Unconditional Positive Regard – Changing challenging behaviour with compassion

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello and welcome to episode four of the Wellspring Way, the podcast where each fortnight we chat to an education professional about their career, their expertise, and some of the challenges facing colleagues in classrooms right now. We also find time to grill our guests a bit on their own school days. Today I'm joined by an expert in behaviour management in schools, Luke Mitchell. Luke's been part of Wellspring Story right from the very beginning. He's now Head of Behaviour Support for Positive Regard, Wells Springs training and consultancy service that advises schools and organisations working with young people about how to understand and manage challenging behaviour in a compassionate relational way. He's an advanced team teach tutor, a lead advocate for supporting children who've suffered trauma and loss, a specialist leader of education, and an expert in therapy. Luke, welcome to the Wellspring Way. How's the start of the year gone for you?

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Hectic is one word to use. Not just for me, I think for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

And why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Oh, a number of things, innit? The society we're living at the minute, the current sort of climate, the world as it is at the minute. Obviously, it's there was lockdown a few years ago, then we had like a bit of a bit part year, I guess, coming back, and then now it's it's full on back at it. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

So, ahead of behaviour at Positive Regard.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

For people that aren't aware of Positive Regard and what it does, tell us a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

So I'll I'll start off, I suppose, by describing the service rather than the concept because there's two little bits there, and I suppose people get mixed up with that. Um, the service, Positive Regard, is a behaviour, SEND, mental health and well-being support service for schools, children's services, residential care settings, and a number of sort of other anybody working with challenging young people, really. Um, and it started out in Barnsley. Um, and basically what happened is I was working in an outstanding SEMH provision with Dave, who you had on the on the last podcast, um, and the local authority used to commission behaviour support in the schools to help reduce exclusion. Um, and they used to we used to go out into the schools, support them, behaviour reviews, just working with the schools really, prevent the kids from being excluded or being placed in SEMH provisions, like any sort of good funding that it disappeared, um, and schools still wanted to know what they could do to support the young people. So Dave at the time was was was my boss, and he said to me, We we still need to go into these schools and help them out, even though there was no funding there. So um we did that out of professional generosity, went into the schools in Barnes, and and we're helping out again, which was great, but that meant that then I wasn't in my school anymore. Um schools around the authority and other authorities then started to catch wind of what we were doing and decided they wanted a piece of the action as well, and that's where it started to develop, and it needed a bit more planning then rather than Dave and I just going, right, let's go into these schools, let's go into that school. So that's kind of how the service grew, positive regard, uh, and it's now grown to a service that uh last year we supported over 450 schools, uh six children's services, a couple of residential care settings, um, and it's not just me that does it as well, there's there's 34 of us now, there's a whole team of us that are handpicked, um, then trained and developed, and and they all work in schools, which is one of the beauties of the service, I think. That's kind of its uh I suppose its uniqueness is that every single member of staff that does it has a job in a school, so they're still doing it day to day, they're still practicing, they're still relevant, it's still fresh, and they get out there supporting and helping out. Um, we chose the name Positive Regard, I guess, because fundamentally its values or unconditional positive regard sits alongside what we do, and it's it's at the heart of everything we do rather than sits alongside it. Uh, Carl Rogers was the chap who came up with unconditional positive regard, the theory of, and he was a humanitarian psychologist working with some really tough clients, and his team of therapists were trying to do therapy with rapists and murderers, that sort of stuff. And they were finding therapy really difficult to do with that person because they couldn't see them as anything other than what they were, and I can imagine that's quite difficult and quite challenging when you presented with someone like that. And one of the theories that is that he said that you had to remove that judgment when working with young people, and we just really liked that concept, and we started using it in in our school at the time, but yeah, so we we kind of take and we we like the name, the theory, the whole sort of relational-based aspect to it, and henceforth we named the service positive regard.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

