Abstract
Tell me a little about your early career and your route to consultancy.
I started as an English and Drama teacher and, after various career moves, including time as a local authority arts advisor, I eventually became a head. After 5 years, I was seconded to the Department for Education (DfE) to be the continuing professional development (CPD) advisor for London, and then to the Training and Development Agency. The secondments lasted 2 years, after which I decided it was unfair to return to headship because the acting head was brilliant. Fortunately, at that point I was offered a job at the Institute of Education in London, where I became CPD leader of a new department. I stayed there for about 11 years, eventually becoming Director for School Partnerships, before leaving to set up my consultancy.
What elements of education and leadership does your consultancy work focus on?
Vision, strategy and professional learning and the impact that these have on the organization. A vision is not just a statement – it’s about being clear on the difference you want to make; and a strategy is not something which leads to an enormous development plan and a list of actions and jobs – you need to be clear on how to implement it and to be able to evidence the difference you have made.
So that must be very satisfying for you.
Very much so; I feel I can help and support schools to achieve the difference they want to make, and that will always, always be for teachers first, because you can’t improve the learning of the children until you improve the learning of the teachers.
Have you published on that aspect of your work – teacher learning and how it influences pupil learning?
Yes, with Peter Earley; we edited a book of case studies based on a 3-year TDA (Training and Development Agency for Schools) project (Earley and Porritt, 2009). I’ve also written in quite a few practitioner journals [e.g. Earley and Porritt, 2014] – I can’t write unless it’s accessible for practitioners.
In addition to your consultancy work, you are a co-founder and National Leader of #WomenEd. What prompted you to establish this organization?
There was quite a personal dimension to it and then more of a professional dimension. I had been seriously ill, and with time on my hands I connected via Twitter with quite a few women leaders across all sectors. We were getting angry with some of the things we saw on Twitter – a lot of male voices that were very dominant. Occasionally we saw women trying to join in the conversation and being pushed out, because it wasn’t a collaborative shared response the way women tend to talk with each other. Plus, there was a lot of male banter which at times was quite off-putting.
Then, on the weekend of International Women’s Day 2015, there was a group of us on Twitter discussing the gender leadership gaps in primary and secondary schools. We felt so strongly that one of my co-founders said we should have a conference about this. So I offered to write a blog about what was being said, and – I vividly remember this – it got published about 7 pm, and within an hour it had a thousand views. So, what that told us was that there were a lot of women who were following but didn’t have a voice. Things moved rapidly from there. We established our name, Twitter and email accounts, and we held our first ‘unconference’ sponsored by Microsoft at their offices in London – ‘unconference’ because we wanted a different model to the usual where ‘experts’ (often male) present from the front and then disappear. Instead we had interactive sessions run by facilitators who were themselves delegates for the rest of the day. That first conference gave us our mantra. Sue Cowley talked to us about being 10% braver, and that has been taken up in phenomenal ways: encouraging people to be more confident, more courageous – to just take the next step.
From there it has just grown. In the UK, we have a core team of strategic leaders, supported by 11 teams around the UK. We also have teams worldwide: Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Italy, and soon we hope to expand into Luxembourg, Australia and Spain. So, it’s gone global, and the more we’ve worked with our international teams, the more we realize many of the issues are the same and the gap is even bigger in a lot of other countries. Of course, the gender pay gap horrifies everybody, but I don’t think any of us realized how stark it actually is and the other gaps that exist: confidence, career break, flexible working…you name it, there seems to be a gap at every single level across every education sector.
…And is this still all voluntary?
All voluntary, which is an issue with us all at times, simply because the more we do the more there seems to be needed to do. But we’ve had a lot of impact. If you go on Twitter and type in #WomenEd #Impact we can reference: promotions, new, changing roles within schools, increases of confidence, negotiated salary increases. You can also type in #WomenEd #10%braver and see the evidence for that as well.
So you can really see the difference you’re making?
Yes, and we look to make a difference by articulating and acting out our values. There are eight in total, but key is the value of challenge to bring about change, because that acts at three levels: for individual women and men because men have got to start changing the way they support women; for the organizations that employ them; and for systemic level leaders.
