Good morning, friends and colleagues
I am truly delighted to welcome you to our conference which I hope will be a celebration of the great strides we have taken within the education sector, as well as a call to courageous action for all that we still need to achieve.
Above all, I want you to feel energised, valued and refreshed by taking these two days out from your busy schedules to attend.
Thank you, Leora, and your team for all the hard work that has gone into organising this event. We look forward to hearing more from you tomorrow.
Our theme is building at various levels and it’s symbolic that we are meeting at this wonderful venue, a modern aspirational building within the heart of the city that was home to the industrial revolution.
For those of you who enjoy urban history, Birmingham has so much to offer, including over one hundred miles of canals, developed by world renowned engineers such as Brindley and Telford. Canals grew Britain’s wealth. The network now speaks of regeneration, and new opportunities in a bustling urban landscape, paying homage to the amazing skills of our predecessors while nurturing the talents of the next generation of entrepreneurs. The canals were built to achieve practical goals – transporting millions of tons of coal and merchandise – but they also appeal to our aesthetic senses.
If I have whetted your appetite for a lunchtime stroll – please make sure you come back!
I believe that as educators we are faced with similar daunting challenges in our own era of high-tech revolution. As the world changes relentlessly around us, the list seems to extend: children’s fragile mental health, the increasing prevalence of SEND, the continuing regional variation in academic outcomes and progression to higher education, the looming spectre of AI and its implications for our classrooms (whether we regard it as freeing us from bureaucracy or making the human workforce obsolete) and of course, the ongoing battle to balance budgets.
Life is never easy.
I’m sure that many of us became teachers and leaders because of the opportunity to make a genuine difference.
This room is full of talented people who understand the educational climate and are best placed to find solutions that will help young people to achieve and thrive.
Building a strong ecosystem depends on making those connections that lead to the creation of opportunities through trusting reciprocal relationships.
The relationships we build with each other provide the foundations of change. We are social beings who thrive on connections. This fundamental truth is at the heart of healthy workplaces, classrooms and staff rooms.
Education is not something that can be reduced to an algorithm – it’s not a simple matter of inputs and outputs but of the relationships, the network of interactions – that surround every individual – child, parent or teacher.
Think of them as interconnections ideally woven together to create a security blanket.
Many of us have been working with our staff on improving relational practice, on ensuring that our interactions are positive to yield partnership and trust. The truth is that if we can’t model healthy relationships for our children, nobody else will. Moving away from a climate of transaction and into one that actively cultivates and values relationships at all levels has to be our way forward.
This is one of the reasons this conference is so important – an opportunity for everyone to share stories and contribute your own areas of insight and expertise for the good of the wider community. Small interactions have a potentially life changing impact.
Forgive me for another moment of metaphor… Many of you will have visited Liverpool, particularly if you are football fans!
You may also have taken time out to visit Liverpool’s World Museum, another hugely impressive building that is currently hosting an immersive exhibition about the life of bees created by Wolfgang Buttress.
It’s on until May 2025, so if you haven’t seen it yet, consider adding it to your ‘to do’ list. I wish all our children could visit.
I particularly love the exhibition because it celebrates the beauty of our natural world and reminds us that we have a huge responsibility to each other and the environment.
It also emphasises the importance of relationships in maintaining a sense of healthy equilibrium.
Bees have lived on the planet for an astounding 120 million years and are vital to all our survival. Most of the food we eat depends ultimately on bees pollinating plants. The healing powers of the honey that bees produce have been known for centuries – even Pythagoras wrote about honey’s medicinal benefits for curing joint pain.
Bees are such an essential part of our fragile ecosystem. And Bee communication is fascinating – waggle dances are precisely choreographed to show the location of hives and to alert fellow bees to danger.
Bees communicate to survive and thrive. And they have roles and responsibilities to each other.
Bees are purposeful – Chaucer is thought to be the first writer to use the phrase ‘as busy as a bee.’ They are dedicated to their work, and they are the unsung heroes of our planet.
Humans of course have not been the best allies of bees – pesticides, pollutants and climate change have had a devastating impact on some of the 200 species in Britain alone.
Hopefully, an outcome of the exhibition will be that we learn to take more care.
So why am I putting bees in the spotlight today?
The world of bees provides us with a metaphor – bees have played such an important role in the development of civilization because of a few crucial factors
- simplicity of purpose
- adaptability
- communication and collaboration
These are key to their survival.
I think the same messages hold true for the education sector as for the beehives.
We cannot lose sense of our central mission. We have to be productively purposeful.
Schools have never been more important than they are now, and we have to ensure their continued success.
Great schools are the engines of their communities, the heartbeat.
And whatever issues beset out communities, we have to be part of the solution, otherwise we will fail future generations of leaders, we will not develop the great citizens who will continue to flourish.
So we need to continue being the hubs in which people connect and relationships are forged, society cemented.
It takes a village to raise a child.
It takes a school to build a community.
The challenges we face may never have seemed more exacting, but neither has our capacity to build solutions.
We are better prepared as schools, trusts and leaders through the training we receive and the vast research evidence base available to us.
We have the relationships and confidence that membership of CST brings. We know that the strategies we develop and share make us stronger collectively. We need to maintain the relationships with each other to continue the cross-pollination of ideas.
Whatever we build has to be genuine.
Some of you may have heard the legend of the Potemkin villages.
The legend goes that during Catherine the Great’s journey to Crimea in 1787, Grigoriy Potemkin, the man behind the project of making Crimea part of the Russian Empire, ordered fake villages made out of plasterboard to be put up quickly alongside the Dnieper River on which the Empress passed in her boat. Freshly erected shiny buildings with newly painted facades, inhabited by happy peasants with herds of healthy animals (brought in from Central Russian villages) were designed to conceal the real state of events – poverty and ruin.
Catherine was greeted by throngs of grateful subjects; when her boat had passed, the ‘towns’ were quickly dismantled and moved, along with the livestock and merry peasants, to a location farther downriver to await her sailing by again.
The vision of subjects thriving joyously was of course no more than hollow propaganda.
Whatever we build has to actually make a difference. We want future generations to look on our work and thank us for our foresight and creativity, and for the longevity of our creations.
We should take our lead from the engineers who built our amazing canals – genuine solutions to improve lives. We cannot build Potemkin’s villages as facades just to impress.
Our young people are facing many challenges that will shape their adult lives: dealing with pervasive social media; responding to the looming catastrophe of climate change; learning the lessons of this summer’s riots; managing automation and AI so that lives are enriched rather than dehumanised; and finding solutions to global conflicts which overshadow us all.
Our challenge is to ‘build’ the future society we wish to see. This has implications for the curriculum, partnerships and school communities we develop.
I hope that you will find opportunities to build new relationships and gain inspiration during the course of our conference. You will hear from some influential thinkers who are truly invested in securing children’s life chances.
So, enjoy this event, speak to new people, make connections, have lightbulb moments, make a difference: the country’s children and families need you.
