I was inspired by a post I saw on LinkedIn recently. It was by a Headteacher who was talking to other school senior leaders through his posts and this one was on staff retention which he felt was the biggest threat to the teaching profession right now.
He called out the significant numbers of staff with essential experience, confidence, expertise and passion for their role leaving the profession.
He spoke about staff turnover leading to the students missing out and the remaining staff carrying heavier loads.
If you're a Teacher or Learning Support Assistant, what are the pressures you’re facing at the moment? What do you wake up in the morning fearing about your day ahead? What steps can your school senior leaders do to support you?
Or if you're a school senior leader, are you in touch with the pressures faced by your staff in their classrooms and in your school? Are you aware that they get the 'Sunday dreads' and lose sleep over their work life? What steps can you take to support them?
One thing that stuck out for me from the LinkedIn post was when he told the school SLTs to, “invest in your staff”.
As a provider of SALT CPD and resources this was really insightful for me.
I understand that not all of the pressures in school are embedded in speech, language and communication needs… but they might be.
⚠️ Behaviour is a form of communication so if classroom management and student behaviour is an area you need support with, try to look for the underlying reasons why a student’s behaviour is poor. Is it because they are overwhelmed with the amount of work, information, new vocabulary? They may have a processing difficulty- that’s speech & language.
❓ Is it that students are struggling to identify and label how they are feeling so can show ‘challenging behaviours’ during the school day? That’s speech & language.
❓ Is it that you and your colleagues feel pressure to meet data targets for maths and reading but the lower-ability students just can’t reach the expected levels? There are probably comprehension, processing and retention issues in there for those children.
❓ Is it that there are just so many children in each class with SEND and you don’t feel that you were prepared for this during the training you had for your job?
❓ Is it that you’re finding it a challenge to make reasonable adjustments and differentiate the curriculum for the children in your class who require it, while aiming to provide the highest quality of education for all of the children in your class but it’s so overwhelming and you just don’t have time to do it all?
It’s time to have those conversations. Encourage your senior leadership team to gather that information and to look deeper than the data for maths and reading.
Here’s some ways I can help you.
1. Download my free Staff Skills Audit Tool to give to your SLT so that they can gather information on the training and experience you and your colleagues have. This will help them to highlight any gaps and inform their next steps for training as well as your own personal professional development. Click here to get it.
2. Tell your SLT about my whole school CPD training package. It’s full of short, pre-recorded training, demonstrations and resources for your staff to access over a whole year so that they can know which reasonable adjustments to make, how to identify underlying speech & language difficulties and plan ways to support the students before their emotions and behaviour expand into bigger issues.
Here’s the web page where you can find out more about the training package: https://www.thespeechandlanguagegarden.com/schools-training-package
3. Book a call with me to talk about the needs of your school and how quickly you can get your staff enrolled onto the training package.
4. Find me on LinkedIn here- I’d love to connect.
P.S. Let me know if you’d like me to point you in the direction of the person and post that inspired me.
Hi I'm Beth Morrant, a Highly Specialist Speech & Language Therapist and I'm on a mission to help thousands of education and childcare settings to have trained-up staff who can confidently identify and support the wide range of speech, language & communication needs that children can have.