Power of the Parent 3: 3: Andy

Episode Transcript

Charlotte Speak  0:12  

Hello and welcome to Power of the Parent, the podcast. I’m your host Charlotte Speak, I’m a level seven CMI accredited coach, a strengthscope Master Practitioner, Mental Health First Aider and talent consultant. And I’m also the face behind Power of the Parent. In this podcast, I’ll be speaking to parents in the workplace. Some of them are in traditionally employed roles, others are running their own businesses. And we’re having conversations about life in general, insights about being a parent and having a career and exploring the strengths that parenting has awoken for people. We will talk about things like the value that they’re bringing to the workplace, as well as my guests very generously sharing their personal stories and anecdotes about everything life can throw at us. I am joined by Andy, who is a teacher. He’s also a business owner. He’s a dad to three girls, and he’s my friend of over 15 years. I really can’t wait to chat about how he manages all of those worlds colliding. He’s got a lot going on, it’s safe to say. And I am really interested and excited to bring Andy’s voice into these conversations that I’m having. So we’re recording this in March 2021. Schools have been back out of the third UK lockdown. So you’ve had a year of teaching that has looked completely different. You have welcomed a lockdown baby. That isn’t her name.

Andy  1:45  

We have a shortlist. But yeah, that wasn’t on it.

Charlotte Speak  1:48  

The latest addition to your family was actually peak pandemic. 

Andy  1:53  

Yeah, she was quite early on when everything was when it was serious COVID Yeah, when everything was really quite alarming. So before we got used to all the rules, the regs and the masks became second nature. So yeah, it focused our attention.

Charlotte Speak  2:10  

Yeah. So I suppose my next question is potentially quite a big one, how are you? Have I summed you up in the intro?

Andy  2:19  

Um, I guess so. It’s quite unusual, isn’t it to hear yourself being summed up? Yeah, I think that’s a fair appraisal. I’m still reeling to be honest with the fact that we’ve known each other for 15 years. When did that disappear? And perhaps that that’s relevant as well, isn’t it that time marches on? It’s such a lick, 15 years? That’s taken me? Yes, I’m almost speechless, which is not what we want for a podcast. So I’ll try and put things into some perspective. But yeah, I think that’s a fair appraisal.

Charlotte Speak  2:53  

So the last year has been like, all over the place. And you’ve been in what I would describe as quite a unique position from a parent perspective, because you’ve experienced it as a parent, but also, as a teacher. We all know, parents that are listening to this, particularly those that have got school aged children, we’ve had a small insight into what it’s like, when those worlds collide, how has it been you?

Andy  3:21  

Yeah, interesting. And I think, to begin with, I’m really mindful that everybody’s been on their own journey. And that journey is really, you know, there’s the saying, isn’t there that we’re all in the same storm. But actually, we’re all on different boats, and a bit of a cliche to start with, isn’t it, but it’s really pertinent, because everybody’s had all sorts to deal with. And some of it, you know, some of it you just don’t know. We’ve done a lot of remote teaching. And I’m a bit of a self confessed geek, I guess. So some of the challenges that we’ve faced, I’ve kind of relished, you know, it’s given me the opportunity and the platform to, to show off some of my skill sets that I’ve got with computing. And so it’s been great. I’ve got a role in School, I’m the digital project lead. So I’ve been responsible for putting together how we’ve been going to do remote learning. And we’ve had to go up quite a lick. Because we weren’t perhaps early adopters, as a school with some of the digital stuff. So bringing everybody on board and getting that consistency has been a challenge. It’s not particularly helpful if you’ve got one or two members of staff in a school that are, you know, doing green screen tutorials and other people can’t log on. So that’s been, you know, a bit of a learning curve trying to bring on board the whole staff, trying to find the right balance has been the key. Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean we should have done and, and there’s been a bit of a lag as well. So I think I’m really mindful that we got going, and we were doing really well with our remote learning. And then suddenly, we could just see that the engagement was dropping off really quickly, and we were starting to have emails from parents saying, they’re struggling, they can’t cope, their work life balance is, you know, not working, the children are getting stressed because they can’t finish the amount of tasks. And, so we had to kind of respond to that. So it’s been a lot of kind of toing and froing, listening to our parents listening to our children, I did some great Zoom calls with my class, I’m teaching year two, so six and seven year olds, to begin with, we’re having lots of fun, they got used to using, you know, all the mute buttons and that sort of thing. Our digital literacy improved massively, probably beyond their age expectation, and we were doing a great job, and then suddenly I kind of recognised that they looked jaded that there wasn’t the same sort of spark. And we really needed to ease off. So you’ve got this really tricky dichotomy, I think, is the word where we want to do the best for the children, we want to keep offering the learning opportunities, but actually, they’re not getting the support they might need at home. And how do we strike that balance, because you might have some children really, you know, chewing through the work and doing a great job, and other children struggling? You know, we see this day in day out in the classroom. But when you’re teaching through a letterbox, you don’t get to see all the visual cues, you don’t get to know what’s going on. So trying to strike that balance, as has been the biggest challenge, I think.

