I began my professional career as a teacher through Teach First, a graduate programme training teachers and placing them in schools which serve impoverished communities. I remember the headline data of the programme that “poorer kids are eighteen months behind when they take their GCSEs” and “the school achievement gap between rich and poor has not narrowed in a century” (Teach First). After being placed in my school where the majority of students were placed on free school meal; the difference between those children who had affluent backgrounds, and those who did not, often transpired in results. Therefore, since the beginning of my time as an educator I have always had an interest in closing the disadvantage gap.
When I joined my school in 2018 there was a clear group to target. The school had always been successful at targeting pupil premium and SEND students- it was one of its main strengths. The focus was shifting onto boys. Boys were doing worse in results and this trend has continued. It is a bias which is mirrored in headlines that we read today, The Irish Times writing, “Boys don’t try? Why so many boys are falling behind at school” (2019) and The Financial Times, “Why are boys falling behind at school?” (2018). In my first year as an English teacher, I also had a “male only” nurture group and therefore my primary concern in terms of achievement (and behaviour) was with boys. In addition, the English department ran a lunch time intervention for boys who were underperforming based on their SATs.
Over the course of my teaching career, I have continuously reflected on my practice. Yet it was only as my third year began to end that I noticed my bias towards boys. The amount of one to one help within the lesson and the differentiation I offered, often went towards boys. My own preconceptions that boys were more boisterous; more challenging and more easily distracted were manifesting into my practice as asking boys more questions; checking male student work more regularly and punishing the boys more quickly. Whilst the girls were receiving less sanctions, they were also omitted from having any impact on my teaching. I conducted my research to see if this was a school wide problem. Whilst all teachers agreed many girls were eloquent in their answers it is much less likely to see them offer responses in class. Furthermore, in the 16 lessons I visited (2021) it was five times more likely that a boy would be asked to answer, than a girl.
Therefore, I decided to begin focusing on the young women in my classroom and reading about the experience of young girls at school today, and I realised that the headlines of boys underperforming hid a plethora of problems facing girls. One third of British girls feel unhappy about their appearance by the age of fourteen (The Times); girl’s happiness plummets much further than boys during adolescence (The Times); 37% of British female students at mixed-sex schools have personally experienced some form of sexual harrassement at school (UK Feminista and NEU, 2017). These facts conveyed the desperate need for female students, especially those in mixed schools, to have safe spaces within the school building where they could feel empowered and cared for. Subsequently, my focus moved away from within the classroom to outside of the classroom.
A colleague and I had been training throughout 2020 to set up a female empowerment group within our school. This has been led by a charity called Be Her Lead. The programme trains teachers to be female role models in their schools and champions for girls throughout the school building. The programme focuses on ensuring that girls in low income areas, and especially those from BAME backgrounds have safe spaces within their schools to speak about issues that are important to them. However, the school year of 2020-21 was heavily disrupted by the COVID 19 pandemic and restrictions were placed on school clubs due to the disturbance of bubble systems. This stopped us from carrying out an intervention as we envisioned and we had to delay a year. Despite this, the creation of this group straight after the pandemic seemed like a perfect opportunity. Undoubtedly, the pandemic has affected and continues to affect the lives of the teenagers within our care, with academics noting that, “compared to adults [the] pandemic may continue to have increased long term adverse consequences on children’s and adolescents’ mental health.” This will be discussed in greater depth later. Therefore in September of 2021, I set up a Be Her Lead group.
How the intervention was run
For a group like this to feel safe, both the colleague and I agreed that a limited number of students was crucial. The Head of Year 10 and I discussed around twenty girls to invite to the first intervention. We wanted these students to be for girls who would really benefit from a safe space to discuss the issues they felt as they moved around the school and as they got older. I had not taught this year group before, so I was shocked by the students the Head of Year 10 had recommended. On first meeting, they are all bright and articulate, even if slightly shy. However, as the intervention group reaches it’s last few meetings of the academic year the amount I have learnt about the daily struggles they face in a modern day secondary school has shocked me.
I teach in an average sized inner city London school, with each year group averaging about two hundred students. Therefore, many of the girls had never met before and thus our initial meetings could be tinged with awkwardness. However, what was important to my colleague and I was that this space belonged to the girls so we would respond to what they wanted to talk about. In our first meeting, this was exactly what we asked. Girls were supposed to write what they found difficult about being a teenage girl and what they wish they could discuss at school. We found a lot of recurring issues: insecurity; identity; social media; boys; body image; goals and ambitions; family struggles.
From here, the creation of the agenda and the intervention was easy. It was run at lunch time so the girls would arrive at the same classroom every week, we would briefly, or not so briefly, discuss our weeks and then we would complete a creative activity which often led to these issues being discussed. From here I will discuss some of these interventions in detail.
