Nikki Collinson-Phenix

Why reconnecting your team can be the biggest return you'll get all year, and why that's got nothing to do with papering over a broken system. Right. I'm about to argue for something that sounds a bit mad. Spend money on your team having fun. I spend most of my working life telling leaders to look under the bonnet. To stop handing out fruit baskets and resilience training and actually face the pressure their people are under. So this one might surprise you. Let me be clear about one thing...

Right. I'm going to keep this one really simple. Because I'll be honest with you, I hate data. Numbers make my eyes glaze over. I'm much more of a "tell me the story" person than a "show me the spreadsheet" person. But sometimes you come across numbers that stop you in your tracks. And this week, that happened. I was reading a House of Commons report about the NHS workforce. Parliamentary stuff. Official stuff. The kind of thing that normally lives in a filing cabinet and never sees daylight....

Meet Debra. She was one of the best they had. Deputy head. Fifteen years in education. The person everyone leaned on when things got hard. She ran the timetable, mentored the NQTs, covered for absent colleagues without being asked, and somehow still managed to teach a full load. Everyone thought she was amazing. She was the first person in the building every morning and the last to leave most nights. Not because anyone told her to. Because the system had quietly made it impossible to do the...