So unconditional positive regard. I think that's a really, really difficult concept for people to kind of get their heads around.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So nobody's saying that you have to like every single person that you're around or every single person that you're with, but you have to care enough to be your genuine self and authentic enough to be explicit and open about this. So there's there's young people that I work with, for example, that um I really struggle with um to build a relationship and to connect with, but I care about them enough to make sure that everyone else around me knows that I support them when I can support them. But if that young person starts to become defensive and is a trigger for my own stresses and my own behaviour, that it's really clear in that young person's plan that I'm not the best person to support them in that moment in time, but I have to be a professional, have unconditional positive regard, care enough to know that I'm actually not the right person at that time. Um so then I would um I would step aside and let somebody else support and get in there. Um, the other sort of side of it is the um if a kid tells me to f off one day, the next day they come in, I don't hold it against them that they've told me to wife off. So you you have to strip that judgment away, strip that emotion away, as I go, I suppose. Um respond with a smile on our face, with genuineness, with openness, but don't let them get away with it. We still make sure that we pick it up and we teach them how to express themselves in a more sociably acceptable way the next time. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

That's really honest of you to kind of say that that sometimes it is really challenging because I think you hear it, this unconditional positive regard, and your instinct is almost to consider well, people doing that must be saints. But you're saying you don't have to be a saint to be able to treat people with the most important.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Oh no, nobody's a superhuman, are they? You've just you've just got to be honest and open, and again, that's part of it, the part of the theory is being being honest and being open, um, talking to each other. Um, yeah, it's it's a tough gig. We always say as well that so the the kids who are the hardest to love are the ones only loving the most, and you've really got to be resilient, keep coming back every day, but that's hard for you. You get stressed, you you succumb to like secondary stress or compassionate fatigue. So if you work with a kid who's uh emotionally draining or feels uh neglected or feels uh under threat, you walk home at the end of the day feeling neglected, feeling abused, feeling under threat yourself as a member of staff. I can imagine. Coming back in the next day to work with that young person is is really really challenging, but we can't hold any of that against them, otherwise, we're not going to be that person that they need. Um there's a phrase that I use whenever we do support, and at the end of the training, I always say, be the person you needed when you were younger. Um it's a phrase that kind of sticks in my head and resonates with me. It's something that I suppose I have to think about on my toughest days because you do rock up when you do feel tired and worn down and stressed, but yeah, having a little phrase like that, knowing that these kids need somebody in their life, an emotionally available adult to support them, uh, is it's important.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Yeah, it's uh I mean from a parent's perspective, it's something that I kind of try and teach myself and tell myself all behaviour is communication. She's just trying to communicate something to me, and it's if you can try and grasp that, it makes it a little bit more bearable.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yeah, uh, that's something that we have to work on a lot with schools and and services, I guess, that are working with young people that behaviour is communication. Um and so when we talk about behaviour is communication, we we need to be able to understand how the young person's expressing themselves, and they're expressing themselves often through a piece of challenging behaviour. Our goal is to understand its communication and almost translate the behaviour. Um, that's something that we do a lot of work on, and we focus in with staff on how to translate a young person's behaviour. Um what we tend to find though with behaviour is often we can react to behaviour directly, which doesn't necessarily translate it or meet the need. So if a if a child throws a chair over, a very typical response is to say pick up the chair. If an adult throws a chair over, a very typical response is to say, Are you okay, what's the problem? And you try to dive down to the what's behind the behaviour. Um another way to get this across to people in terms of that behaviour is a uh a form of communication is to think about if if a child was in a wheelchair and they refused to walk, would you punish them?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

I'm glad you responded to that. Um if you had a blind child who couldn't read and refused to read without access to braille, would you punish them? Of course not. So, what if you had a child with communication difficulties in your classroom that was showing you challenging behaviour and refused to behave, would you punish that?

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Well, I know I know what the answer should be. Most people I know that I've fallen into patterns of the city.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

And so have I as well. The first six years of my career was spent telling kids off if I'm gonna be right. But yeah, that young person who's showing you that piece of behaviour is trying to tell you something, and and most schools they want to say no to that last one. No, we don't react to it, but we often do if a young person sat there, even low levels, swinging on the chair, refusing to get on with the work, they're trying to tell you something, they're trying to tell you I'm bored, I'm fed up, I'm unhappy, I don't like this, I'm really worried about my mum. Do I have to wear these smelly clothes again tomorrow? I just don't like school. They're trying to tell you something, and surely our goal as a practitioner, and what the point, one of the points we try to get across through the service, is that you need to try and figure out what the problem is. Now that's difficult, um, it takes time, it takes effort, but that's what we look at. We look at how to translate that behaviour so we can meet the need in the heat of the moment rather than using a one approach to deal with that one piece of behaviour. Because, like I've just said, there a kid will swing on the chair for a variety of reasons. We've not even started to touch on the sensory need or anything there. There's there's there's so many reasons a kid behaves the way they do. So yeah, I think people enjoy the service or use the service because it it can open up people's sort of I suppose uh mindsets and opinions and and give them new ideas to support and translate behaviour. Look at behaviour slightly different rather than look at it as something that we need to squish and use a deterrent to sort of just stop and eat in a moment.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

