Learning to position yourself for success

As a new leadership programme for Black members launches, Sally Gillen talks to tutors Marva Rollins and Dolapo Ogunbawo.

Marva Rollins

IN 1995, Marva was appointed to her first headship, joining a primary school in east London as its first Black leader and overseeing an entirely white staff.

“The first year was not fun,” she recalls with a wince. The national curriculum had been introduced by the Government a few years before, but the school, like others, had yet to implement it. Many staff had worked at the school for more than 20 years and wanted to keep doing what they had always done, the way they had always done it.

And they had no qualms about letting Marva know.

“Before I arrived, I met with the deputy head, who informed me that members of staff had stated, ‘if she comes here, she changes for us. We change for no-one’,” she recalls. “I was disrupting the status quo.”

Was her race an issue? She isn’t sure. “But racism isn’t something you can put in your hand and look at,” says Marva, adding: “You know, I think a white woman may have faced some of the same challenges around the new curriculum.”

That said, she remembers a teacher feeling free to remark: “Well, they needed a Black head in Newham, didn’t they?”

“In those days, there was the notion that if you were a Black leader of any sort, you were a token,” says Marva, but she was confident in her skills, abilities and track record in education, and being a wellknown activist in Newham, she was used to challenging and being challenged.

In short, she got on with the job of leading changes in the school.

Still, the absence of any support or training for new heads at that time – “you did an interview and a presentation, you got a set of keys, and you took on the headship” – was testing.

It was Marva’s mentor who got her through and they still meet up. “She kept me in education. I couldn’t have quit though because for me, as a Black woman, I couldn’t be seen to be throwing the towel in,” she says. “But what I didn’t have was an experienced, Black head teacher I could call on. There was nobody I knew who was having the same experience as me.”

Today, while many Black teachers still find themselves as the only one in their school, they can at least draw on support from the networks of Black educators that now exist, and anyone who feels stuck or discriminated against will usually know another Black teacher in another place who they can turn to for help.

“Even if you are the only Black teacher in your school, you are very rarely on your own,” says Marva.

For example, the NEU has four Equal Access to Promotion WhatsApp groups, which Marva and Dolapo Ogunbawo manage. It is not uncommon for them to be contacted via WhatsApp or other platforms such as LinkedIn, out of the blue by someone they have never met who is in desperate need of support and advice.

“Sometimes people get in contact because they just want someone like me to reassure them, to say ‘yes I know, I’ve heard this story before’. Some people just want to feel safe. They want to know they aren’t losing it. They want to know they aren’t imagining some of these things that are happening. They want to know it could be racism, that they aren’t paranoid.”

Racism in school workplaces, covert and overt, together with the isolation of being the only non-white staff member, can hamper Black teachers’ progression. In too many cases, it simply ends careers.

A 2020 report by University College London (UCL)’s Institute of Education (IoE), Making progress?, found that in addition to the excessive workload heaped on all teachers, Black teachers are also coping with the ‘hidden workload’ of racism.

Marva says that while all teachers might have the misfortune to be managed

Interview

by someone who flatly dismisses their desire to progress with the words “you’re not ready yet. I’ll tell you when you’re ready”, this happens a lot to Black teachers and causes significant distress.

“I call this plantation leadership,” she says. “I own you because I’m your head teacher. There really are some leaders out there trying to strip the confidence from their staff, some who think they own them. Yes, some teachers may not be ready for promotion, that’s true, but the response should be ‘ok, what can we do to help you prepare?’, not simply ‘you’re not ready’.”

This is where the new programme, Positioned for success, delivered in partnership with the NEU, comes in. Written and delivered by Marva and Dolapo, its aim is to support Black teachers with more than three years’ experience to prepare for the next step in their career.

Starting with a session on obstacles and enablers to promotion, with senior leaders’ attitudes a key one, it then moves on to practising and polishing the key skills needed to move into or upwards in leadership (see box).

“Black teachers get increased selfconfidence from sitting in a space with

Positioned for success

Places on the six-month development programme are fully funded by the union. It is open to any Black teacher who has at least three years’ experience.

It will offer:

• opportunities to explore the Black experience of the job application, interview and promotion/appointment processes and the challenges and obstacles

• strategies to overcome obstacles

• strategies to raise your profile in the workplace

• opportunities to develop your vision as a leader

To find out more and apply for a place, go to neu.org.uk/blackleaders-course people who look like them, being part of the group but also presenting and with people such as Dolapo and I who have walked the journey,” explains Marva.

Together, she and Dolapo have been designing and delivering bespoke training for Black teachers since 2007 and they believe that to encourage more Black teachers to put themselves forward for promotion, addressing confidence is vital.

