Education

Education settings

My career started out in education settings supporting children and young people with additional needs, and my degree was in Applied Education Studies. I'm incredibly passionate about getting education right for our children and young people, and I think we've still got a huge deal of work ahead of us to achieve an education system that works for everyone and allows children to reach their full potential in life.

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Education settings and educators are stretched beyond capacity with demands on them only continuing to increase. Children's needs are complex and I've not met a single child I've worked with who learns in exactly the same way as their peers. So how can education settings and education professionals achieve the seemingly impossible task of meeting every child's needs and get them to their full potential, without any additional resources or time?

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To quote Morgenstern, the industrial engineer, the answer could well be to 'work smarter, not harder'. Or as I like to think of it, reimagining what education looks like, rather than just doing things 'because that's how it's always been done'. Something that stuck with me on my degree was a statement that the current education system could be viewed as the largest ever social experiment - our current systems have changed very little from the original Victorian structures of widespread education, and it seems the research and learning that has happened in the past few decades, particularly about effective pedagogy and child psychology, largely get ignored within education.

Joining the dots 

One of the biggest challenges faced by education settings is funding. There are so many different pots of funding available to schools to apply for or organisations wanting to support schools, but often finding what's available in the first place is impossible, the applications are lengthy and time-consuming, the set up requirements are beyond reach and then, if you're successful with the funding, there's numerous hoops you need to jump through in terms of delivery. Then there's the end of funding report...

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All of this can be a huge deterrent for time-stretched educators to even consider applying, so the cycle of lack of funding continues. But this is where I can help, by joining the dots between funding and schools, and removing that pain point - I can research and source funding opportunities, write the applications, manage the entire funding project from start to finish, and support you throughout delivery.

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Developing education programmes

Education programmes, whether delivered within teaching time or extra-curricular, are hugely impactful for children and young people. But only if they're developed and delivered in the right way. In my time within education, I've seen so many intervention programmes that are marketed as the next best thing, but not many tend to stick around for long - that could be down to cost, but often it's to do with the longevity of the programme, staff confidence, how entertaining it is for the students (and let's face facts - children always learn best when they're having fun at the same time!), and how 'user-friendly' it is.

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Whether you have an education programme that needs a revival, an idea for a new programme that needs to be developed into something that is scalable and impactful, you need support in developing training for your education programme, or you need help in getting people to see how amazing your programme is - I can help! 

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Take a look at the About page to see some of the things I did for the FIRST LEGO League STEM programme.

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Supporting teachers

When you take away the pressures and time drainers on educators, you can see just how creative and passionate they are about doing the best for the children they teach - that's why they got into teaching in the first place, right? So if we can minimise the amount of time they have to spend on the millions of other things they have to shoehorn into their day, their skills and expertise in teaching effectively will get the chance to shine through. It's about optimising teachers and educators, being smarter about how their time is distributed, and restructuring their workload.

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And that's where I can help - supporting you to rethink the processes within your education setting that don't bring any additional value to children and young people's education and introducing those that do, alongside making better use of teacher's time and skills.

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Get in touch with me today to see how I can help you and your organisation by completing the contact form below, or booking a free introductory discussion by clicking this button:

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