Charlotte Speak  6:57  

Okay, and that’s, I mean, it’s been a huge task, hasn’t it? For all the reasons that you’ve just just shared. How was it for you? And do you compartmentalise? Do you see it, like one way as a parent another way, as a teacher? Or is it just like Andy as a whole and like, how do you separate that?

Andy  7:24  

I think teaching is a vocation, I think, when I chose to go into teaching, I went in with my eyes wide open, my wife already worked in education, I had some friends working as teachers, and I wanted to move into a sector where there was some scaffolding, some kind of structure to the organisation, but also some freedom within that. That was what was important to me to be able to have some sense of security, but also some freedom. And, you know, teaching does offer that. So it’s not a 9 to 5 job. It’s certainly not a 9 till 3:30 job, you know, regularly, I would say daily, I bring work home with me, you’re always thinking about how you can improve things that, you know, the art of teaching is complex, the more you learn, as a practitioner, I think the more complicated that the job gets, because you’ve got more information at your fingertips, you think, actually, I know now how I can help that particular child. The challenge is, how do I, you know, shoehorn that into the demands of the curriculum and everything else that’s going on in school. So it doesn’t get easier, it gets more complicated as time goes on, you’ve got extra bits and pieces that come with your development, you’re helping others in school, and so on and so forth. To compartmentalise, I don’t know, I think you benefit from having your own children, because you’re just more informed, again, just have a little bit more information. Although you also get a little bit of guilt, because perhaps you’re not doing the role as a parent justice, because you’re putting your priorities towards the 30 children in your class.

Charlotte Speak  9:12  

And so I’m really interested and I don’t think we ever talked about it at the time, and it was pre me having the girls as well, so I genuinely wouldn’t have even had this view on it. But when you did change roles, and when I say that’s like an understatement, you completely changed your career. It timed, I think, at a similar time to when your eldest was born, or there or thereabouts. [Yeah, it was, yeah.] Did becoming a parent have any part in that? Or like what was the impact of that happening at a similar time?

Andy  9:55  

Yeah, I don’t think it would be fair to say it was the absolute catalyst, but it was certainly a big piece of the jigsaw. I was working, I’m still not sure anybody’s gonna be interested in this but just to give it some context, I did a geography degree because my teacher at high school was great. And he just kind of lit a spark in me, that steered me down a path of geography. So I wanted to go to uni. That’s all I kind of knew. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I just wanted to go to uni. So my mum and dad had never been to university. We didn’t really have a family history of that. So I just wanted to go have some fun and get a qualification that might open up doors. So I ended up doing geography, which you either become a weatherman or a teacher. You know, it’s a bit of a random one, I enjoyed it, I had a great time at uni, I didn’t really want to be a weatherman. So I actually filled in the application forms a couple of times to be a teacher, and never really posted them off. Through various different opportunities in life, I ended up in a sales role. And I loved it, you know, I really enjoyed the job that I had, the company migrated, I went with an off-shoot. And, and that meant we were in a much smaller company, but I had a bigger responsibility, and I loved it. And then as Millie, my oldest, she’s eight now, as she came along, you do start looking a little bit further downstream. The sector of sales that I was working in, had a lifespan, it was within the printing industry. And I just felt, you know, this is getting harder and harder. Even in the five years that we’d been doing that role, you could tell how much more difficult it was getting. So I was looking in 5-10 year chunks and thought, you know, I don’t really want to be 40 and have to change jobs. I’m a bit nervous about that. One day, we were in the car, and we got a text message. And I can still hear the ping of that text message. It’s really peculiar. You know, you know how many messages you get and for some reason this one stood out, we were in the car, and we read the message. And a friend of a friend had said that they had a problem, a member of staff had left school, this was in August, how were they going to recruit for September, it was a teaching assistant role. And I said, I think I want to go for this and just see what it’s like, dip my toe in the water. And if I like it, then, you know, see if we can do some sort of PGCE. And if not, then I’ve ruled it out. And I loved it. And sort of not looked back since really, I’ve you know, it’s been fantastic.