Positioned for success sessions include how to analyse job descriptions and, importantly, interrogate and understand the person specification used to shortlist. This covers the key areas applicants must address: the quality of their teaching and learning, their expectations of themselves and their children, how what they teach impacts on assessment, how they use data, safeguarding and child protection, curriculum development and working in teams.

Supporting statements filled with meaningful information, rather than cliché-ridden paragraphs that lack impact, are also a topic. “This whole thing about ‘I’m passionate about this, I’m passionate about that. I love children’. Ok, you can be passionate, but you don’t want half a dozen passionates in a supporting statement,” laughs Marva. “It’s exhausting. An overused and misunderstood word,

I think. However, this is not specific to Black candidates, as I have read a number of supporting statements written by all colleagues over the years.”

Building confidence isn’t an overnight fix. “You don’t wake up one morning and think ‘Oh, I feel confident now’. It grows from getting to practise some of the skills you need and being in an environment with people who support you,” she says.

Dolapo Ogunbawo

“MANY times over the past 15 years, I have been asked: what does a bespoke training programme for Black teachers do that a generic course doesn’t?,” says Dolapo.

Within the enquiry lurks a suggestion that perhaps Black candidates may need some additional training to address some deficit before they can apply for promotion, she feels. “We keep having to explain that people going through a bespoke programme are not doing so because they are in some way damaged and need to go through another layer of training to make them whole before they can present themselves as a candidate for a job,” she says.

If the course is designed to fill any gap, then it may be self-belief or confidence – to instil it where it is yet to exist or replace it where it has been lost. The latter can come from experiences of discrimination in the workplace. “Many are told they are an angry Black woman, or an angry Black man, so they then become silenced. They lose their voice,” says Dolapo. “Many Black teachers find they are working in isolation. That is terrifying on its own. Then, knowing – even at the back of your mind – all the stereotypes out there, the teacher feels a bit wary,” she says. “Confidence also comes from knowing you are well-prepared for what you are going to face. That will enable more Black teachers to go forward and apply, knowing there is support for them.”

She adds that many Black teacher recruits leave before their third year, frustrated because they cannot see a way to progress in their career. “They complain heavily of discrimination, so they don’t even get to middle leadership. On our course, Marva and I want to take teachers and give them the confidence they need for their journey and career progression.”

Although an experienced school leader like Marva, Dolapo has never worked in a school in the UK. Relocating from Nigeria in 2004, she joined the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) as programme manager of the then National College for School Leadership training programmes.

It was eye-opening.

“I had not been aware of the glass ceiling that exists for Black teachers here,” she says. “But it quickly became clear to me because every time we did the recruitment for the course, when I stood at the front of the hall introducing myself as the programme manager, I would notice the very few Black teachers in the group.

“Their eyes would light up and during the first break they would come to me and say ‘you don’t know how happy we are that you came in and introduced yourself as the programme manager because we have been so scared we won’t be able to open our mouths because the atmosphere will be against us’. That was a heavy burden for me. I just wasn’t expecting that.”

She found that there were very few applications from Black teachers for the National College’s generic leadership training, perhaps one or two per cent at most.

Together, Dolapo and Marva, who had met through their work for the IOE, turned their thinking to designing and developing a course aimed specifically at Black teachers and have been working together since. They remain in contact with their first cohort from 2007, who still come together to support one another.

“Life is hard, and it’s hard for everybody. What we all need, all of us, is to be in that little group that we know will be there for us, where we can rant without the fear of being judged, where we can even weep to our heart’s content, and the group will then pat us on the back and say ‘enough of that. Go and wash your face, out you go and face them’,” says Dolapo.

Working on your professional development alongside others who may share your experiences, can bring mutual support and the start of a support network for the future. It will be needed.

Does Dolapo feel the anti-racist practice that many schools have been steadily adopting over the past two years, including unconscious bias training in recruitment, offer any hope that things will improve for Black teachers and their opportunities to progress?

“I am optimistic. Things will change. Nothing remains the same forever. Some people will maybe try to make the change go slower but I find what is happening now heartening,” Dolapo reflects. “A school where I had spoken about Positioned for success invited me to speak about equality and diversity in September. Many schools are taking it on board.

“There will be, of course, some who are doing this as a tick-box exercise, but we will also find many who are willing to understand so why would I not see that as a plus? But a school must move from just having the training to translating that training into practice and reviewing its practice from time to time, that’s when the change will happen. For me, even allowing someone to stand in front of them and talk about it is a plus. If we keep talking about it, it will eventually get through.”