Colleges must fight against the “always busy” culture that crushes innovation, writes Brian Banks

Two strange things happened to me the other morning.

First, I tried to make a pot of coffee using a teabag. I recall staring in the coffee pot, dimly aware that something was wrong, but what?

Then, later, I couldn’t remember if I’d washed my hair or not. My hair was wet, but had I used shampoo? Complete blank.

It was as though I had one too many browser tabs open, and these simple extra tasks had tipped over the operating system in my skull.

I had exhausted my mental bandwidth.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, both US academics, define “mental bandwidth” as two components of mental function. The first is cognitive capacity, including the ability to reason abstractly and solve problems. The second is executive control, our ability to manage our cognitive activities.

In 2016 Mullainathan, with economists Heather Schofield and Frank Schilbach, used this model to argue that people living in poverty use so much bandwidth simply coping with the demands of daily survival, they lack cognitive space to develop innovative strategies to escape that poverty.

Perhaps factoring in mental bandwidth into our practice could provide colleges with tangible, quickly attainable, benefits.

Helping lecturers to grow their mental bandwidth nurtures creativity and innovation in teaching and learning.

Becoming a reflective teacher is a baked-in part of every educator’s journey, and rightly so. Yet it is often just another box to fill on a lesson plan form, rather than the transcendent practice it is meant to be. Why?

I think this is because true reflection takes time: real time, not five minutes in the corridor on the way to another class. And time costs money.

It also needs plenty of bandwidth. Just as you might shut down some tabs to stream an HD movie, so we need to shut down some of our mental threads to reflect and learn from our experiences.

Jotting down reflective notes in case a lesson plan gets monitored is a simulacrum of true reflection, of benefit only to those with other boxes to tick.

Reflection is often just another tickbox to fill in’

Yet investing in proper reflection time is money well spent, as “thinking time” is where we find the seams of teaching gold. It is where “good” becomes “outstanding”. By giving our subconscious mental processes time to run, we encourage our deepest learning, and produce our most innovative, most inspired, ideas.

What this looks like in the real world may not be what people generally consider working, but off-task contemplation is valuable work indeed.

The question is, in organisations where people feel they must always appear busy, how can we change college culture to make this spin-down time?

One solution is to remove extraneous tasks to free space for lecturers’ primary roles.

The anthropologist David Graeber was baffled by the ever-increasing administrative demands on university academics.

Admin filled their mental bandwidths, so instead of exceptional teaching, learning and research, universities got reams of mediocre admin, with burned-out, disillusioned, academics.

This highlights an important point. While facilitating staff bandwidth carries benefits, failing to do so carries considerable costs.

If staff are living with their bandwidth in the red most of the time, burnout is never far away.

Reflection time is also recovery time, and freeing up bandwidth is a pressure release for a busy brain.

Since it can take months to recover from burnout, it makes financial sense for institutions to do all they can to keep staff from reaching this dangerous mental state.

It’s hard to create a culture in colleges that let minds recover some of the bandwidth burned up by increasingly busy lives.

But achieving it makes for happier, more effective staff; for teams brimming with innovative solutions to drive the organisation forward; and students who have the drive and capacity to achieve excellence in their learning journey.

And it makes for a better pot of coffee in the morning.

More inspections will reveal a system close to collapse, so ministers had better get the chequebook ready, writes Ed Reza Schwitzer

The reaction was swift and predictable. From the moment it was announced that Ofsted will inspect every college, school and further education provider at least once by 2025, there were howls of protest.

It is not hard to see why. Critics are right that Ofsted inspections and the wider accountability system cause stress and anxiety for teachers and leaders. And they are also right that many teachers and leaders are struggling from non-stop work over the past 18 months.

Amanda Spielman recognised as much, telling the Association of Colleges conference this week it had been a “very turbulent year in education, and a difficult time for colleges”.

I cannot emphasise enough how much respect I have for teachers and leaders – and I completely believe the unions when they say many of them are close to total burnout.

But accountability exists for a reason – to ensure students are both safe and receiving a high-quality education. And it is exactly at a time when staff are most stretched that students are at the greatest risk.

We still do not fully know the impact of Covid-19 on students, and particularly the most vulnerable.

Students are at the greatest risk exactly when staff are most stretched

And while the vast majority of colleges and schools delivered heroics for them (moving education online, safeguarding vulnerable students on site, and often delivering vital supplies to students’ homes) this was not the case universally.

We know from focus groups that there are a small minority of colleges and schools where online teaching was essentially not happening, or was of insufficient quality. No one was inspecting them.

This isn’t about blame, but we cannot have a situation where, unnoticed by anyone, a small minority of colleges and schools has failed to adapt to the challenges of the pandemic. This would be to fail thousands upon thousands of students.

And, of course, the awful truth is that even the colleges and schools who pulled out all the stops during the pandemic may also be struggling from burnout, having given their all.

What we knew about their safeguarding, leadership and quality of education has gone out of the window during the pandemic.

And we all know that drops in these standards are likely to affect vulnerable students worst.

Which returns us to the original point and the role of Ofsted.

Having someone check up on you after most likely the worst, most traumatic experience in your professional career will always be seen as heartless and unhelpful – but in reality it is the time when this check and balance is most needed.

If we accept this argument, it is still important to deal with the legitimate criticism of the effect on staff wellbeing.

I would argue that much of the narrative around catch-up to date has been unrealistic. Money for tutoring or a longer day is helpful, but the more fundamental, human point is that teachers and leaders need time off to recharge.

They need support to help them cope, and need training to help them manage the transition to a new way of teaching. And this all requires funding.

I have heard many people say that anxious, unhappy students can’t learn, and I agree. But anxious, unhappy staff are a problem too.

Anxious, unhappy staff are a problem

So I say, keep the Ofsted inspections. It’s right to scrutinise education at this moment in time.

But if Ofsted confirms the many challenges schools and their staff face, as I suspect will be the case, then let’s use that to reinforce arguments for why proper catch-up funding is needed.

Amanda Spielman said this week that her plan “lets the government know how Covid recovery is going”.

So let us say to government: “You asked Ofsted to uncover issues – and they no doubt will.

“When this happens, be ready with your chequebook. It’s going to be expensive to truly fix a system that is close to collapse.”