The theme of Mental Health Awareness Week this year is kindness.
Three years ago this June, when I was preparing to leave the Association of School and College Leaders, I gave a farewell speech at ASCL’s council meeting. The speech was about kindness and hope.
It was a month after the Manchester Arena bombing and just days after the 2017 London Bridge attack. ASCL had recently launched the commission on ethical leadership.
In my speech, I said that it struck me that compassion and kindness are leadership virtues that we might want to nurture in ourselves and others.
It was these old-fashioned but deeply powerful, even archetypal, words that we were returning to through the commission on ethical leadership
The importance of kindness
I referred back to Steve Munby’s speech that year at ASCL’s conference on power and love. Love, he said, is the drive to connect things, to bring people together, to unify, to make whole. It:
- Focuses on the needs of the pupils as they are.
- Creates a climate where children feel safe.
- Is inclusive so no child is left isolated.
- Shows empathy and connects with pupils.
At that time, I was reading Ten Poems of Kindness. A simple and old-fashioned word, “kindness” is an underestimated virtue in our increasingly hectic and impersonal world.
When the terrible darkness of a bomb in Manchester engulfed us all, we were fortified by the kindness of thousands of people who came immediately to the support of the parents looking for their children, and children looking for their parents - taxi drivers who stopped their meters; families who opened up their homes, brought food and water; people who queued to give blood.
And then we heard similar tales of simple acts of kindness following the terrorist attack in London. Our emergency services running towards danger, then turning their backs on it as they attempted to hold the life in front of them together.
This is civic leadership. This is the best of us.
And thousands of people gathered in Manchester’s Albert Square for a vigil of peace on Tuesday 24 May 2017, when Tony Walsh read his poem, This is the Place.
And then the leadership showed by teachers and leaders everywhere. Leadership in a dark time, the leadership that acts always on behalf of children, the leadership of love and kindness.
And the children and people we lost on those dark nights. You are missed, you are loved. “Whether the moon is full or crescent, your absence is a presence.”
And now, again, we face dark times. It strikes me again that kindness is needed.
Coronavirus: Anxiety about reopening schools
As Ten Poems of Kindness was a sanctuary then, so Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is for me now.
One of my favourite moments in this beautiful fable is when the horse says: “Nothing beats kindness. It sits quietly beyond all things.”
We have seen extraordinary acts of kindness and professional generosity through the pandemic.
But, completely understandably over the past week or so. people have become anxious. We are being asked to open schools more widely.
And let me be clear, schools have not been closed. They have remained open for the children who have needed our support and care, including the children of key workers.
Teachers and leaders have in many cases worked harder than at any point in their professional lives as they have sought in extremis to support home learning.
Parents have been magnificent in attempting to support their children’s learning while, in many cases, also trying to continue to work.
We have all done our best.
We all want to do the right thing
And now we are being asked to take a step towards opening schools more widely. It is difficult and confusing. Because this is a new virus, we cannot expect the science to be able to give us all the answers.
Science can tell us (tentatively and with various levels of confidence) about risks to specific groups. But it cannot tell us everything. We must be guided by the science and seek to do what is right based on the best evidence we have.
All of us - the teacher anxious to make the right decision, the leader trying to make sense of the advice, the trade union official who wants to make sure members are safe, the civil servant faced with multiple and competing pressures working late into the night - we are all trying to do the right thing.
As Charlie Mackesy says, one of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things.
So let’s be kind to each other for, as the maxim goes, everyone is fighting a hard battle. Let’s find a voice that enables us to work together to calm the waters.
It is the kindness that sits quietly beyond all things that binds us - and the common bond of wanting to do what is right.
Leora Cruddas is the chief executive officer of the Confederation of School Trusts
