Catina Barrett WLN June 2021

Lou:

I want to ask you about trauma informed leadership. And I'd be really grateful if you would define that. Because on Twitter, everybody seems to be really arguing about what that is.

Catina:

Okay, so for me personally, that's trauma informed, transnational feminist leadership. I think trauma informed leadership draws on the theory of trauma, and much of the important work that's happened in recent years is feminist in its base. But I think it's really important to say that I would define myself as a transnational feminist, I would probably not be able to do this work if I wasn't able to preserve that.

Our sector has embraced trauma-informed teaching and learning on the basis that we believe students have often been affected by trauma that gets in the way of their learning. And that teaching needs to take this into account. And that's true, that's fine. We've seen trauma informed teaching really grow in schools, around learners mental health, mental illness, well being. And that's predominantly out of the ACES work, which found that adverse childhood experiences are huge in people’s later lives. And those consequences are not just for learning and not just for relationships, social, economic, or whether you get mental health problems, but loads of physical illnesses are also massively affected by those adverse childhood experiences.

More recently, what we have seen are racism ACES - the impact of prejudice and discrimination. If you don’t also take this into account, there is no equality really, and it's not trauma informed. Education is catching up with this.

I guess my experience, because it includes all that NHS experience - accident and emergency, high technology nursing and public health - is that one of the things we don't think about is adverse experiences in adulthood. And I think we have to think about that now, because of the coronavirus restrictions; there are people who've been traumatised in some way by this and we won't see it immediately. Adverse childhood experiences play out over many years. Coronavirus impact will be the same and future generations are going to have to deal with it. So things like the government's catch up programme for schools are nowhere. The fact that Kevan Collins resigned on principle, I wish we could see more of it. We keep forgetting that the parents of the children concerned are actually adult learners. And in a very few years the young people affected now will be the parents of the next cohort of children coming through. And unless we embrace trauma-informed leadership now there’s a disaster looming, but we never seem to do that cohort planning properly.

So the missing thing is looking at adverse experiences in adulthood and how they play out. There was raised awareness around domestic violence in lockdown, the recognition that some level that everybody needed to do something about it: having a code word, going to the hospital, the GP surgery and seeing a poster that says, tell us and then we'll do something about it. At the start #MeToo wasn't part of that focus, but with the killings of women it came to the fore. So the two young women in Finsbury Park, and the young woman in Clapham, and more recently of course #EveryonesInvited and that disastrous Ofsted report. How can anyone say they are shocked at the sexual harassment and abuse and violence towards girls in schools? I have no idea. Because if Ofsted is the answer to that problem, I want to know what they have been doing up to now. There’s no evidence, of course, that they looked in any depth at FE. Schools are there, and universities - look down that list and your university is pretty much there. But colleges can't be identified in that way. And there’s no recognition that sixth forms are part of the further education system at all, further education is just invisible again. We’ve contacted Ofsted to see if they will work with us because this is a huge problem, whether it’s student on student sexual harassment, staff on student or even student on staff. I desperately think we need research in our sector and I think why women should do that research. We need research in our sector to look at that. Yes education does good, but I don’t think we think often enough about its potential to do harm. Because nobody's talking about it or saying it's a big issue in FE, we’re behaving as though it doesn't happen. We know that it does. When we did the pop-up Equalities Tour a few years ago we heard endless stories, for example from young women apprentices in the motor trade, how affected they were by the ‘banter’ and sexual abuse. It was horrendous for them, often the only woman in a male environment and the provider was doing nothing.

So how does trauma-informed feminist leadership help? I think it's really important for people to understand that as a leader, now and in the future, given the uncertain world we live in, unless you understand the impact that that trauma may have had on you, on staff, on students and the community locally, and maybe your stakeholders, if lots of your stakeholders are third sector charity organisations, you're not going to be able to come up with plans that work, you're not going to develop relationships that actually are productive. And you're not going to get your curriculum right. There is no point in the government talking about having catch up sessions for people, if they're not able to learn because they've been traumatised.

We know that the Centre for Mental Health estimates that there will be 10 million new cases, that's three times what the NHS can cope with at its maximum. We know that we know that we don't know where the end of Covid is, we talk now about living with it. But we don't talk about the number of people who will be bereaved or whose socio economic lives will have been completely destroyed by this. By the time the programme that's designed for their age cohort comes along, will have passed on to the next cohort in all honesty. We don't know the best way to respond. And we don't know what services are going to be available. And we don't know how many people who previously had access to mental health services are going to be discharged early in order to make room for new people. What we do know but we never talk about is that the second largest group of people who are likely to die from Coronavirus are people with psychosis, or schizophrenia. Do you see that conversation anywhere? No, because of course, we still don't really honestly talk about mental health problems, even though we know that people who already have mental health problems are more likely to get bad outcomes from Coronavirus.

What we've got to do as leaders is to be ready to respond to people in a way that enables us to treat people with compassion. We need to look for compassion in all of our organisations and the public sector in particular, because otherwise it's not doing its job as a public organisation. And we need to do that compassionately. Yes, I think you can still make hard decisions, rational decisions, etc. But treat people well. Did we want that before Coronavirus? Yes, we did. And lots of us were arguing for it. Was everybody willing to listen to it? Not as much as they might be now. But I think there is a window for that. And I think otherwise the danger is everybody goes okay, it's all over. We keep seeing that, don't we? We talk about working from home forever and then we're exhorted to go back into the office because the city’s empty and the sandwich shops are all going to fold.