Charlotte Speak  12:54  

I think it’s amazing. And, like, immediately, I do remember some of the really early conversations when you started and just how much you’ve lit up with every conversation that you’ve ever had about it. And like, of course, it’s not perfect, and everybody has their bad days at work as well. But it’s like it was meant for you. 

Andy  13:21  

Yeah, it came at a good time. And I think that all the skills that I’ve acquired, I think what’s nice about teaching is you can amplify the things that you’re good at, of course, you’ve got to teach, you know, a broad and balanced curriculum, and we try our best to do that. But you can put your own stamp on things, your classroom is your own private space, really with the children and so I’m techie and so we use lots of technology in my classroom, much more than perhaps other classes do. If you are sporty, you know, there’s always a bias towards that. If, you know, if you’re really interested in art, that tends to be promoted more within your classroom as well. So schools, I think, have a responsibility to mesh together a range of characters and expertise so that the children benefit from that as they go through. But everything that I kind of learned up to then, you know, I had an interest in photography, all these things that I had never really had the opportunity to use for a purpose. And I think that’s what teaching has given me. It’s given me that real sense of purpose. I think, to sum it up, if I had a bad day in the office, before I moved, there was nothing to show for it. If I had a good day in the office, I made some money for somebody else. Whereas even if you have a bad day at school, you’ve made a real difference to somebody. And if you have a good day, then all the better. So I think for me that sense of fulfilment is the thing that is the takeaway.

Charlotte Speak  14:56  

Oh that’s amazing. That’s so lovely and incredibly inspiring as well. One of the things that I think he’s just always on my mind or I’m very conscious of, particularly in the line of work that I’m in, is teaching doesn’t get an amazing rep for supporting parents sometimes. And a lot of mums in particular that I’ve worked with over the last year. Like, it’s just the overwhelm of going back and I suppose some of the stuff that you talked about before about that kind of division of attention if you want to give everything to your class, and then how much energy is left at the end of the day? And that side of things, how do you approach that? And look after yourself, I suppose?

Andy  15:49  

Probably not very well. Yeah, I do tend to put other things first. But that’s not a completely charitable act, I think, you know, if you do something that you enjoy, you’re getting something from that, you know, if I hated it, I wouldn’t do it. So I would move on. So I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it can you? If you want to contribute extra time and be the best you can in something and if you want to, you know, have success, you’ve got to put a little bit extra in. You can’t then complain about having to do that. I tell you what I hate, I hate having to do things that have no impact. And you think this is just a purely administrative task that’s going to have no benefit to anybody. That’s the hardest thing. When you’re doing something you think, what on earth? I still don’t know how well I handled that because I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. And people tend to know, when I’m, you know, when I’m doing something that, you know, that I don’t really want to do.

Charlotte Speak  17:01  

Yeah, I think that’s totally understandable. And that whole conversation around knowing where you’re adding value and self worth, and all of that stuff, it’s paramount, isn’t it? And I think over the last year, we’ve all had to have a really good look at how we work and how we operate and what we’re bringing to the workplace. And it’s taken a completely different route for some of the conversations for parents in the workplace.

