Facebook Pixel
The PilotEd Podcast

Be Her Lead: Empowering Female Teachers and Raising Girls' Aspirations - Nell Byron and Edith Johnson

The PilotEd Podcast
The PilotEd Podcast
This week I meet Nell Byron and Edith Johnson, former teachers who co-founded the organisation Be Her Lead. Their mission aims to empower women in teaching to build resilience and raise the aspirations of girls in their schools. They have run support and enrichment programmes that train other classroom teachers to lead bespoke programmes targeted at teenage girls. Nell and Edith began to champion the needs of the young women they had in their care, and saw themes that worried them in their context. I wanted to ask them about their journey to this point, and to understand what they had experienced that now  made this equity-focused organisation their urgent mission.

Detractors may say that the focus needs to be on boys’ achievements as we nudge closer to gender pay equality and the achievement gap (measured in grades alone), but as Edith rightly points out, the mission for Be Her Lead is about raising confidence and raising aspirations, and increasing the breadth of aspiration. Just as boys can, and should be encouraged to pursue career paths if they wish, in areas that are seen as female-dominated, such as early years teaching and the arts, girls should be equally encouraged to join sectors that have been traditionally male-dominated such as technology and politics. In this way, both genders benefit from spaces being held for the goals and aspirations of each individual, whether male, female, or non-binary. No child should feel limited by their gender.
Noticing and naming the trend is a relatively recent development: 


Source:
https://www.ft.com/content/3b2509f2-fda2-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521
In 2015, the OECD published the ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence. The report speaks of the growing attainment gap between girls and boys. 
Source: OECD (2015), The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence, PISA, OECD Publishing.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264229945-en
 

I wonder if programmes like Be Her Lead that offer camaraderie, support and networking opportunities for the participants and teachers delivering the program will help not just with confidence raising and aspirations of the girls, but also of the teachers themselves. If so, then they are desperately needed. Figures published last year by the UK’s national education union (source: https://neu.org.uk/policy/teacher-recruitment-and-retention) showed that one in 5 teachers wanted to leave the profession within two years. In other episodes on this podcast, voices like Claire and David Price and Tim Milner have all commented on a need to restore trust in teachers and pay attention to the scrutiny of the profession, as it drives young talent away soon after they are trained, as was the case for Nell and Edith. And we have to wonder, as we prepare to return to our post-COVID classrooms, what that means for the young teachers out there who are desperate for change to come. 

---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thepilotedpodcast/message
The PilotEd Podcast
Not playing