Trauma-informed leadership means understanding trauma as something we experience collectively as well as individually. I wrote to a highly valued leader in our sector recently. And they wrote back to me and said, yeah, I'll be happy to get involved, but I don't know very much about feminism. And I don't know anything about trauma-informed leadership. And then, humbly, they said, and some people would say, I don't know much about leadership. I wanted to say actually, you're a leader I've watched in action, and the only one I'll give you there is probably the feminist one. But your compassion to people unknowingly is exactly what I would mean by a feminist response. I think it's what we've seen as the difference in international leaders, it's Jacinda Ahearne’s response and her engagement of a whole population. I think we've seen it in other women leaders, though sadly not the evidence that they’ve all survived it much better. I think Angela Merkel did an amazing job in an industrialised Western country. So I think we know something about how to do this.

I think trauma informed leadership is about inequality as a starting point. I think it's about compassion. I think you have to learn how to do that. An awful lot of people, in my experience, still think that trauma informed means, I guess, the things that are in the ACES. Or the stuff from my nursing days, it means there's been a shooting like the one at Hungerford, it means there's been a disaster, like a plane crash or a terrorist attack. All of those things are absolutely causes of trauma. But feminists changed that definition to include domestic violence, to include sexual abuse and harassment of women, and others, but in particular, of women. And so I think the inequalities that we see are intersectional, transnational inequalities. So I can't sort it out here, if I don't also think about elsewhere. You have to live the values of it.

In his FETL monograph, Stuart Rimmer who has, of course, just been awarded the TES FE Principal of the Year award, wrote about the tightrope of distress, the mental distress that senior leaders have and that they're almost waiting for when they fall off it and that there is no safety net for them.

And even those who didn't feel they've been that traumatised by leadership talked about how they don't share their own stress with their senior management team, because you mustn't do that as a leader. Instead, they try and protect the senior management team and staff from hard circumstances. So not treating them as adults is what I would say. And not involving them: what are the ways in which we could manage this? How do you experience the problem? We find leaders who don't know how to talk to staff who've been bereaved, or who have experienced violence, or where their job has been put at risk; they back off and effectively protect their own mental health at some level, more than they do that of other people. So I think that's what feminism has brought and I think the transnational element is making sure that we learned from others, whether it’s a male or female leader they are held to account on the basis of how values are enacted. This isn’t the latest leadership fad. This is how you hold yourself to account to a set of principles and values that are increasingly evidence based. There’s some amazing stuff coming out of America and also out of our own NHS, for example the Psychological PPE training.

At the Women’s Leadership Network we used action learning sets to enable participants to learn and think about trauma-informed practice. We tried out a range of approaches within the action learning sets that worked well. In some cases, people were processing their own experiences. In one of the sets, people talked quite a lot about their own experience of trauma, in order to get thinking about leadership, and within that issues around race and sexual orientation experienced as trauma significant issues, where people had experienced the trauma of racism in previous jobs and hadn't realised it until they moved somewhere that was more compassionate, and how it's freed them up to make a difference in their own leadership. That's been quite a revelation for a lot of people. But we need to scale up. I know very few people in our sector who have the expertise and even if they're doing trauma informed teaching or learning, they don't seem to be able to make that leap to leadership: how do you run your SMT? How do you make decisions? The action learning sets enabled people to look through a trauma-informed lens, a feminist lens, a transnational lens, a public service lens. We have to unpick what that all means before we can genuinely take a trauma-informed approach.

It really began to happen. And people wanted those action learning sets to continue. We have a session coming up on 23rd June with Stuart Rimmer and I’m hoping the action learning set participants will come along and ask him questions, having read the monograph. There was a real hunger for things to read about trauma-informed leadership and I was fortunate to be working with Jane Darougar, who had some fabulous suggestions for the box set I put together. The way we ran the action learning sets was to have a webinar beforehand to tell people what trauma-informed leadership was and help them define it for themselves, then the box set would be populated not only with research but with relevant press articles and stats each week. The group also contributed these so that resource bank stayed fresh, and many of them are still delving in. It’s something that will continue to grow.

Stuart’s session on 23rd June is open to men for the first time and I’m a bit nervous about that, WLN has been so successful at amplifying women’s voices so if all the men speak and the women don’t I’ll be unhappy. But it’s such a great opportunity. I really want the women who did the action learning set to interrogate Stuart from those perspectives of trauma-informed, feminist and transnational, not to give him grief or to criticise him, but so that the learning is reciprocal, so that he gets to think about his monograph from a trauma informed feminist approach. You and I go back a long way and I think that taking up of different lenses is something we really tried to do on that public health course twenty five years ago, particularly the transnational approach. So that’s still there for me. Is it for the whole team? No, I don’t think it is. But what was really good with the action learning sets is that we did have people from right across the UK - and beyond - join the groups.

There is so much scope in this work for the sector and for public service more generally, but I wouldn't be willing to lose that intersectional feminist perspective on it, because otherwise you're not giving people what they need to understand it. The challenge now is to get these intersectional approaches into other mainstream leadership stuff, without losing the power and potential of them and the informed clinical perspectives of people like Jane. You know what FE is like. You think you’re getting somewhere and then you look round and everyone behind you has defaulted to where we were five years ago. That’s my worry.

At some point we need to bring the people who do trauma-informed teaching and learning together with the people doing trauma-informed leadership, because not everyone is making that leap. If we’ve learned anything from transnational feminism it’s that, without the whole community on board, nothing ever really changes.