Andy  17:30  

Yeah, I mean, for me, in some respects, lockdown, I don’t know how popular an opinion this is, but it’s quite timely. You know, my wife was pregnant with our third child, we hadn’t tidied the house properly for I don’t know how long. And the car seats were, you know, probably about to start a second pandemic. So it gave us that opportunity to just take stock to begin with, you know, that first lockdown where the weather was good, and the expectations on the children weren’t as high. And actually, it gave us a chance as a family, just to, you know, spend some great time together, we did the walks everybody did. And the daily exercise we went out and it was great to actually just spend a bit of time together. Lockdown, what do we call it, lockdown 3.0? Obviously, there was a much greater weighting on work for me. I’ve been, you know, really busy with the discipline of school, because I was working remotely. We split up in the year group. My colleague is in a small flat, she’s on her own. She was quite happy to go into school and look after the key workers, most of which were in her class already. So it worked really well for us. And with my ICT, you know, computing side, you know, it lent itself for me to do the remote stuff. But because, you know, I was out of the, you know, the firing line in school, I could just concentrate on what I needed to do. And that was delivering teaching and learning to the children. The platform that we used was brilliant, because I could be in 30 places or 60 places at once. So I could give personalised feedback to each and every child. They did the piece of work, it appeared on my laptop, I could give voice notes, I could mark it and send it straight back to them. So even in the classroom, you know, as much as you want to give personalised feedback. Time is the enemy and you can get to some children and the next child you clock later on and you think, okay, well, we’ll work on that afterwards. Actually, what I was able to do is give personalised feedback to everybody. However, that comes with a health warning because I set a piece of work and it comes back 30 times. I set two pieces of work that comes back 60 times. So, you see where I’m going with this, actually, in the end, you drown in the responses that were coming back from the children. So you had to be careful with, you know, managing that.

Charlotte Speak  20:14  

At the end of every couple of weeks, well, at the end of every week, we used to get a, we still do actually now we’re back, but we used to get an update from school. And very often, they would put in the figures of how many pieces of work, or how many entries onto Tapestry or Seesaw had been put on. And how many teacher comments had come back. And the numbers were just astounding. And I know, a lot of the teachers at our school are also parents and you thought like, you don’t know if anybody’s put their children in a keyworker bubble. So you don’t want to assume that that’s happened. And even if they have you still got evenings to get through when you’ve been teaching completely differently. And even those of us like yourself, who are incredible at the IT side of things, it’s still a screen to be staring at for a long time, isn’t it?

Andy  21:07  

Yeah, definitely. So you’ve got all the stamina with that, but also you it’s a role that there was zero training that came from anybody about this. So, you know, we’ve made some decisions, some good decisions, some bad decisions, but they had to be made then and there. I had to, you know, put a case forward, we used Seesaw. You mentioned before, you know, I had to go to our head and make a case for it. Because if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had it. So it was happening, you know, in real time with everything else that was going on. So yeah, it was a bit mad really. But then, once we got established, and we had, I think we’ve had over 47,000 pieces of work that have come through in locked down 3.0 in the school, that’s insane. And some of the children have flourished. Some of the children have done an amazing job, other children haven’t. And you know, now we’re backing into school, a couple of weeks in, we’re starting to take stock and decide, you know, what do we do now? How do we plug those gaps and move forward?

Charlotte Speak  22:12  

I genuinely, and I say this with as much feeling and compassion as I can possibly put into it, teachers and nursery practitioners as well. Real Life Superheroes. I know that that’s a really big badge to wear. But to me, like 100% I just think the resilience, we’ve all had to say resilience over the last year, and it has been incredible. I saw, I think it was the beginning of January, actually, unfortunately, a school near us had got some really bad press because the teachers had, you’ll probably know this better than me, something like invoking their right to not teach. It was their safety basically, it was on the third of January.

