Maternity Leave

Some of you may be regulars to my Comment-Ed blog and know that mostly it is filled with practical strategies and ideas to try out in class, with a little bit of pedagogy/ reasoning thrown in for added conviction.  I rarely write 'opinion pieces' - even though I love to read the blogs of other teachers who spark debate and hold nothing back in terms of their views on educational approaches and policy - mostly because I'm one of those oppressively-polite Brits who doesn't like to offend, and also because I don't keep up with politics as much as I ought to.  This post on 'Prepping Performers' or this one on women in the curriculum were probably as opinionated as I've ever got and even the minimal response to the former on Twitter got me feeling a bit apologetic and worried!

Many of you may also have reached my blog via Twitter, where I shamelessly promote my posts on a fairly regular basis.  I enjoy Twitter.  It is one of my few indulgences that lets me turn my brain off a little whilst still allowing me to feel as if I'm reading interesting articles and being updated on the world.  I don't read the papers or really listen to the news, but I do understand the Panama Papers scandal and Brexit because people post bite-size articles on Twitter for busy people like me to understand, and obviously, there's HONY, which is always amusing/ cultural/ tear-jerking/ eye-opening.

I use Twitter a little like I use Google and always find a wealth of fun and helpful ideas to read, try out and be inspired by, so imagine my disappointment when I searched teacher and maternity, finding myself still in bed with coffee at 8:30am on a Thursday morning after ten days of maternity leave, having dreamt about popping into school just to touch base, and found nothing but advertisements for maternity cover positions.  Clearly, teachers either do not go on maternity leave, or when they do, they duck out of the Twittersphere, or maybe it's true what they say and the baby becomes so all-consuming that there's no space for thinking about teaching or one's professional life for 4-12 months?

Thus far, I have had an interesting relationship with the concept of maternity leave: I am at once horrified at the injustice of maternity pay and its blatant representation of gender inequality that still exists in the UK (I literally cannot figure out how single mothers cope, financially and am resentfully but desperately grateful for my partner's wage), yet I am simultaneously thrilled by the thought of becoming a mother and the opportunities this has given me so far to discuss human rights, biology and life decisions with my students, as well as delighted by the support offered by my school and the state in terms of my legal rights to ante-natal care and the celebration that has been my pregnancy in a working environment.  Having shifted from a 70+ hour week of productivity sectioned into 50 minute periods, the demand for emotional resilience in the face of challenging students and a sense of purpose that comes from being relied upon by colleagues, trainees, leaders and students, to days of nothing that stretch out in front of me, I am horrified by the constant repetition from friends that I don't need to achieve anything today because I am constantly achieving by growing a human!  Yet, I am so relieved not to have to get up at 6:00am after broken sleep and stand all day and calmly cope with students who shout at me or get stroppy because they haven't been allowed to go on study leave.

What has been preying on my mind, however, is how one can be professionally productive on maternity leave without making commitments that are impossible to keep with a tiny, unpredictable baby, or by sacrificing that highly important role of providing for and nurturing a new human being.  Organisations like @WomenEd are constantly reminding us of the stats on school leadership: the majority of the education workforce are women, but a disproportionate number of school leaders are men.  To me, right now, the connection between leadership, being a woman and being a mother makes a lot of sense: if I am to have the 2-3 children I'd like to have, I'm looking at a 2-3 year stop-start approach to my career progression where balancing my previous commitments with the additional presence of a lovely little person for whom I am 50% responsible - logistically, emotionally and financially - is likely to mean that I will feel a great sense of achievement just holding tight and managing my current role.  Whilst I am feeling great about getting my books marked and lessons planned for the following day whilst simultaneously avoiding late fees at nursery by picking my child up on time and getting them fed and to bed feeling convinced that they are the centre of my universe, my male counterparts have had six extra months at a time to develop, gain experience and hone their skills to prepare them more effectively for promotion or leadership positions.

Let's do some hypothetical maths for a moment: if I were to have three children and take six months off for each child, returning to work for at least two terms at a time before starting maternity leave for the next child, I would be taking eighteen months off work over a three or four year period.  I have therefore lost out on eighteen months of career progression.  If I then look back over the previous eighteen months that I have worked and rack up what I have achieved, and what a male colleague of the same age, or a woman deciding not to have children at my age could achieve, it becomes quite worrying: in the last eighteen months I have started a new role at a significantly increased salary, facilitated CPD regionally and nationally on numerous occasions for Teach First, become a drama teacher thanks to the experience of directing @SSF_UK, become a Teach First mentor, co-lead a department, begun an education blog, got to grips with a new syllabus, contributed to the transformation of KS3 teaching in our academy chain, facilitated CPD for trainees across our academy chain and contributed to the development of numerous policies across our school.  In an equivalent eighteen months, I will potentially choose to produce and develop three real life human beings, which is incredible, but is a choice that will undeniably put me on the back foot when it comes to competing effectively with my male counterparts in the workplace.


So what do I do?

a) Stop having children, if my work is so important to me.
b) Accept the inferior position of women in the workplace, embrace my natural role as a mother and be thankful that I am able to juggle both work and family commitments.
c) Figure out a way to have my cake and eat it, too.

Well, here's the thing: I, for one, am endlessly optimistic and frighteningly stubborn.  At an Ambassador presentation for Teach First last year, I stated that one of my professional goals was to prove through leading by example that leadership, ambition, professionalism and post-feminism were compatible concepts: it is possible to be a great leader, to be a great mother, to be a great wife, to cook and clean and be excellent at your job - it's just hard - but nothing worthwhile ever came from avoiding hard work.

