Episode 9 - How do Happy Parents Make Happy Teachers?

The Happy Teacher Pod

In this week’s special Mother’s Day episode, we focus on the theme of happy teachers = happy parents. We are delighted to have on not one, but two, guests - Claire Neaves and Florence Norel- who talk to us about how to make the workplace more parent friendly and, by default, more life friendly. Claire and Florence are fellow chapter authors of the book Jenny co-wrote - A Guide to Teaching, Parenting and Creating Family Friendly Schools: The Maternity Teacher Paternity Teacher Project Handbook and so they are fully-fledged experts in their topics! Claire speaks passionately about discrimination in the workplace and how schools can create truly inclusive places to work, whilst Florence talks to us about how schools can help manage working parenthood. Both guests filled us with hope that there are lots of schools out there that are inclusive and do want to keep parent teachers in the profession, fully able to realise their career ambitions.

This week’s breaktime banter comes from Roxy at a time when she was pregnant but hasn’t told her colleagues yet. She makes her aversion to the smell of a certain porridge well known though! Our Get In The Bin comes from Claire who is rightly fed up which school policies that aren’t truly inclusive of everyone in the workplace.

So many amazing organisations were mentioned in today’s episode. If you want to find out more about flexible working, have a look at the following websites:
Pregnant then screwed - www.pregnantthenscrewed.com
Women Ed - www.womened.com
MTPT - www.mtpt.org.uk. You can also join the Facebook group. Contact them or Jenny if you want to know more about joining your regional WhatsApp group.
The MTPT book that Jenny, Claire and Flo co-authored with six other authors can be purchased here - https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-guide-to-teaching-parenting-and-creating-family-friendly-schools/emma-sheppard/9781032043616