Be Her Lead in Lockdown

Lauren Taylor teaches Science at Bulwell Academy in Nottinghamshire, and is also a teaching and learning coach for other staff.

She participated in the 2020 Be Her Lead programme, attending training days with her team of staff, and running workshops in her school for 38 girls. Once lockdown hit, Lauren managed to successfully take the programme online - here is her story.

Why we needed Be Her Lead

After attending the Be Her Lead Conference last October, I was inspired to apply for the programme and run it in the school where I work, Bulwell Academy in Nottinghamshire. Our school serves a mainly white, working class community, where there is high unemployment and lots of disadvantage. It can be extremely difficult to raise our students’ aspirations for the working world, which seems so unwelcoming to them. The female students in our school, generally, have very low self-esteem and low self-worth. I saw the need to raise their aspirations and open their eyes to the local opportunities which are available to them.

Being a Science teacher, I also wanted to raise the profile of women in STEM across the school and help the female students realise there are many STEM jobs that they would be amazing at. With so many great female teachers among our staff, I wanted to empower them to be able to empower our female students; to raise their aspirations and self-esteem.

A promising start

When I announced to staff I was leading the Be Her Lead programme at Bulwell, the response was very exciting. Having always felt alone in championing women’s rights amongst the staff, I thought it would be like pulling teeth to get a team of staff to support me, but instead there was loads of interest. I suddenly found a community of 10 teachers within my school who felt the same as me about gender equality - and made new friends and allies within the staff body as a result. Be Her Lead’s training and resources gave us opportunities to start discussing gender-related issues as a school, as well.

The response from students was overwhelming too. We had girls begging at our door to be involved, which was sometimes tricky as we only had capacity for 40 in the group! The first few sessions went really well; the girls loved the fact that they got given journals to keep, and responded well to the mindfulness activities and inspirational videos we used for the first few workshops. The Be Her Lead Programme Launch Day in London, where our girls had a day of workshops with the other participating schools, was a great opportunity - none of our group of girls had been to London before.

Lockdown hits

Having successfully implemented the programme in our school and run 3 workshops, it was a disappointment to us all when lockdown came into place and we had to pause. I was gutted because I’d worked so hard to implement it; schools are ever-changing and things are easily forgotten if you don’t have time to embed them in the school culture. I was worried Be Her Lead would be forgotten.

However, my team of staff who had done the Be Her Lead training with me agreed that we should try to move our Be Her Lead community online to ensure the girls were getting the support they needed during this unprecedented situation. I know I can get my students to pass their Science GCSEs in a year if needed, but during this crisis, wellbeing was the priority. Right now we just needed to keep them safe and well.

As my Be Her Lead team member Mel put it, “it was important to continue online, so that our girls know that we are still present for them and will still be their support system when they require it”. Mel is our school counsellor, so she had more direct insight into how lockdown was affecting the most vulnerable students mentally - many of them live in cramped housing conditions, and the absence of the daily school routine left them feeling simultaneously trapped and lost. I also started reading into how the lockdown may unravel 10 years of work done to unravel disadvantage in our society, and this made me more determined to do my bit with Be Her Lead.

Taking the programme online

To keep in contact with the girls, we began to develop a weekly newsletter and weekly sessions adapted from the workshops provided by the Be Her Lead programme. As we started working on these resources, we started to discuss how all the female students within our school community are struggling right now and we didn’t want to make the resources for just the 40 girls on the programme – we wanted everyone to benefit! 

So we decided that we would publish our weekly newsletter on our school’s social media accounts, making them available to any students who were interested. We structured the newsletter  around 3 weekly challenges, under the following categories: learning a new skill, caring for the community, and a mindfulness exercise. My team of staff and I made videos demonstrating challenges, with often amusing results, such as our DIY face mask video, and also sent round examples of creative tasks we’d done ourselves, like mood boards revealing our hopes and dreams.

With Be Her Lead but also generally as a staff, we try to express our ‘real’ personalities. Lots of girls have emailed me during lockdown to ask after Janet, Albert and Barry - my cats! Things like the funny videos and mood boards were a reminder to the girls that we’re still here, and that we’re real people.

In contrast to running the programme in normal school time, it was a challenge to gauge how much the students were responding to the Be Her Lead resources we were sending out. Some of the girls would send us their reflections, and creative work like mood boards. Endearingly, some of them got stressed out because they’d left their journals at school, so we managed to have their purple journals posted home. But it has been hard to stay in contact with lots of students, and I sometimes found myself sending them emails headed ‘Are you still alive???’

Like many teachers, I like to be in control, and I worry a great deal about the safety of my students. Running Be Her Lead during lockdown gave me less control over how the girls responded to the content we sent them, and that was hard. I wasn’t ready to rip off the bandaid. 

To ensure we kept contact with our original Be Her Lead group, we created Microsoft Team groups for them; this gives them a base to keep a conversation and express any concerns to us. Each week, we have a designated hour where the Be Her Lead staff will be available on teams and we run a virtual session based on that week’s theme like the girls would have had in person. We have now created a Be Her Lead wellbeing booklet, using adapted Be Her Lead resources, for them to use as a workbook over the summer. 

20 out of the original 38 girls have been accessing the sessions each week, and I’ve noticed massive impact on their confidence and self-esteem, and some of them notice a change in themselves; one student emailed me to say: ‘I like everything about Be Her Lead. It definitely has given me a little bit more confidence. It’s important because it can help young women grow stronger.’ 

Fostering community

Finally, inspired from the Be Her Lead weekly virtual coffees, which some members of our Be Her Lead team have been attending weekly, we have set up a regular coffee morning within our school staff community. Our teachers have really been benefitting from the community aspects and we are hoping to grow this with more weekly meetings and even themes! My colleague Helen, who helped me run Be Her Lead, said recently that ‘supporting one another with weekly team meetings and commenting in the group chats has helped me in lockdown, particularly when I’ve felt quite low’.

Feedback from the female students and whole school staff has been wonderful – they are loving getting involved, feeling more part of a community, and feeling the benefits of the self-care workshops and ideas. Mel commented that ‘​I really enjoy getting to know the students in a different setting; it’s really nice to be able to build on relationships and get to know students more, and to be able to be truly yourself with them in a safe environment.’

Looking to the future

We will definitely be continuing to run Be Her Lead at Bulwell, and expand it to every year group. As Helen says, ‘BHL is the new buzzword, and other members of staff asking me about it as students have been telling them how great it is.’ 

But from September, I want to take more of a backseat role. My ambition is to rise to SLT, and this is a  great opportunity to become a better manager by handing the every-day management of the programme over to other teachers and older students. In this way, I hope to empower women in our staff to empower our girls.

If you are interested in applying for the Be Her Lead programme, register interest here.