…and do you work with any other organizations?
We work with the DfE on lots of projects: we’ve supported their work on flexible working and were one of the groups included in their recent diversity statement in terms of what we are doing to bring about more diverse leadership.
We’ve started working with other partners as well on a massive project all around case studies of flexible working, and the Chartered College of Teaching will host that on an open access part of its site. And we’re a partner with Ambition School Leadership on the first women only NPQH (National Professional Qualification for Headship). We supported them on people applying, and we contribute facilitators too.
You must feel very proud of all that #WomenEd has achieved.
Yes, and the recognition doesn’t end there. In November 2017, we were shortlisted as Outstanding Diversity Network of the Year. We didn’t win but we were proud to be chosen. Then in December ‘17 we were listed as one of the TES [Times Educational Supplement] Top Ten Education Influencers of the Year. We’ve also been offered a book contract with SAGE (Porritt and Featherstone, 2019). We see it as a book for practitioners, but we think it will be very useful for leadership lists in education, and we hope every organization supporting trainee teachers will draw it to their attention as well. We have started to do some work with teachers who are training because we want them to see #WomenEd as a network that will support them throughout their career.
How do you find time to do this?
I work part-time now. I’ve had a fabulous career, but this is the most joyous thing I’ve ever done. There is something quite special about women coming together deciding to make a difference. It works in so many different ways and it’s wonderful.
So can you say where the main barriers are for women being promoted and taking up a proportionate role in education?
Unconscious bias and sometimes conscious bias, but that’s more difficult to assess. Unconscious bias in that we’ve had millennia of obstacles to overcome, and within schools there is often a reluctance to change structures. Schools still look and work the same that they have for a very long time, and seem happier to search the world for their middle and senior leaders than they do to look at the women sat in their own staff room, supporting them with the kind of conditions they need to stay in the education profession.
Then there are the gender stereotypes that are linked to unconscious bias. For example, in many societies working women are still expected to be the primary homemakers and carers even when their job is every bit as demanding as their partners’.
So what you’re saying is it’s bigger than education – it’s societal?
Yes, there are all those societal, historical issues that have to be addressed, and one of the chapters in our book tries to sum up how children’s attitude to gender and the stereotypes that go with those are formed. So one emphasis we put to our aspiring and existing women leaders is that you’ve got to be a role model to the girls and boys that you work with. Otherwise we’ll all have to keep doing this over and over again.
Also, when all of the gender pay gap data came out in March and April of last year it turned out that the aggregated data for education across all sectors was the third worst – even mining was better than education. So, in a profession that prides itself on trying to bring about social justice and equity for all, we don’t treat our staff in that way, and that is shocking.
…and there are such a large number of women working in education.
Yes, and of course one of the other gaps we work on is the gap that intersectionality brings. If you’re struggling as a woman, you’re going to struggle even more as a woman with an ethnic background or a woman like myself who is now recognized as disabled. And I’ve found it shocking some of the ways in which some people respond to me now with that label attached to me – I feel less valued (Porritt, 2018).
Based on your wide experience, what one piece of advice would you offer to aspiring female leaders?
It’s got to be: be 10% braver. Feel the fear and do it, because men feel the same fear, but it doesn’t stop them. So, feel the fear, experience the fear, deal with it and then just go and do it. For example, there was a recent Twitter chat that the US WomenEd team started, and one question was about being braver. Somebody asked the question, ‘but yes what does that mean?’ And I said it’s about anything, and it will be completely different for every woman, because everyone is at a different stage. All it means is just be a bit braver in whatever you are thinking or doing than what you thought you could be. And then we go further and say celebrate it and shout about it and be very proud of it, so that you role-model it for the women who are following you.
You must feel you’ve made a real difference.
Yes, I do think so, and that’s partly because I now know how to evidence that more than I ever did at the start of my career, and it’s important to do that so that you feel that you can see that you are helping and supporting. Looking back, it’s been fabulous; I couldn’t be more proud of having worked across the range of education, and it’s a fabulous profession.