What does it really take to lead a school and what keeps people going?

Simon Botton is an executive headteacher in South Gloucestershire, leading two primary schools and serving as Head of Inclusion for a seventeen-school multi-academy trust. He has been a headteacher for nearly twenty years and is the author of Head Teachering: A Practical Guide with the Messy Bits Left In.

Simon wrote the book because he was concerned about a profession telling its story badly, editing out the doubt and difficulty, and in doing so, making headship feel unattainable for those considering it. This conversation is the antidote to that: grounded, honest and quietly hopeful.

Together we explore:

• Why Simon wrote Head Teachering and the question the book is trying to answer.

• The edited certainty of leadership culture online and why leaving the messy bits in matters.

• Moral purpose as the thing that sustains and what Simon means by measuring success in decades.

• Isolation in headship: what it looks like when leaders retreat and why connection is not optional.

• The wellbeing realities of twenty years in the role - compartmentalising, exercise and the difference between long hours and productive ones.

• Coaching new heads through overwhelm - arriving with no trust in the bank and learning to live with the chaos long enough to address it.

• Whakapapa: the Māori concept Simon draws on in his final chapter about legacy, responsibility and what we pass on.

What would it mean to lead in a way that still matters fifty years from now?

In this episode I chat with Elly Chapple - TEDx speaker, author of Diagnosis: Human and founder of The Power of the Pause training. Her work draws on two decades of walking alongside her eldest daughter, Ella. Her book is not, she is careful to say, a book about disability; it is a book for every human. It is about presence, vulnerability and what we lose when we let the fast, overstimulated version of life set the pace.

In this conversation Elly and I talk about:

• Why the work of education starts with the adults, not the children.

• Sympathy versus empathy and why empathy has to linger.

• The bin lid, the front brain and what gets in the way of being present.

• Edges: knowing where ours are and honouring other people's.

• Why difference doesn't threaten us, it reveals us.

• The small practices - breath, pause, safe relationships - that bring us back to ourselves

Links to Elly's website, her book Diagnosis: Human and TEDx talk are below.

• Website - https://ellychapple.com/
• TEDx Talk - Diversity is the key to our survival: The Shoeness of a Shoe
• Diagnosis: Human

In this episode, I'm joined by Karen Gebbie-Smith, ASN Support and Development Officer with Aberdeen City Council, and Angela Johnston, Head Teacher at Daneston Primary School. 

Karen has built a series of professional learning book groups for senior leaders across the city and in this conversation, we focus on one of the early texts - Good Autism Practice for Teachers by Karen Watson. Angela has participated in the group and has found the text and the process so engaging and useful that she took the model back into her own school and watched it ripple outwards — into classrooms, into culture, into the way staff talk and communicate. 

Together we explore:

• How Karen came to use book groups as a professional learning tool and why a shared text has done something that ‘training’ alone often doesn't.

• The book itself: why it struck the balance between accessible and genuinely challenging both at a personal and collective level. 

• The question at the heart of every session: what do you know now that you didn't know before?

• The shift from fixing children to examining environments and how language change drives culture change.

• What it takes to create a space where experienced leaders feel safe enough to say I don't know or I got that wrong.

• The ripple effect: from Karen's senior leader cohorts to Angela's whole-school book groups and the difference it made.

Would you like to know better, to be able to do better?

You can find Good Autism Practice for Teachers by Karen Watson wherever you buy your books. Or you can connect with Karen Watson via her website or her podcast.

I’m joined by Guy Claxton (Emeritus Professor of the Learning Sciences at the University of Winchester's Centre for Real-World Learning) and Emily Poel (a Berlin-based embodiment practitioner and trainer). Their new book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education, is now available.

The book makes a serious, scientific case for putting mind and body back together - not as a wellbeing add-on, not as a few movement breaks in a long sit-down day, but as a different starting point for thinking about what learning is, and what schools are for.

In this conversation, Guy, Emily and I talk about:

• Why the mind-body split, traceable from Plato to Descartes, still shapes what schools believe intelligence is.

• The 4Es of embodied cognition: enactive, embodied, embedded, extended.

• Why doing might be more primary than knowing.

• The "body-mind".

• Resilience as the willingness to stay intelligently engaged with something difficult.

• Epistemic safety in the classroom, and what it asks of teachers.

• Embodied leadership - not just as slowing down, but as nuance, discernment and options.

The question they want every reader to sit with: what would an education at which everybody could win actually look like?

Bodies of Learning is available from 26 May - https://www.bodiesoflearning.org/

What does belonging actually mean in a classroom and what does it require of us?

