Mrs. Naima Charlier

FROM WELLINGTON COLLEGE, BERKSHIRE

Mrs. Naima Charlier speaks to us about her unique role at Wellington College, as well as the Harkness pedagogy and how equality is implemented into the school’s curriculum.

Could you tell us a little about your role at Wellington?

Director of EDI and Social Responsibility is not a role that I had encountered before. It represented such an exciting opportunity to work with a world-leading school that was so passionate about the need to acknowledge, support and work with children who are growing up in this global and very interconnected world. It was exploring the idea of the barriers that can sometimes exist for young people if they don’t feel like they are included or that they belong. It’s about actively learning about what kinds of barriers exist and what schools should be doing to break them down. The school had placed the children’s wellbeing and their ability to be valued as their unique selves at such a high priority that I was immediately attracted to the job. This role was an opportunity to work on a really global approach to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in education. They are each very separate ideas, which require individual attention. My background feeds into this as well, as my father is Muslim and from India and my mother is from Scotland. My mum’s parents were blind and my parents’ interracial marriage was always an interesting topic of conversation. A lot of interesting things come up when you have differences which, perhaps, others don’t share. I grew up in a small town in Oxfordshire and seeing less people who looked like me, and experiencing a curriculum that reflected what made me who I am and my family what it is, piqued my interest at a very young age. The idea that we can look at these differences of inclusion, diversity and equality as the separate elements that we need in order to have everybody firing on all cylinders. You can have a really diverse group of people, but if they don’t all feel fully valued then you aren’t going to benefit from everyone’s different perspectives, thoughts and experiences.

Wellington College was one of the first schools to teach Wellbeing as a part of the formal curriculum. Can you tell us a little more about this and the Harkness pedagogy?

When I first saw this job and started doing my research into Wellington College, I looked into the kind of establishment that they were and the type of work that they were doing. It was so innovative and so forward thinking in the way that they understand how learning happens and how children need it to interact, and they have placed wellbeing at the centre of the curriculum. The children have lessons in wellbeing, they have a constructed programme that can support them in all the ways necessary for the current state of the world. The world is very different to how it was when we were at school, so the curriculum needs to change in order to reflect that - having lessons that give children the opportunity to learn and understand these things is really valuable.

This idea of Harkness learning is about not considering the teacher as the one with all the knowledge, who will then place that knowledge in the heads of the young people. It is about the people in the classroom coming together as a group, and giving the students agency. It’s about the students having a voice that is heard, and having the ability to co-create ideas that can be shared with a teacher, who will then support a conversation and guide the children. It’s about allowing students to have their voices valued, and that aligns so beautifully with EDI as well, regarding acceptance and understanding that everybody matters. It’s about every person’s voice being respected and considered valuable. When we think: “Who is the expert in the room?” The answer is that the room is the expert. That underlying meaning behind Harkness learning really interlinks with my own work on EDI learning and using education to prepare children for the dynamic world they are going into.

There are also the Wellington College values, which I am asking you about due to your work on social responsibility in addition to your work with EDI, and I think that they are all very interlinked. The values are: kindness, responsibility, respect, integrity and courage and they are modelled and practised in everyday life at the school. Can you tell me a little more about how this is achieved at Wellington?

All schools have values. When values are really embedded into a school community, the school » almost sings to you that their values make up a part of everything that they do. One of the things that struck me when I visited Wellington was just how embedded the values were, in the way that students were speaking to each other, working with each other, the way that teachers interacted with the students, the processes and procedures that they had in place and the value that is placed on kindness, integrity and courage, and how the adults here constantly reference and model these. They give really good examples of when these are at work and when they are being upheld, and those examples are used in the college systems that reward behaviour and educate students about the best way to make a mistake, because this is a college full of young people who, of course, are going to make mistakes. How do you make a mistake? How do you acknowledge that and learn from it? Learn to say sorry if that is what needs to be done, own that mistake and authentically move on with that personal journey that you are on.