Yeah, and I I guess your own kind of issues come into play, like you've said, like you know, if you're if you're tired or you've got you you feel stressed and under pressure, you know, it's it's hard being a teacher, isn't it? Um you know you've got a class full. I guess you you reach for what you know in that moment.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Um what's natural to you? I I like I said in the first six years of my career, I had no sort of training that I've had now. I didn't work along psychotherapists to start with, I didn't work in specialist provisions to start with, I was just presented with challenging behaviour. And my mum used to deal with me by telling me off or shouting at me. Yeah, and that was kind of what I was doing in my practice with the kids, and on the majority on the whole, I had pretty good behaviour in my classes, apart from from a couple of kids. There was always the same couple of kids that it really didn't work for, and the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Yet I continue to do it over and over again. Um, when I look back at my practice then, and I look back at my practice now, I much prefer where I am now. Uh, I have better relationships with young people, and overall I have better behaviour, but it's a lot harder now to do what I do. Um there's there's there's more positive moments, I guess, but I got a lot better behaviour more of the time when I reacted like that. But it doesn't sit right with me anymore, especially since having my own kids. Like I don't want to shout at children or constantly punish them to make them behave because ultimately I'm making the kid behave through fear rather than through connecting, understanding, and trying to support the young person. Um I just mentioned about my daughter then. I'm trying to be relational-based with her when I'm bringing her up, which again is really, really tough because I just want to sometimes do that sort of punitive thing and take something off of her because that's my natural response. But I want her to behave in a way that's socially acceptable when she goes to school. But I'm teaching her to do that as a parent now. So, like, for example, just running down the corridor. I don't want her to walk because she's scared of being told off. I want her to walk because that's what you should do. It's a socially acceptable behaviour. And I'm teaching her that now when we go to the Aldi, I'm holding her hand, I'm walking around, I'm giving her she's only two, like I said, but I'm giving her those instructions now. An eco, this might be a little bit controversial, I guess. I don't want her to behave to and come home with loads of stickers on a t-shirt for walking nicely. Like I just want her to walk nicely. I want her to be praised, obviously, but more intrinsic praise, like fist bumps, high fives, well done, that's nice walking, than than to come home with loads of stickers. It's nice to be rewarded, but I just feel you get more motivation out of an intrinsic reward, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

Yeah, I mean ultimately that's what we want, isn't it? For whether they're children in our class or our own children. We want them to do the right things, make the right choices because it's the right thing. That it's the right thing to do, not because they're scared.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

So that's behaviour's taught, you have to be taught that. If you haven't been taught that, how do you you come into a classroom, somebody gives you a piece of work, you don't like it, you get stressed. The reaction that you've seen to deal with stress is to shout at somebody or argue or throw something, then you just you're modeling that. Um, and if then if we model as teachers that we shout at them when we're stressed, then they just and it just carries on. Um, it's tough, we've got to model something else. Like I said, behaviour's taught, right? If you if a kid can't catch a ball, what do you do?

SPEAKER_01 13:22

You spend time with them throwing a ball with them and catch a ball.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah, you break it down for them, you show them where to put their hands. If they can't read or write, what do you do?

SPEAKER_01 13:29

You sit down with them and show them how to do it.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Absolutely, you scaffold it, you support them, you teach them. If they can't behave, what do you do?

