Following on from my blog last week about reframing special educational needs and disability, it got me thinking more and more about the idea of aspirations. In the different roles I have had, aspirations or the absence of them has been a key theme, and one of the most fundamental barriers for many of the children I have worked with. Right back when I started teaching, I worked in a school where it felt that children had really limited aspirations perhaps due to their circumstances and the beliefs of the community at that time. 

I remember doing a Geography lesson regarding the comparison between an African village and a Town or City in England. Now this school was 20 minutes away from Nottingham City Centre, and so I naively began my lesson talking about Nottingham and asking the children to think about what was there, the features and so on. I immediately realised that this was going nowhere, and when I then asked the children how many of them had visited Nottingham, 2 children out of my class of 35 raised their hands. I realised I was making huge assumptions about how able these families were to travel to their closest city, and therefore how much harder it was for these children to imagine a world beyond where they lived. It struck me that the contrast between where they lived, and Nottingham was going to provide as rich a discussion as comparing where they lived to an African village. That 20-minute journey may as well have been thousands of miles away, and this unwittingly meant that these children and indeed their families had understandable limits on what felt achievable for them. 

Furthermore, when discussing what the children wanted to be when they grew up, apart from a couple of exceptions, all the children named jobs or careers that existed within their community. They all named jobs that someone they knew did. Now obviously we all consider our futures when we are children, based on what we know and have experienced at the time. However, what was remarkable to me was that these children were 8 and 9 years of age, and their ambitions were so practical. I had no astronauts or prima ballerinas, there were no popstars or pilots, it was like they had already put limitations on their dreams. I remember getting excited as one boy said footballer, so I zoomed in and asked him a few more questions. He explained that he wanted to get good enough to play for a nearby semi-professional team so that he could play football and get paid, but for his real job he thought he would work in the local factory.  

Now please don’t think I am being snobbish or judgemental here, and I am not suggesting there is anything wrong in wanting to do the job your Dad does or follow in your Mum’s footsteps. Success and aspirations come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and I not suggesting that some are more valid than others. It just felt too soon for these children to be even considering the practicalities around the job they would do, and I wondered what they had heard, felt or experienced for them to have got there. As a school, there was a real sense that part of our role was raising aspirations and allowing the children to believe that anything was possible, however those lessons really highlighted for me that the starting point or the obstacles in place to them really believing that were very different to what I had anticipated. 

Going on to work in Youth Justice, I came across so many incredible young people. The boy who was capable of writing a brilliant script, the boy who hacked my phone when I still had a brick, the girl who was such a beautiful artist and the list goes on. Yet if I think about what careers they all aspired to, they all generally revolved around mechanics, labouring and hairdressing. Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these careers, and success for many of the young people I worked with was them achieving these roles. My concern wasn’t the options they chose, it was the fact that they felt the options were so few, and that these options often had no bearing on what the young person actually enjoyed or was good at. More than this the adults around them also bought into these limited options, again without really considering how right they actually were for the individuals in front of them. These children needed a positive future to aim for even more than their peers, yet sometimes those limited aspirations led them to think that their current lifestyle was much more exciting than anything they were working towards. 

Whilst working with the Virtual School, we were passionate about ensuring that schools and other adults supporting the children looked after we had the privilege of working with, encouraged aspirations and applied no assumptions or limitations on what the child was capable of achieving. We were keen to celebrate some of the amazing successes of young people who went on to University or who followed their dream, not to claim any of that success but to highlight that anything was possible. We also knew that research backs up the fact that high aspirations for a child can increase the child’s chances of success. Burley & Halpern (2001) in their review of the literature and Shin (2003) when looking at distance learning all found a significant positive relationship between high aspirations and school success. So, logic would tell you that having limited, or negative aspirations has the opposite effect. It potentially all has the danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe the child can’t do well, thus the child does not do well, and I now have evidence that the child can’t do well…. and on it goes. 

A friend shared some quotes with me the other day and one that feels very apt when considering our roles as educators is:

“If I accept you as you are, I will not help you. However, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of being, I help you.”

Goethe (1749-1832)

It links to my blog last week and in previous weeks, where labels are so often used to understand children and their needs, however in the wrong hands or with the wrong perspective those labels can become like a millstone around the child’s neck. It can be useful to know that a child is looked after, so that we appreciate that they are coming to us with experiences that may impact on their thinking, behaviour and presentation. However, if we use that label to assume that the child will be any less able, any less intelligent or any less capable of success, then it us that is placing a barrier in front of that child. We are placing a ceiling on their potential, and that is not okay. If we instead imagine what the child could be able to achieve, focus on their strengths, feed their passions and be inspired by their dreams and ambitions, who knows how important we become on that child’s journey to success. 

Also, if we encounter children who are limiting themselves, it is our job to show them what they can achieve and what is possible. It is easier to join them in their comfort zone and not challenge those perceptions. Billy Elliot would have been a pretty rubbish story though, if that dance teacher had just turned round and said, ‘Do you know what your dad’s right, boys like you don’t dance’. We have to allow children to see beyond their current situation and to realise that they are not limited by what those before them have done. Especially in the world we live in now, where we have no idea what future jobs could even look like, we have to encourage our children to be curious, want to explore the world and look for opportunities. 

I also like the quote from Henry Ford that just shows why we can’t let any limits that children give themselves stop us in being aspirational for them:

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

If children see limited options, then we need to give them unlimited experiences. We have to provide opportunities for them to see and imagine more. We have to be mindful that our aspirations are not theirs and that we may need to do a bit of exploration too. I think it is hard in schools as children are surrounded by adults who have chosen to work in schools. If I am a child that finds school difficult, that aspiration certainly does not fit with me. I had a fantastic discussion with some very likeminded people this week where we discussed the need to have working musicians spending time in schools to inspire children to want to make music. Likewise, we considered how amazing it can or would be to have scientists inspiring science lessons, and authors inspiring writing. Making those connections between the lessons in school and the real adult world can make such a difference to children who are trying to work out where they fit and realising the breadth of where a subject can take them can put a whole new slant on that subject. 

So, my wish this week is that we are curious when talking to children about their futures, and if we spot a child who has already put a cap on their success, we remove that cap and show that child what they are capable of. We remain aspirational for every child; we are not held back by labels and diagnoses and we do everything we can to ensure that the child is not held back by these either. We have to be wary of being judgemental and preachy, because some of the factors that limit children’s knowledge and experiences, such as finances, are real, so how can we overcome those? We spend plenty of time in adulthood being practical and cautious, children need to spend longer dreaming, imagining, exploring and feeling like they can do anything – in fact maybe we all do! 

Help the children you work with find their dreams, be kind, be curious and be aspirational!

#justbekind #becurious #afasterhorse #beaspirational