Space to Think: Conversations In Education

Professor Toby Greany joins me to talk about the Sustainable School Leadership research. It's a three-year study of school leaders across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland that grew out of the Leading in Lockdown studies.

Toby is Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has spent over thirty years researching how school leaders interpret and enact policy and how place shapes leadership.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• What "sinking" and "thriving" reveal about leaders' experience and why hours worked don't tell the whole story.

• How leaders' time has shifted from instructional leadership towards care: attendance, behaviour, wellbeing and additional support needs.

• Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto's five elements of care, and what they offer school leaders.

• Hopes and fears for Scotland, including the research's description of the system as sometimes "stultifying"

• The protective or sustaining influences. 

Toby’s closing question: What does care look like now and how do we get that balance right between education and care?

You will find the full research reports at the Sustainable School Research website, including the full report, technical reports for each country and the new interactive dashboards. There is also a podcast series with the research team. 

Dr Emma Hepburn is a clinical psychologist and the illustrator behind Instagram's @thepsychologymum, known for bringing evidence-based psychology to a wider audience through her drawings, including her recurring character Brian the Brain. She's the author of several books, most recently The Anti-Burnout Book.

Together we explore:

• How drawing for clients became an accidental platform 

• The decision to write about her own burnout in The Anti-Burnout Book

• The specific signs of burnout, including ones that don't appear on a checklist

• Wellbeing as an individual sitting inside a wider system, not just an individual responsibility

• Teaching as a high-cognitive-demand profession without built-in space to think

• Life-work interference, and keeping your own needs at the centre of a sustainable life

Emma's closing question: How do we put the wellbeing of teachers at the heart of our conversations and see it not as an add-on but an integral part of our role?

You can find Emma on Instagram at @thepsychologymum or via her website (https://dremmahepburn.com/), which contains links to her books and products. You can read more from Emma on Substack at The Wellbeing Society. 

The Anti-Burnout Book 

A Toolkit for Happiness 

A Toolkit for Modern Life

A Toolkit for Your Emotions 

A Hug In A Box 

Sheila Ball is a doctoral researcher at Leeds Beckett University, where she leads the Flourish programme and her work centres on Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment. Her doctoral work is about cultivating spaces of possibility in education, and in this conversation we unpick what that actually looks like in practice.

Together we explore:

• The role of attention in the Thinking Environment.

• Why three minutes can be a surprising amount of time.

• How judgment and pace work against thinking in schools.

• Trust and equality as outcomes of practising together.

• The Flourish programme and the value of imperfect, small-scale experimentation.

• Why there’s no silver bullet, and what that means for how change actually happens

Sheila's closing question: How can schools be spaces where everyone genuinely feels they matter?

You can learn more about the Flourish Programme here, where you’ll also find vignettes from past participants.

Six years after our first conversation, Jenni Donohoo and I revisit collective efficacy - a term now used far more widely than it was, and often stretched beyond its original meaning.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why construct integrity matters, and how collective efficacy gets diluted into collaboration, morale or "being on the same page".

• Bandura's original definition and the four sources through which efficacy is built.

• Three conditions for testing whether a team's confidence is actually warranted.

• The common myths that surround collective efficacy.

• The difference between evaluative, coaching, and appreciation feedback and where efficacy is actually built.

• Trust as something that develops through joint work, rather than a precondition for it.

Jenni's closing question: What difference are we making, and how do we know it was us?

Connect with Jenni - https://jennidonohoo.com/ 

Collective Impact: Overcoming the Twelve Enemies of Teacher Efficacy (2025)

Leading Collective Efficacy: Powerful Stories of Achievement and Equity (2021)

Quality Implementation: Leveraging Collective Efficacy to Make “What Works” Actually Work (2020)

Collective Efficacy: How Educators’ Beliefs Impact Student Learning (2017)

The Transformative Power of Collaborative Inquiry: Realizing Change in Schools and Classrooms (2016)

Collaborative Inquiry for Educators: A Facilitator’s Guide to School Improvement (2013)

Bruce Adamson is a human rights lawyer and CEO of the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities. He was Children and Young People's Commissioner Scotland from 2017 to 2023, where he led work on incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots law. 

In this conversation, we explore what a rights-based approach actually asks of schools and what it risks becoming when it doesn't.

In this episode:

• The origins of the UNCRC and what it means for it to sit in Scots law

• Article 29 and the aim of education as the Convention sets it out

• Why a values-based approach to rights matters more than a compliance one

• The Lundy Model of participation and what meaningful pupil voice looks like

• Working with the rights of one alongside the rights of all

• Inclusion, learning disabilities and what classrooms can teach us about diversity

• Resourcing as a rights issue, and what happens when it doesn't follow the responsibility

• Rights as a powerful legal tool for holding decision-makers to account

Mentioned in the conversation

• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rights/

• Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities (SCLD) - https://scld.org.uk

• Scottish Government guidance on the UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act - https://www.gov.scot/publications/united-nations-convention-rights-child-incorporation-scotland-act-2024-statutory-guidance/

• Supporting Children's Learning: Code of Practice (fourth edition, 2026) - https://www.gov.scot/publications/supporting-childrens-learning-code-practice-statutory-guidance-education-additional-support-learning-scotland-act-2004-fourth-edition-2026/

• Professor Laura Lundy's model of participation - https://participationpeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Compressed-PP-_-Lundy-Model-Explained-2.pdf

• Sonia Livingstone and the 5Rights Foundation - https://5rightsfoundation.com

• Callum's Law (restraint and seclusion) - https://www.parliament.scot/bills-and-laws/bills/s6/restraint-and-seclusion-in-schools-scotland-bill 

• United Nations (Convention on the Rights of the Child) (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 — https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2024/1/contents

• Learning Disability Week (SCLD) — https://scld.org.uk

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

Simon Botten 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.