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Show them how to behave better, that's what we're doing. Understand what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

That's what we should be doing. We should be teaching behaviour, but again, it takes a lot more time and effort. It's actually much easier to rely on a system to do it for you. So I'm talking about a punitive system on a wall, a traffic light system, a minutes off break time system. Now, again, it sounds like I'm anti-system when I say stuff like that. I'm not, because I understand and I've used them in my practice that they help create consistency, high expectation, clarity, the visual aids. My issue with them is they were I always found them to be really rigid, so they don't give enough flexibility to those two kids that I was telling you about when I was very heavily reliant on behaviourist and sanctioned approaches in my class, is there was always two kids that were in the red traffic light system. And again, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Um and I guess there's that thing, isn't it, that kids have who are very lucky, privileged, whatever you want to call it, in terms of their home life and how well supported they are and how well they've been modelled good behaviour, well, when they're misbehaving a little bit, it's often about trying to push boundaries and find out where the boundary is. But if it's children that have never had that support and have got all kinds of horrendous things going on in the home life that we can't imagine, then it's a different, it's a different issue, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 14:54

They need to know we're a safe adult, they need to know we're gonna come back every day, we're gonna be there for them, we're not gonna let them down because adults might have let them down in the past. Yeah, they need to know that we care, they need to know that we understand. Importantly, though, they need to know that we are gonna put boundaries in place and rules in place, and something's gonna be done if something goes wrong. What that something is, then, um, depends, I guess, on um on your approach and your response. That something doesn't have to be sanction-based, that something can be a consequence of some sort, for example, a logical consequence, putting right what's gone wrong. The consequence might simply be we need to have a conversation about what's gone on and teach you how to express yourself in a more socially acceptable way. Um, there's a lot of skill that comes into doing this as well. So, if you're teaching a young person, let's say, for example, a kid smashes windows with a chair, all right? That's quite a high tariff behaviour. Yeah, you've got to teach that young person that that's not acceptable. Okay? How do you do that with a young person who gets so angry that they smash windows? Simply excluding them or putting a detention in place won't teach them how to express themselves in a socially acceptable way. Again, what's the kid saying who smashes a window? He's saying I'm angry, I'm cross, I'm frustrated, I'm unhappy. So we've got to give them a strategy that's more socially acceptable than the thing that they were doing, but equally achievable. So if you've got a kid who's angry, quite often what we do in the classroom is we say to the kid, next time you're angry, come and tell a teacher. I don't know if you've ever been angry before, Elizabeth, but I've been angry a lot, yeah. You can't just go up to somebody and go, I am angry.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

No, it's impossible. And it's that thing of you know, tell someone who's angry to calm down. Has anyone ever calmed down in the world?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

This is often a strategy that we give to young people, it doesn't work, and then we rely on that sanction to deal with them. Whereas also, or just a couple of other things, if you've got a really angry kid who's potentially smashing a window and you say to them, right, go and use the mood board next time you're angry, to make a conscious decision to use the top part of your brain to go and move your face from the calm bit to an angry face is is pretty much impossible. The reaction that they're showing you is is something that they deem as the right choice and the right and it's gonna get their needs met. Um I also hate the phrase when we say to kids, you're making the wrong choice, make the right one, because to them that might be the right choice. How on earth do you know what the right choice is for that kid? But we need to still that I'm not for one minute suggesting that we accept children throw chairs through windows, but we've got to teach that young person a more sociably acceptable way that's achievable to get to express their feeling and emotion. So I'll I'll use that one as an example because I'm thinking about a kid now that I worked with who we had from primary all the way through to key stage 40 or 11. He um he used to throw chairs through windows when he got really, really angry. We tried a number of strategies when he was angry to help him not throw chairs through windows, and none of them worked. And one day we came up with the idea, and this is gonna people are gonna hate me when I say this, but we asked him, or we tried to train him to throw the chair down the corridor. Wait a minute, you're teaching kids to throw chairs. Well, I'd much rather throw the chair down the corridor than at a window. Obviously, after about a few days of that happening, we were like, whoa, this is this can still be unsafe. It didn't cost as much money, it wasn't a criminal damage this time, so we're kind of reducing the risk, but equally, we're not having you throw chairs down the corridor forever. We're just diluting the strategy down to something that's more achievable. So, what happened now is this kid no longer picked up a chair and threw it through the window. He'd leave the room, pick up the nearest chair that was to him, and throw it down the corridor. So, what we started to do then is work on the fact that he was doing the same thing every time, leaving the room, picking up the nearest chair. We used some of the understanding that we have around sort of regulating young people and that pressure helps you regulate and that sort of stuff. And we we purchased some heavy furniture and we put it outside the class door and we trained the kid to go and pick up the heavy furniture, the heavy chair, slam it on the floor, and then sit on the chair. And what he was actually getting from that when you dig down is that one of you one of the key associations you learn when you're when you're really young is that deep pressure and our repetitive rhythmic activity helps equal safety and regulate you, which puts your lid back on basically. We taught him to pick up the chair, which was heavy, pressure, slam it on the floor, heavy pressure, and then sit on it. And actually, what it created was almost like a Pavlov's dog moment for all the staff because when we heard this boo on the floor, we could see this young person was distressed, dysregulated. Staff could then poke the head out of the door and just say, You're okay, buddy. Yes, I'm gonna be with you in a minute. Well done for using your strategy. So now he's been praised for showing I am angry in a more socially acceptable way. Windows are not being broken, chairs are not being thrown down the corridor, and we've got a much more uh sociably acceptable behaviour. Do we want him to do that for the rest of his life? Absolutely not. Um, and we'll we'll keep supporting him and keep tweaking that until we can get it to something that is more socially acceptable. But changing behaviour doesn't happen overnight. Like it takes time. That was a three-year journey with that kid. Great story. A three-year journey. Really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Because obviously, the the standard response, I think, if most people heard there was a kid throwing chests, well, he needs expelling, that would be the kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Crush that behaviour kind of thing, but all you do is move it, don't you? You just move the problem.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