Andy  23:04  

Yeah, so the timing, to give it a bit of background, the media it’s such an easy target to attack teachers and the government doesn’t particularly like teachers either. They’re a big organisation that doesn’t get a huge amount of support. And there’s not many teachers that are in it, just, you know, I don’t know whether I can say this, you have to bleep it out, but tossing it off. Like its people are working really hard, like they are in all sorts of industries. Teachers aren’t the only people that are working hard. But there’s not many teachers that aren’t, you know, they do their very best. Sometimes it’s not good enough. And I think most people will take that on the chin. But generally, I would say most teachers are doing their best. And the best is pretty good most of the time. I think with the lockdown thing and the strike, it was a really difficult situation. Because people genuinely, you love the children in your class, you want to do the very best for them. And part of that is keeping them safe. You go on a school trip and you do a lot of head counting, because your priority is to make sure that the children are safe, and you’ve got everybody there. And that, you know, is the same in the classroom. Yet, you know, a couple of days before we came back after Christmas, all that everybody could see over the media was skyrocketing COVID cases. It was only going in one direction. It was just getting worse and worse. The rest of the country was being told to lock down. You know, don’t go into the shops if you can’t. And if you do, you need to, you know, follow all the protocols. And at the same time, we were being asked to be in a small room with 30 children without a mask. Now anybody that has got children and you know how quickly head lice and everything else spreads in a small classroom. It just didn’t match up and it was a really difficult thing. Everybody that I spoke to was saying the timing of this is terrible. This could have been done two weeks earlier. And actually, people were put in a really difficult situation where they were balloted and I hate, sort of, I cringe with all the sort of the Union stuff, to be honest, it doesn’t fit with me, but you have to respect it, you know, people are trying to do the right thing, but I don’t really like it I kind of feel a bit awkward with at all. But I also felt worried about, you know, I was involved in a governance meeting, and I said, would anybody here choose to go into a small, you know, would you go into Gregg’s and spend six hours in there without a mask with a group of people? And they looked at me as if like, no way. Well, yeah, it was precarious.

Charlotte Speak  25:58  

Absolutely, it was. It was frustrating watching as a parent, and just people saying, the NHS aren’t striking, the NHS are carrying on and like you can’t be can’t compare the two worlds that’s completely different.

Andy  26:14  

And they’re incredible with what they’re doing and, you know, I can’t imagine some of the horrors that some people have seen. But they also had all the best kit, I guess that could have been provided at that time for them. And they weren’t asked to go into those rooms without anything. It was just so difficult for everybody. And I think going back to what I said before, you know, everyone’s been on their own journey and the challenges that they face, you know, are personal to them. Let’s hope we never have to face it again.

Charlotte Speak  26:49  

I hope so. I certainly hope so.

Andy  26:52  

I would say just in case, we go on a different path. Something that pops into my head is that the real heroes, I think, are the children. Coming back, talk about resilience. Yeah, of course, we’ve got some gaps to plug but you know, all the scaremongering about, you know, falling behind, everybody is in a similar sort of place. So if your children are in the top of the class, they kind of still are, if they’re in the bottom of the class, they probably still are. And most children, somewhere in the middle, have strengths and weaknesses. And they still are. And it has really felt, in the last two weeks, business as usual. The one thing that’s now starting to creep up more and more is I think vocabulary. And vocabulary is one of the biggest keys to success in education. And so I’m going to make a big plea to all your listeners, if anything you can do is just to keep expanding on the vocabulary, sit around the table, talk to your children, because we’re finding that, you know, children have such a narrow range of vocabulary at the moment. And that is tangible, because they’re not going to the zoo. So we’ve had children talking about, you know, playing with animals, but they don’t know the name for the zoo. Not been to a zoo. And they haven’t been you know, they don’t know what a birthday party feels like if you’re under four or five, because you know, that that memory’s kind of vanished. So we need to work hard as a community to just give them that vocabulary, because that’s the key.

Charlotte Speak  28:27  

That’s noted, I’m off to go and speak to my girls immediately. I think that’s a really powerful thing to remind us that we can do so easily. It sounds easy to do, but huge in impact.

