Naomi Shenton, The MTPT Project’s Ipswich Representative outlines the most helpful things that her school leadership team has done to support her as a working parent during the period of school closure and national lockdown.

For the most part I am genuinely enjoying spending more time with my small people during lockdown. That’s not to say every moment is wonderful though or that there aren’t very significant challenges. Taking out any form of childcare has transformed the challenge of juggling motherhood and leadership and there is now a very fine line between the two. All those who have seen my daughters in virtual meetings recently can testify to that.
The best thing my school is doing to support this balancing act is being sensible about workload and allowing for as much flexibility as possible about when work gets done. Our principal has made it clear that many staff have small children to look after and / or children who they are home schooling and so leaders at all levels should manage workload carefully. It has been made very clear what the priority should be each week so that people can manage their own schedules. When we needed people to have in depth team discussions about centre assessed grades it was made clear that that was the priority so that the pressure was reduced and people had time to do this effectively and juggle family life.
As a a school we always consider the workload to impact ratio when we make decisions and we are maintaining that as best we can in these circumstances. For example we are not teaching live lessons, rather we have chosen to record video lessons. For teacher parents this means that they don’t need to stick to a timetable but can record at a time which fits in with their lives. The videos are shorter than a live lesson as students can pause to complete activities which improves the teacher time to student learning ratio. Furthermore these videos will then be kept and used as valuable learning resources in the future. We use whole class feedback normally so are experimenting with this as well as self marking activities to avoid people spending a long time marking.
We use Google Hangouts for our meetings and teams have been urged to schedule these for a time which suits them and their families. It is obviously harder to achieve this for larger meetings but parents are told in advance and at the start of the meeting that it’s fine to have their children present. Three of the senior leadership team have small children and there’s often at least one making a guest appearance in our meetings.