I’ve had the privilege recently to work with advanced practitioners across England as part of the #APConnect project. They are all absolute powerhouses, driving quality improvement beyond recognition.

What they and I have in common is where our loyalty lies: in the values of education. We might define these slightly differently but use words in common: transformation, making a difference, leaving nobody behind.

As long as we have the freedom to work to this end, we continue to do a great job, despite other challenges of our sector. For advanced practitioners, the work is the organisation. They work for FE, for its students, for its transformational potential. They describe it as a vocation, a passion, a mission: it’s more than “just a job”.

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For some people, the organisation is the work. Loyalty lies fundamentally with the survival of the organisation. Compliance follows and it’s hard to take risks. FE specialist Azumah Dennis calls this leadership without loyalty: survival leadership, where the ultimate purpose of the organisation - education - is not the key driver.

Christina Donovan researches trust and mistrust in further education. Where mistrust has taken hold in an organisation, the way to claw it back is by talking values - those “values of FE” which speak to what the institution is for: enabling everyone in a learning community to thrive.

A set of personal ethics 

When was the last time anyone asked you what your key values were?

Maybe the festive season will provide a pause point for you to give that some thought, as it did for me three years ago, when I was contemplating a freelance career. I began to see values as a practice. Not woolly words that just hung there in mission statements, but as something I enacted, intentionally, daily, in the decisions I made and the things that I did. A personal ethics.

Among other words such as freedom, respect and kindness, the value that kept coming up for me was joy: a word that’s everywhere in December. Joy is in the spaces between people: in the ways we connect and interact with one another. I don’t mean happiness - that seems like just another commodity. Joy can’t be bought, it can only be enacted. And, like any practice - like yoga, or meditation or running - we have to keep on doing it to be any good at it.

I set out to embody a practical ethics of joy in all my work. I’m navigated by Nesta UK’s definition of “good help”: does the work that I’m doing enable people to feel hopeful, identify their own purpose and confidently take action? Wouldn’t we want that for students? For friends and family members? For ourselves?

Even when I’m not feeling great, I try to act “as if” I was joyful. This makes me sound like Pollyanna and I’m really not. I am fierce and tenacious when it comes to what I believe in. I aim for critical, affirmative joy: bringing good grace to a situation so that those I’m working with can also think and speak for themselves, no matter how challenging that is. And the advanced practitioners of #APConnect meet me in this space and take critically effective joy out to their organisations.

Practical things we do include working at learning names (and preferred pronouns) and then using them to make sure each individual knows they are recognised and known. Sounds like a no-brainer, yet I still encounter educators who say, I’m no good with names. Get better.

We explicate values in the work that we do, finding common ground which then enables us to work across differences.

You are everything

And we use the Thinking Environment - currently having huge impact in FE - to compel colleagues and students to think for themselves and think better together, beyond divides. As a consequence, “good help” stories are blossoming across FE and you’ll read more of them in this blog in the coming year.

We are not waiting for permission to do “good help.” And before you think, “yes, but...” some of the APs I’m working with get an hour’s remission a week and no extra pay (others are treated more joyfully). But the point is their mindset has shifted. No longer the individual ‘I can’t…’ but the collective, ‘What if we…?’

My call to arms for the festive season is this: don’t settle for thinking you can do nothing. You are everything.

There could never be a better time of year for you to accept joy into your head and heart. In a world where you can be anything, be joyful. After all, according to the writer Rebecca Solnit, joy is a fine act of insurrection. An ethics of joy really can change the world.

Lou Mycroft is a facilitator, writer and public speaker