Andy  28:44  

So here’s my fact that you can take away, [I love a fact], this is a good fact. So 30 million is the number. 30 million is the difference in the amount of words that a child will have heard from a word rich and a word poor family, by the time they start school. So if you’re the family that’s sitting around the table, and they’re chatting, and you’re engaging with the children and doing the sorts of you know that all the good things, your child’s potentially going to hear 30 million more words than a child that’s plugged in and don’t get that interaction. 30 million, so not necessarily 30 million new words. But 30 million and what comes with that is the ability to turn take, that inference, that ability to scaffold and to predict and everything that that learning kind of centres around in English schools. What a difference. You don’t close that gap. To close that gap, you’ve got to acquire something like 50 new words a day against your peers to try and make any sort of difference. So yeah.

Charlotte Speak  29:52  

That just blown my mind. Yeah, talk to your kids, people. So at the end of all of my podcast episodes, I am asking my guests three questions. We started to touch on this a little bit. But the first one is, what does self care look like for you?

Andy  30:12  

I think when you pause to answer the question, that’s not a good sign, is it? I don’t think about it a lot. So to think about it now, I guess it looks different at different times in your career and in your life. So self care at the moment is spending a bit of time with the family. It was going swimming once a week with the family. That was pretty cool. And we got into a good habit with that. And we missed that. It’s stealing a little bit of time to watch a film occasionally, or a footy match. I guess self care is trying to pinch the almonds and a glass of wine.

Charlotte Speak  30:53  

Next one is if you could go back and give a piece of reassurance to the Andy, who was becoming a parent for the first time. What would that piece of reassurance be?

Andy  31:06  

I don’t know. I don’t know about being a parent. I can answer it for being a person. 

Charlotte Speak  31:12  

Yeah, go for it. 

Andy  31:15  

I find it difficult to not care. So you know, someone says something, and you take it on board, and it hurts you sometimes. So I heard the other day that the five minute rule. And if it’s not going to affect you, in five years time, don’t spend more than five minutes worrying about it. And I’m trying to stick to that at the moment.

Charlotte Speak  31:35  

Yeah, I love that. I love that advice. And just, yeah, we can choose to do what we want with feedback, aren’t we? It’s not always the gift that some people make out to be.

Andy  31:47  

And you hear all these quotes, and you know, I’m sure in your arena, you’re well aware of a lot of them. And to be honest, a lot of them, you kind of, as a layperson, I guess, I hear them and think oh, yeah, I agree with that. And it’s in one ear and out the other. But that one’s stuck a little bit, actually, for me just at the moment. So yeah, just trying to care a little bit less about the things that shouldn’t matter.

Charlotte Speak  32:13  

And finally, what are your hopes for parents in the workplace? I was gonna say in the future, but the future is now isn’t it? So for how we are working at the moment for parents, what are your hopes?

Andy  32:29  

I think the world’s got itself in a little bit of a mess haven’t we at the moment. You know, we think about all the discussions centering around race, the centering around gender and the impact of men on women and everything that’s, you know, really current in the media at the moment. I think we’ve just got to start looking after each other, haven’t we? Everybody just needs to have a bit more respect. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s tricky, isn’t it? Just because we’re so connected with Twitter and everything else now. But then we’re also isolated as well. And we just need to find a way to have a bit more respect towards each other.

Charlotte Speak  33:15  

Love that. Thank you so much for the chat. We haven’t sat down and spoken properly, well, probably since you know, the kids actually have been born. And there’s lots of half conversations that are still hanging in the air, I’m sure, but, you know, we’ll get back to it one day. It has been an absolute pleasure to catch up. And thank you so much for sharing your experience of the last year and what it has been like to be a parent and a teacher in a global pandemic. Let’s hope that you never have to report back on that again. 

Andy  33:48  

Yeah, fingers crossed. Thank you. 

Charlotte Speak  33:50  

And becoming a new parent as well.

Andy  33:51  

I know, we’ve not even mentioned the baby. She’s good. We love her to pieces.

Charlotte Speak  33:57  

Thank you, Andy. Thanks very much for tuning in to Power of the Parent, the podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please rate, review and subscribe. And if you could tell all your friends about the podcast that would be wonderful. If you’d like to get in touch, you can find me on Instagram. Just search Power of the Parent. I’ll see you next time.