Schools are working hard on inclusion matters. Bridget Ward on why good intentions and honest self-knowledge are two different things.
We sat down with Bridget Ward, Head of St Helen’s Northwood and Chair of the Girls’ Schools Association’s DEIB Committee about what it really takes to make a school somewhere everyone belongs, and why she believes girls’ schools can lead the way.
In a time when people are quicker to take sides, slower to trust, and less sure of what’s true, schools are vital places that bring people together. Every morning schools bring together, children, families and staff with different backgrounds, needs, and beliefs, and try to build places where all of them can do well. With more people now paying attention to inclusion matters, from inspectors to families choosing where to send their daughters – getting this right matters more than ever and getting it wrong has never been more public.
“Inclusion” covers a huge range of meanings for people. What does it actually mean in a school, day to day – and why should Heads who are already stretched care about it now?
Ask the girls at my school and you would struggle to find the polarisation everyone talks about. They are more accepting of one another and more curious about one another than we often give them credit for. But they are growing up in a world that pulls hard the other way. Every day they are handed arguments, from every direction, and invited to pick a side. Almost none of it comes with any help to make sense of it.
That is what inclusion means day to day. It is not a policy or a line in the prospectus. It is making sure a girl can ask a difficult question out loud and get a proper answer, and that the adult in front of her does not change the subject. Heads are stretched, I know, but this is not another thing on the list. It is the one thing that makes everything else on the list work.
Almost every school describes itself as inclusive, and inspectors are now looking much more closely at whether that’s true. How big is the gap between saying it and showing it?
Every school I know works very hard at being inclusive. That is not quite the same as being inclusive. The honest answer is that we do not know what we do not know. When you are running a school, days can go past at speed. You only tend to find out you have got it wrong when somebody tells you.
That is the whole reason for the GSA Inclusion Summit. To give school leaders the time, and the company, to work out where they actually are and what to do about it.
More parents of children with special educational needs are taking complaints further than ever, while other parents ask why some children seem to get more help than theirs. How do schools keep the trust of both?
This is the same polarisation arriving at the school gate. The moment support looks like a finite pot, parents start counting.
I would turn it round. Every child in the school has needs, and those needs change as she goes through life. Some are written down in a report, and some aren’t. It is making sure each girl gets what she needs to do well and, in time, understands herself well enough to ask for it. Say that clearly and often enough and the counting tends to stop. Where it does not, the answer is almost always a conversation rather than a policy.
Many teachers are frightened of saying the wrong thing. What does that fear do to a school – and how do you get past it?
A frightened school gets smaller. Topics quietly drop off the list. A teacher swerves a question, or says we will come back to that, and does not. Nobody decides this. It happens one avoided conversation at a time.
We all know how it feels to speak when you are not sure you will get it right, but school is the last place that feeling should take hold, because the girls are ready for these conversations. If we do not have them, their phones will. So, the job is to prepare staff properly, give them the facts, and make it clear that trying and getting a word wrong is far better than not trying at all.
Most of the conversation about neurodiversity is about pupils, not the adults who teach them. What are schools missing? And with new rules on menopause and pay gaps on the way, are staff the next big test?
Yes, I think they are. We have become much better at asking how a girl learns, and much of what we now understand was not even named when most of us were at school ourselves. We have been slower to ask the same question of the adults who work in our schools, and whether a staffroom, a meeting, an inset day or a set of working practices suits the people working in them.
I’m a great believer in modelling what we ask for. You cannot build a school where a girl feels able to say what she needs if the adults around her don’t feel that they are able to say what they need to. Menopause and pay gap reporting will make all of this visible in a way it has not been before.
Families have more choice than ever about where to send their children. What do they notice about whether a school is truly welcoming – and what might heads be missing?
Parents feel it before anyone tells them anything. It’s in how the girls speak to each other in a corridor, who does the talking on a tour, whether a child looks comfortable being herself.
What leaders can sometimes miss is the quiet minority. Most schools are good at the girls who are visibly thriving and the ones who are visibly struggling. It’s the ones in between, who find one particular corner of school hard and never say so, who can go unseen. Finding them takes deliberate effort, and it’s usually the truest test of how welcoming a school is.
Girls are seeing things online – from “looksmaxxing” to “tradwife” videos – that many adults have never heard of, while scare stories about AI and social media are everywhere. How should schools respond calmly, and what can girls’ schools show everyone else?
Most of what girls meet online reaches adults as a scare story, and schools can take the heat out of it. Much of it arrives packaged as a fight – men against women, one side winning and one side losing.
Our job is to make sure that when girls meet this information that they can see it for what it is. A girl who knows what she thinks, and why, and can clearly say so, is not easily influenced by any of it. That is what girls’ schools have always been for.
This is the conversation we will be having at the GSA’s inaugural Inclusion Summit on Thursday October 8, and I hope to see my GSA colleagues there.