So, I fully intend on having my cake, eating it, and taking seconds, and am taking some cues from my experience teaching abroad in an environment that felt very much like the professional holiday that I'd like my maternity leave to be, but with less sun and weekend mini-breaks to Thailand, alas.  When teaching in Vietnam, I was desperately concerned that the well-behaved students, resource-wealthy school, rewards and perks, lack of observations and long holidays were deskilling me for the type of schools to which I hoped to return in the UK.  Was I setting myself up for a career teaching the privileged elite in private schools across the world rather than the underprivileged students who really needed me?  Upon returning to the UK, I discovered that far from deskilling me, this experience had given me the time, the space and the enhanced wellbeing to develop my teaching practice in areas that were in high demand in the UK, namely EAL teaching and grammar.  So often in the UK education system, we simply do not have the time to develop effectively and sadly, all too frequently, promotions are offered not because a candidate has been given the time to fully grow into a role, but because someone is needed to fill the position now, resulting in poor leadership and burn out.

If approached with determination, an open mind and NHS-approved levels of caffeine, maternity leave, I have decided, can provide a similar opportunity for calm and considered professional development.  If you are in a similar position to me, why not consider these options:

1. Develop your subject knowledge, or your knowledge of a different subject strand that you are required to teach (for me, this would be reading schemes, drama, history or media).

• Future Learn provide great, free online short courses from respected universities that can do just this.
• As a member of your local library, or as an alumni of your university, you can gain access to texts specific to topics of your choice - I'm currently reading up on approaches to bilingualism.
• What free events, open to the public, or to alumni, are happening at your local university?  KCL, for example, are doing a whole alumni weekend of free talks on Shakespeare; UCL run lunch hour lectures during term time; the British Library run fantastic free workshops on a whole range of topics.
• If you really want to challenge yourself, and have the finances to do so, why not take the opportunity to complete a masters?  There are lots of forums and discussion pages from Mums who have balanced childcare and study to help you consider whether this commitment is the right one for you.
• Do all the stuff that you wish you could do but never have the time when working: read all of those books, go on those field trips, visit those museums, and be sure to document this somehow - make these experiences meaningful so that you have an armoury of ways to use them when you return to work.

2. Get abreast of curriculum changes.

• Read the new specifications - how many times have you lied and said you have done this, only to scrabble around desperately when you realise that you don't actually know what the word count is supposed to be, or which texts are supposed to be compatible with which, or the format of the questions on Paper 2 Section A?  Now you have the time to actually become an expert on it and swan back into department meetings as the Edexcel/ AQA/ OCR/ WJEC guru!
• In English, at least, there are a whole load of new areas that teachers simply feel unfamiliar with: 19th century fiction and non-fiction texts, new poetry anthologies, the disappearance of Of Mice and Men (sob), a renewed focus on Shakespeare, 100% exam - use this time to read up about these areas so that you can be at the forefront of the planning and teaching and learning of these topics on your return.
• Exam marking: if your maternity leave is timed appropriately with the exam season, we have all heard that there's nothing more effective for KS4 and KS5 CPD than marking for an exam board, but who wants to do this at the end of the summer term after marking a million mocks and controlled assessments/ coursework all year?  You never know, now it might be a thrill to see students' writing again - and this is a paid CPD!

3. Use your weekends.

Poor dads - all the Mum and Baby books I have read emphasise the importance of proactive bonding from dads because of the unavoidable advantage that mothers have to connect with their child: the whole gestation thing, the breastfeeding, the time spent at home, the pheromones.  Get yourself a breast pump, pop some bottles in the fridge and give dad some exclusive time with baby whilst you go out and attend or facilitate some weekend CPD sessions.  

• If you are, or know a Teach First trainee or Ambassador, then at least six huge conferences are run every year in different regions across the country, and there's a national Impact Conference coming up on the 23rd July.  You can also hear about great events run by organisations like @WomenEd, the Teacher Development Trust (@TeacherDevTrust) and Teaching and Learning Leeds (@agwilliams9) by following different people on Twitter.  Mostly, these are affordable, accessible, and run at the weekend.
• Teach First are also always on the lookout for great session facilitators, especially in their newer regions.  Either search for the names of their Local Engagement Officers in your local areas, or ask me to connect you via Twitter (@Comment_Ed)/ the comments box in this blog.  These Local Engagement Officers are specifically employed to make connections to work towards Teach First's mission of addressing educational disadvantage, so they are a great first port of call to put you into contact with someone who can help more specifically with your enquiry.
• Tutor, or offer to facilitate Saturday revision/ booster sessions in your former/ local school - you'll have more time to effectively prepare sessions and it's a lovely way to keep in touch with your former students without the stress of marking!  It's also another very welcome opportunity for paid work when you hit statutory maternity pay!

4. Use the Mum and Baby networks in your local area!

• Even before my baby has arrived, I have managed to join two groups on Facebook full of local mums selling buggies and sterilisers.  What these networks are also great for, is hearing about events in your local area.  Who knew, for example, that there will be a French Saturday school launching just round the corner from me in September, who are in need of trustees and volunteers in their initial stages - as mum-to-be to a bilingual baby, wife of a French husband, fluent French speaker and teacher, what a perfect opportunity to learn about how schools are launched and run from a management, rather than teaching perspective!
• There are lots of teachers on maternity leave, and lots of them are likely to be in your local area.  Why not band together and meet up with babies to discuss all of the professional topics that are weighing on your mind and build a community of professional development?  Everything is always easier to do when you have a supportive network of like-minded individuals!

Obviously, these are only the things that I've been mulling over in my mind since the ever approaching reality of maternity leave and motherhood, so if you have any other suggestions or things that have worked for you, please do leave a comment or reply to me on Twitter to begin an empowering social media conversation about maternity leave and the teaching profession so that more than long term cover jobs come up when we search on Twitter!  In fact, why don't we begin our own hashtag: #maternityteacher?