Intervention 1 (Appendix 1)
The first intervention we ran, it was important for us to not only understand what the girls wanted to be discussed but also how we could ensure that the group was a space that would feel safe and comfortable for the girls. The group made three core promises within their Be Her Head Code which were, “Empathy”; “Respect” and “Bravery.” They then made promises of how they would act within the group to abide by these key rules and goals. Each Be He Lead code should be individual to the group. It identifies the student’s promises to one another for the group to run smoothly and allow students to be vulnerable in a space where they know they are safe. It was important to my colleague and I that the group is inclusive to all and also to attempt to remove a sense of hierarchy between us and the students. This has definitely been a learning experience for both of us. Taking away the hierarchy is something that simply is not discussed at teacher training. Yet, how else could a space be safe if the students felt like they were constantly being watched by two people who had all the answers when it comes to adolescence? All the answers to the questions they were asking? Neither my colleague nor I know what it is like to be a young girl of colour, growing up in a city and therefore we wanted to be two people that the girls could trust to support them, rather than two women who were the oracles of knowledge.
(Appendix 1)
Intervention 2 (Appendix 2)
A problem faced by many of our students is that they simply do not know how to support themselves in moments of weakness and stress. The girls we were supporting had a worrying lack of resilience. This seems to have been exacerbated by COVID-19, where academic and personal problems were able to be ignored and hidden whilst simultaneously the unrelenting fear and worry surrounding the news cycle and outside world increased anxiety within many of our students. So in our workshop we thought about self care. This is a phrase that seems to have become a platitude in the twenty-first century, yet as a teenager the need to rest and reset is hugely important. So we had the girls write some of the issues they faced, many of them writing “looking good” and “PE”. We had students draw themselves, and think about what inner reserves they had to help themselves when faced by these problems. Then we also had them draw “survivor boats,” with their emergency supplies on board such as, “music; reading and binge watching.” Each island was supposed to represent the physical and mental struggles each student experiences. When you have fifteen students in a room, it is an experience for them to trust you with information that can often be private. Yet the group also allowed students to realise that they are not alone. Many of the problems faced by one girl were faced by another two in the group.
Intervention 3 (Appendix 3)
To continue in the vein of problems experienced by them all, my colleague and I also ran a workshop focused on the theme of identity: shared and individual. Each student decorated a puzzle piece to represent different aspects of their personality- origins; dislikes and dreams- and then placed the puzzle pieces together which represented their shared identity as students of the Academy and members of Be Her Lead group. This illustrated to the girls that whilst they often speak about feeling alone and different, actually there are always commonalities between them and the other girls in our group.
Impact
It was difficult to find definitive numerical data that supported how Be Her Lead had made an impact on our students. Many of them were not failing academically when they entered the group and whilst many suffered from SEMH issues, they were generally a group of girls that were present to school. They did not enjoy school, they found many aspects of the environment challenging, yet they attended. However I think the student voice that my colleague and I conducted with them, goes to show that they did find it made an impact.
Case Study A- When I first came to Be Her Lead I was facing some tricky times at school. Whilst our school is diverse, I do not follow a Muslim religion and my background is Korean. So for a very diverse school, it was difficult to find students who were like me and I was being teased with racist comments regularly. When I finally told a teacher, the boys were told off and I got the apology I wanted but I still felt like I was not being heard. Be Her Lead is a space and time that I can talk about things and I know I am always being listened to. It doesn’t take courage to speak at Be Her Lead because all of us always feel happy and comfortable.
Case Study B- I found the beginning of Year 10 a really stressful time. Every lesson was a reminder that our GCSEs were not far away and the academic pressure really became a lot for me to handle, yet everyone else seemed happy and confident so I tried to act like I was too. Once I came to Be Her Lead and became friends with people I had never spoken to before, I realised we were all acting. Everyone was finding Year 10 stressful and this shared experience made everything seem so much easier.
Next Steps
This group is supposed to be a springboard into long-lasting change at my school. Whilst it may not reach a huge percentage of a year group, or a large demographic at the school, the personal testimonies of Be Her Lead “alumni” show me that this is a group that needs to continue. Whilst my colleague and I plan to continue to support our group of students through Year 11, something that they have requested, we also with the train other female teachers to become leaders of similar female empowerment groups. Specifically, we both agree it would be good to have a more diverse group of teachers leading the groups. I feel uncomfortable thinking that my colleague and I, two white; cisgender;heterosexual females are the best teachers to continuously lead an intersectional female empowerment group. I feel putting diversity to the forefront of our future training is of critical importance. Both my colleague and I have tried very hard to limit hierarchical structures within this female empowerment group and thus, it is crucial that a system of privilege based on race does not manifest.
The lack of focus on females within the community and the institutions we have is systematic. There has to be groups within schools that encourage girls to feel empowered and emboldened to not hide their feelings. As the girls said in one of our workshops, when the girls feel safe to speak, they “are free”. (Appendix 4).