It's it's it's it's teaching them how to express themselves in a more social, acceptable way. We keep saying behaviour communication, we've got to teach them how to say I'm angry in a more social, acceptable way. There's more to it than just that as well, the wraparound stuff. So there's logical consequences associated with that, like I said, which is repairing the damage. So he used to have to repair the windows. Did he do it at his break time? No. He did it when the time was right for him, and when the time was right for the facility management worker or the care team, uh, the caretaker, um, and they'd work together and they'd work with each other and they'd be having conversations, they're doing it, but teaching, come on, mate, this is not acceptable, and so on and so forth. I know that you get angry, it's okay to be angry because it absolutely is. It's not okay to put windows through, and we'd teach them what to do instead.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Do you come up against a lot of um resistance when you sometimes when you go into school and you're trying to teach this stuff?

SPEAKER_00 20:32

Um, so the schools that are asking us to go in obviously are trying an alternative approach and it's not working, hence, therefore, they ask us to go in and support them. So they initially they can be more receptive. There are still key pockets of staff in the schools that that aren't receptive, and we have to do a lot of work around changing their mind, um, or not changing the mind, really, because we never do that. Like we don't we just poke a couple of people in a way. So, what we never do is we never walk into a school and say, remove your systems, stop punishing kids, because that'd be really wrong of us because we don't know the kids. And for 70, 80% of kids in school, those systems might be effective for what they're not effective for is that 20-30% that are still on the system. So we go in and we help upskill them and support them and help them with their mindset so they don't have to rely on a system. Um, one of the biggest difficulties I find with this, Elizabeth, is the mindset of the world isn't set up in a way for relational-based approaches. So, like if you do something wrong in society, there's an instant punishment associated with your behaviour usually. So if you go and rob a bank or steal a car, there's you're getting locked up for it. And obviously, we have to prepare young people for the world as they move forward. Um, but I I always ask people on training, and this is this is one of the ways that I guess I I can poke people, is I say to people with this with this mindset that there needs to be a punishment, and is do you behave the way you do because there's a punishment in place? So, how so, for example, if an elderly person walked past this building, she dropped a purse, would you steal the purse?

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Of course not.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

No, why?

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Uh because it's wrong.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

How do you know it's wrong?

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Because it'd be stealing, and it's against my moral code to do that.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

How who's who's programmed that into you?

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Oh gosh, we're getting philosophical now.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

But your life, your experiences, what you've what you've been taught, which is again the point I'm making, is you've been taught that that's not the right thing to do. Whereas some young people haven't been taught that that's not the right thing to do. For them, that might be the right thing to do. I'm gonna steal that purse because I can feed my family. Does that make it acceptable? Absolutely not, but they need to be taught there are other ways that we can we can we can go about sort of our reactions and responses. So if the elderly person dropped a purse, would you give her the purse back?

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Would you expect her to give you 10 quid out of it?