Zahara Chowdhury is a teacher with eighteen years of experience across secondary, further and higher education. She is the author of Creating Belonging in the Classroom (Bloomsbury) and hosts the podcast School Should Be. 

Zahara brings both professional knowledge and personal experience to this conversation. Writing about belonging as a South Asian Muslim woman who grew up normalising assimilation and a practitioner meant writing from a place of real vulnerability. What she offers is not a framework to implement but an invitation to look more honestly at what we create and for whom.

Together we explore:

• Why Zahara wrote Creating Belonging in the Classroom.

• The belonging triangle: representation, connection and voice and what each of these looks like in practice.

• Why belonging is not one-size-fits-all and why understanding your community comes before anything else.

• What we consistently underestimate, including the power of a smile, a question and being seen without judgment.

• Fear, repair and what to do when belonging breaks down in a classroom.

• What Zahara wishes more people in education were saying to one another.

Zahara leaves us with this: what would change if we started seeing teachers as people?

Connect with Zahara through her blog or her podcast, School Should Be.

What does it mean to think well and what gets in the way?

Kati Driver is a former civil servant and coach who works with people in public service, helping them think more clearly, more honestly and more deeply. Her practice is grounded in Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment, a framework built on the belief that the conditions we create around thinking matter as much as the thinking itself.

In this conversation, we explore what that actually looks like, not as an ideal, but as something that can be woven into the texture of daily professional life, even in busy, relational, interrupted environments like schools.

Together we explore:

• How Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment has shaped Katie's practice.

• Attention as a component of thinking - what it means to give it fully and why it's transformational even in two-minute pockets.

• Equality as a starting belief, the belief that everyone you work with can think well for themselves and what shifts when you hold that.

• Incisive questions - what they are, how they work and why they matter. 

• The promise of not being interrupted and what becomes possible when people are given space to reach their fifteenth thought.

• Silence as alive, not empty and what we miss when we mistake quiet for absence.

• What changes in groups and teams when they change the way they think together

Katie leaves us with the question: what would change for you if you knew everyone you work with could think well for themselves?

A short introduction to Conversations in Education — what this podcast is, what it values and why it exists.A podcast that takes seriously the human complexity of working in schools, early learning centres and learning spaces of all kinds.

If you've followed Space to Think, you'll recognise the spirit. If you're new here, this is a good place to start.

Depth over speed. Inquiry over answers. Honest conversation about education as it is lived, led and felt.

In this episode, I’m joined by Miranda West, publisher and founder of the Do Book Company and the person responsible for turning the world’s doers into authors.

Miranda spent nearly three decades in publishing before a family move to Switzerland, a rabbit hole online and an email to a small festival in West Wales led her to start something entirely her own. Since 2013, the Do Book Company has built a collection of over 50 compact, practical guides - from sourdough to knife sharpening, improvisation to loss - stocked everywhere from independent bookshops to the Tate.

Together we explore:

• How a cold email to the DO Lectures became a publishing partnership

• The alchemy of commissioning - why some incredible talks will never become Do Books and a guide to knife sharpening sold out by Christmas.

• Handing full creative control to designer James Victoria and why those white covers became iconic.

• Do Pause, the book that found its moment twice: first on publication, then again when the entire world came to a stop.

• Miranda’s take on AI, where she draws a firm line and why she thinks transparency is the only way through.

• The new series she’s exploring - practical guides for teenagers, written for them to buy themselves.

Miranda also walks us through what’s coming next from the Do Book Company including Do Loss, Do Blue and Do Curate by DO Lectures co-founder Claire Hieatt and a beautifully witchy October release on ancient wisdom and folklore. 

You can explore the full collection at thedobook.co and find the DO Lectures at thedolectures.com.

Curiosity creates space. This final Wild Fragment draws on a simple but powerful invitation from Michael Bungay Stanier to Stay curious a little longer.

As a closing reflection for the season, this episode gathers the threads of the previous fragments - understanding, listening, tending, slowing - and offers curiosity as a kinder stance in leadership and life. Not as indecision, but as openness.

A question to consider: What might happen if you stayed curious a little longer?

Listen to the original episode here.

What if time isn’t something to manage, but something to relate to? This episode revisits my conversation with Sarah Stewart and the suggestion that We can’t control time… but we can change our relationship with it.

This reflection explores how our experience of time is shaped by attention, presence, and meaning and not just schedules and productivity. It invites you to notice the quality of your time and to consider what might shift if time were approached with curiosity rather than control.

A question to consider: What is your relationship with time right now?

Listen to the original episode here.