Mark’s story

Mark is a teacher and school leader who took part in a Grit schools programme.

I first came across Grit when I saw the Channel 4 programme about Ballet Hoo where marginalised young people from the West Midlands performed with the Birmingham Royal Ballet. I had been teaching a while and just moved into a school leadership role. I remember thinking, “This is extraordinary stuff….”  and I thought the programme had the potential to make a real difference in my school. Within a couple of months I was taking part in one of Grit’s Coaching for Success programmes at John Taylor High in Staffordshire.

We had some difficult kids, with a few who were totally disengaged, and the old-fashioned approach to discipline just wasn’t working. Grit turned them around. Grit gave us the focus, the structure to help the students to have real conversations about themselves, their lives and their ambitions for school. For these kids behaviour was transformed and grades improved. The ‘no hopers’ who went on to university; the cheekiest, rudest, most disrespectful girl who one day turned to me and said “Sir, I get it” and went on to get a full set of GCSEs; and the kids who got college and sixth form places against the odds.  

The programme ran for six years with Year 10s and 11s supported by teachers, support staff, parents and governors; and we had Sixth Formers mentoring year 8s.

There were so many jaw dropping moments. I saw staff transform their thinking about what young people were capable of.  I saw a colleague who was coming up for retirement and had always had a very traditional approach towards the kids, volunteer to be a coach and start to use coaching conversations. Her passion for equality, fairness and social justice bloomed and instead of retiring she went to work in Alternative Provision. I saw a Teaching Assistant move beyond her uniform and attendance ‘enforcer’ role, drop the confrontational approach and take on the coaching approach. She told me, “It has changed the way I work with kids”. And she went on to win a promotion.

Grit was a totally different approach, a different language to turning around behaviour – solution focused, positive, with an emphasis on goals. The impact of the Grit approach extended into the wider school - it changed the way the school operated. It created a coaching culture for the whole staff body, in our teaching practice, in leadership and management practice, in the way we related to each other as colleagues. And there was a direct link to improved staff and school performance.

Grit has become the foundation of what I do when I work with staff and kids – my ethos, my values and the strategies I use. I build relationships, talk about potential, responsibility and resilience; about belief; about having a second chance; and being able to put mistakes right.

Grit has shown me the unlimited potential in every young person – even those in the most difficult circumstances. It has taught me to have faith in them, even if everything else tells you they are going nowhere. I’ve taken it to all the other schools I’ve worked in and I know colleagues who have done the same. I use it in my work with trainee teachers in universities, in my work with permanently excluded pupils, and in my work as a leadership coach.

Grit works with the MOST disaffected kids. It engages AND challenges. It is uncompromising AND compassionate. And it gets results.