For those of you who don’t have young children influencing your professional reading, then the term “A Squash and a Squeeze” will cause little pause for thought. For EY colleagues and parents, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s first collaborative effort is an exquisite distillation of the importance of perspective.

''Wise old man, won't you help me, please? My house is a squash and squeeze.'' What can you do if your house is too small? The wise old man knows: bring in a flappy, scratchy, noisy crowd of farmyard animals. When you push them all out again, you'll be amazed at how big your house feels! – so reads the synopsis.

The idea of perspective is key in leadership. I know that there are some days when I look at my diary and see countless school visits and meetings, and wonder when I’ll have time to “get work done”. Luckily, that feeling is short-lived, because I have learned to remind myself – conversations with colleagues are the most important part of my job.
And perspective is at the heart of Education Scotland’s Leading a specific change project PLA, where participants are asked to engage with Fink’s Change Frames to support reflection and professional dialogue with colleagues to help establish why the change is needed and what it will entail for all involved. Fink asks us to interrogate the ‘change’ from Purpose, Passion, Political, Structural, Cultural, Learning and Leadership viewpoints before establishing an action plan for the change project.

The role of the Empowered Learning project team, of which I am one small part, currently rolling out 40,000 devices across the City of Edinburgh, is very much to lead change. For some of our schools, the arrival of these new devices is an update to their current setup rather than an entirely new way to work, for others it marks the first step on a transformative journey. For everyone though, it represents change. And we all know how scary change can be. During our early deployments, I have been acutely aware that we have been asking some colleagues to take a leap of faith, whilst others are asked to undertake significant administrative and logistical tasks to get these devices into the hands of our young people. And we have been doing this in a year that has already been squashed and squeezed by an array of pressures affecting school communities, from Covid absences and exam changes to national recruitment droughts and hikes in the cost of living.

It has been vital then to ensure that our key contacts, our staff and our school communities understand the benefits of this project so that they can weather the short-term pain as we get it off the ground. Following the oft quoted suggestion of Simon Sinek, we have sought to “Start with Why”. We have collaborated with partners and brought together various networks of colleagues to discuss the aims of the project, and we have communicated home our ambition. That ambition, that the tools and training being made available to staff, students and parents/carers will create space for greater workflow efficiency, greater equity of opportunity, more effective interventions and support, and more creativity and enjoyment in the learning process for all.

In short, to take a little bit of the squash and the squeeze out of education.