At Wellington, I think it is just so obvious that the students and staff believe in each of those values. In fact, students don’t just believe in them, but they actually appreciate that they are there and want to embody them in everything they do. I have seen that again and again through assemblies and talks, through their work, even through a chapel address that we had this morning. It sang to me of the human connectedness that we all have, and how we as individuals can uplift and take care of each other. It was yet another moment in the day here where the values are just everywhere.

What challenges do you feel you have with implementing EDI within the school setting? Wellington actually started this journey of EDI a few years ago; they consulted an external company and asked them to come in and audit the school for EDI. Out of that audit came one of the big ideas to employ someone for this role. In terms of challenges, I think it’s about co-creating and having our own understanding of what these terms mean, what ambitions we have where change is needed, and also how we can organise ourselves to make our priorities clear. In an EDI world, we have different dimensions that we look at. We have the Equalities Act, which helps us to understand and acknowledge groups that might need more support than others. We also have our own context here at Wellington, the students that we have here with us and their needs, their desires and their voice, their opinions on what we need to focus on more.

We have different dimensions that we look at, for example gender. We have moved from being an all-boys’ school to a co-educational school, so that is a journey the college has already been on. What does that look like when we consider all the different facets that impact boys and girls? What potential barriers might there be? Where is the school really strong? Where is it less strong? How do we know? How do we look at altering different policies and procedures for a better outcome? How are we celebrating everything that needs to be celebrated? I mention gender in particular as I have been very open in my own personal journey. I did my MBA in International Educational Leadership. You have to do a research piece for that and I completed it on women in leadership, and in my profession - which is a dominantly female profession - there is a very senior imbalance between men and women. It is a personal area of interest for me that I have been researching and speaking about for a long time. There are many other areas that we consider, for example, we look at diversity; there are things that we are doing under the heading of Pride, for the LGBTQ+ community; there is all of the work that we are doing on neurodiversity and the different ways all our brains work and how wonderful that can be, and how beneficial it can be to have people that think differently; we’ve been looking at disability and how we can ensure that our campus, our lessons and the ways we operate are as inclusive as possible; we want to work to remove any potential barriers we might have. I can give you lots of examples of the different activities that we have done.

The bigger piece for me was the question of: “How do we understand ourselves here as a community at Wellington?” Building that understanding and those relationships has been the key focus. I’ve been here just over one year now, and a lot of that first year, for me, was about getting to know people, getting to know what they care about, what they think we should be looking at. We created teams in lots of different areas. We have an EDI steering group that includes governors and people across the College, including our Heads of College, our student leaders. We also have EDI Champions and EDI committees. We have inclusion ambassadors in each house and we do sessions of training with them, we have external speakers that come in to talk about particular topics. We also have a variety of other things that we are doing and, as you can see, there is a lot to be done and there are a lot of exciting things to get involved with. www.wellingtoncollege.org.uk

From a young age, the use of the word ‘tolerate’ really struck me. Often in school policies, when we talk about differences, we talk of tolerating others.

I’ve always pushed back about the idea of tolerance, not because we shouldn’t be tolerant of each other, but because it doesn’t go far enough. That idea, not just of tolerating, but of actively appreciating and valuing difference when we come across it. Wanting to get to know more and being really curious about why somebody thinks the way they do or is the way they are, or what we can learn from each other in a way that unites us as human beings.

What exciting initiatives are planned for the future with regards to furthering EDI and social responsibility within the student body? There are always so many exciting new things, because there are always so many exciting new students! When you have a student voice and student agency like we do, the potential to get involved with wonderful things is always on the cards. We did podcasts with the students last year, which parents and students could listen to together. It allows for students to talk to parents and teachers about different issues and also to our international schools, prep schools, feeder schools and partners. We want to network, to share information and ideas for ways we can support other community members. I think that it is really important that we are sharing and actively trying to improve our school. As human beings, it is essential that we are connecting with and learning from one another.

We are all learning.

We would like to thank Mrs. Naima Charlier, Director of EDI and Social Responsibility at Wellington College, for giving up her time to speak to us.