was an important question to ask, deserving of serious reflection.

The second experience was the evening of the same day. After having prepared some interminable presentation for Ofsted, I attended the launch, at the Guild Church of St Katherine Cree in Leadenhall St, of a new report by Theos entitled Love’s Labours: Good work, care work and a mutual economy by Hannah Rich.

It is part of a three-report series that Theos have published called Work Shift, which seeks to chart the changes in work patterns experienced by society, explore the ways in which work can shape (and be shaped by) our relationships with others – colleagues, family, friends, neighbours, and wider society – and try to understand how ‘recovering an appreciation of these relational aspects of human labour might even make our working lives better.’

It is, like everything that Theos puts its considerable collective mind to, timely, very relevant, theologically robust and well researched. The other two reports are about the rise of lone working (1 in 3 of us!) and insecure working – zero-hours contracts and the gig economy (The Ties that Bind: the rise of insecure and lone working and the search for mutual bonds) and about the need to relearn the beauty and joy of our divine calling to work, in the face of work patterns that are debilitating and how we might ease the conflict between the goods of employment and the goods of all the unpaid work we do (Working Five to Nine: how we can deliver work-life integration).

Although these were spoken about, the focus was on Hannah Rich’s work around the care sector, appropriate as the church we were in supports the large number of mostly immigrant workers in the hospitality and care sectors. The central argument of the report is that there is a crisis facing the adult social care sector in the UK, both economic in nature, but also relational. It means that paid care work is seen as low-grade work because of its poor pay, arising from a deep misunderstanding of both care and love. Social care has the potential to reimagine love and care within a careful economic structure where everyone benefits, because they are a set of skills of unique applicability in the social care sector. This intersection of love, work and care offers a way to revalue the work done in care homes, especially if we use the Christian theological perspectives of love and dignity, which can re-route the debate away from just cost and price. The report tries to re-imagine love in public, and how that helps us all ‘to value care work differently and more highly.’ (p.9).

There is a really significant chapter at the end of the report (p 37-45) that seeks to understand that love is work, that it is a set of skills and disciplined attitude of heart that has real economic worth and needs paying well, so that

‘good working conditions for care workers…can be envisioned as an outworking of love towards them, just as good quality care is an expression of love towards those in receipt of it. Love needs to be accounted for not just in how we think about the cared-for, but also for the carer, and to do less than this risks justifying exploitation’ (p.45)

The potential answers to the question I raised for my student are beginning to emerge here.

The third interesting experience was the privilege of being invited as a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching to attend an event, hosted in the House of Lords by Baroness Morris of Yardley (known to those in the profession as the wonderful Estelle, the only recent Secretary of State for Education who has actually been a teacher!), concerning the ethical and professional aspects of leadership. We were forbidden from sharing photos, so the montage above is from the House of Lords promo material and gives an idea of where we where and the view from the terrace.

We heard from a number of people after Estelle, but the burden of the event (apart from networking, scones, cream and gallons of really good tea!) was to explore the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education and to push that agenda forward both with the DfE (a representative had appeared from Sanctuary Buildings) and to extend it towards a proper, chartered-body upheld professional code of conduct for teachers, for which collaborators were eagerly sought.

Talking to a colleague from a catholic multi-academy trust, we both noticed that the framework had its roots in a Christian understanding of leadership, but that its roots were nowhere referred to, and that the word ethical might be a stand in for the word love. A report on the implementation of the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education is appearing in May, whilst a summary of the framework is here.

And so to the last experience, again in an Ilford school. This for me answered many of the questions that the other three experiences had raised. The school was a UNICEF rights-respecting school. I was shown to the classroom to conduct the observation, but whilst writing notes on the observation I was conducting, added this:

Children came in and spoke to me, saying good morning and introducing themselves – polite and confident. This is a sustained culture of politeness and care and mutual interest – and anticipation of learning – unlike any other class culture I have come across in this job.

Somehow, not in a complete way, but in a way that led to these Year 2 children being able to work easily in groups without squabbling, being left to work and able to work collaboratively, of being deeply respectful of their teacher, the student in the class, and me (a stream of children came and introduced themselves and shook my hand), I had found a place where the ‘public love’ of a teacher, expressed as a set of skills and attitudes of heart, had had a rich impact, a first glimpse of what love might look like in a classroom.