SPEAKER_01 22:40

No, I would expect her to say thank you.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

So she's not so you're not you're not doing it for a reward, you're doing it again because morally, based on what you've been taught, is the right and wrong thing to do. You're behaving based on what you've been taught. So yeah, we do come up against a lot of challenge, um, but that's the it's good. The challenge needs to be there. And I I always say to people that as well that I'm no, like I'm no saint either. Like I still am behaviourist at heart, I really, really am. When my I've got two stepchildren, um 13 and 14, when they refuse to go to bed at half past eight and then they refuse to go at nine o'clock, and they refuse to go at half nine and ten o'clock, I don't start acting therapeutically or relationally based. I'm like, just go to bed, yes, I've got to go to work in the morning. Uh and that's because it's it's natural to respond like that. I just know that if if I am responding like that, right, I tend to find I get two outcomes with kids. I either get conflict and they argue back with me, or I get compliance. But they're complying through fear, like I mentioned earlier, and that doesn't sit right with me anymore. There's the opposite end of the approach as well, um Elizabeth, where I think people try to be, they try to be relational-based or trauma-informed, for example, and they don't quite grasp it, and they almost they put in lots of support, but they drop their boundaries and their challenge and their expectations. And what we do there is we almost become permissive and cajoling in our practice, and that's not what positive regard is, or relational-based, or even trauma-informed practice at its heart, isn't that um what happens if you do that and you become, I suppose, too supportive and drop the challenge and expectation is that kids often get away with stuff then, because we're not putting boundaries and expectations in place. Where when you've been truly relational based, you you find a balance of the two. So we're working with people rather than doing it to them or doing it for them.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah, I mean, Dave's always said that, hasn't he? That you know you hear it. This doesn't mean that kids can get away with behaving badly at all. Um yeah, but I think people hear it and that's and that's the mistake they make.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Right then. I think we might move on to a little bit about what your home school days were like.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Oh my days. I hope my teachers aren't listening to this. I always I always look when I deliver a piece of training to see if any of my ex-teachers are on, because they would literally stand up and go, How on earth are you delivering training around dealing with behaviour? Because I wasn't the best behavio kid, for gonna be perfectly honest with you.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Right then, are you ready for a quick fire round?

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Oh yeah, go for it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

School dinners or packed lunches?

SPEAKER_00 25:03

School dinners all day. I still have them now.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Yeah. Um, inset day or school trip?

SPEAKER_00 25:09

School trip, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Really? Rather than a day off?

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah, residential care, even a residential setting, even better.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

Oh yeah, yeah. Food tech or resistant materials?

SPEAKER_00 25:20

It sounds really if my partner's listening to this, he's gonna laugh at this. Resistant materials, I can't even build an IKEA wardrobe. But I used to love doing resistant materials, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 25:28

No, I used to love that smell. You know, of like the kind of acrylic or the sawdust and all that, yeah. Um English or science?

SPEAKER_00 25:35

Science.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Which science did you like best?

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Biology.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Football or athletics?

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Oh I I love both, but football is at my heart, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Well planned revision or last-minute cramming.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

Last minute cramming.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Always.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Keep you on your toes.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Yeah, yeah. Gotta have a deadline to do anything, haven't you?

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

And finally, we ask everybody this. Okay. Um, if you had a magic wand and could do absolutely anything, don't worry about money, don't worry about practicalities, what thing would you change in the education system to make it better for young people?

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Um for all schools to have access to the high level of skill that they need to support the young people of today. So I'm talking about psychotherapists on site, uh instant access to a clinical psychologist, for example. Just just just really skilled staff that are in, they've got great skill staff, good leaders, good teachers, good tiers, um, but just that other level of skill that we need to support the young people's needs today. Um give them all access to something like that.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

And that's a great one. I think to be honest, we could do with that across society actually.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

Everywhere, yeah, every business, every service. To decent mental health support.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Absolutely appropriate today because we're talking on World Mental Health Day as well. So that was a good answer for that one.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

I knew that, I just put that one in there.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Right. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. That's been um a brilliant chat, really enjoyed it. Um, and thanks to you, the listener, for joining us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode. We'll be talking to Katie Hartson, who'll be sharing her knowledge on training teachers and what she thinks makes the perfect teacher. Till then, take care, and we'll see you next time.