#104 – Supporting Female Leadership in Ed and Edtech

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Big thanks to Cool Initiatives for sponsoring this week’s episode! Find out how you can access up to £10,000 by putting forward a  project that helps schools operate more efficiently and drives new ways of teaching and learning by checking out the info below…

What’s in this episode?

This week we are throwing back to a WomenEd event in November where we discussed the importance of female digital leadership both within the education and edtech sector alike.

A government report on the school workforce in England, showed that the state education sector is 74% female, yet only 65% of headteachers are women. We know that whilst the teaching profession is dominated by women, the senior leadership teams are underrepresented.

On the tech side of things, under 12% of partners at both accelerators and corporate venture firms are women. Only 17% of seed funding rounds go to female led startups, dropping to 12% for Venture Funding rounds. What does this mean for what types of edtech are invested in, how they are designed and who they are eventually used by? Are we heading for a situation like the advertising world of ten years ago where only 3% of creative directors determining advertising were women even though the chief purchasers and influencers within the household were women?

Luckily there are many initiatives working to make a change and we focus on just a few in this episode to clarify who they are and what they are up to.

WomenEd_Tech – the spin off handle from grassroots movement WomenEd focusing on digital leadership
EdtechWomenUK – the UK and London chapter of the international Edtech Women movement out of SXSWedu and Austin
Nevertheless – the podcast series focused on resurfacing stories in amazing female leadership in education innovation and technology in the past and present day

You’ll also hear from live discussion looking at:

Feedback

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People

Quotes from this episode

• We need to think about our why for technology in schools
  I worked in a MAT where I had to drive an hour and a half to a 45 minute meeting and two hours home…why?
  We know that presentism gets rewarded in our school
• We are paper free. We do our minutes and actions in the meeting.
  It’s not about the curriculum it’s about the culture of the school and how we can harness technology to get the wellbeing right
  I’m trying to find solutions that can save my team time and energy
  They used whatsapp for their school comms
  This is how I see it…make a list of the challenges that you see in your school and then go and find a load of tech solutions for them 
• What you should be doing…is demanding of technology companies to give you the training in your school.
  If you take a leadership role with this, you become such a fantastic role model
  Every school in Uruguay has fibre…and we don’t even have proper bandwidth
• Are we preparing our young people for the world of tomorrow?
  I think a lot of this is to do with confidence. Sometimes I get that fraud feeling…but I don’t need to be that geek in the ivory tower. It’s saying ok, so tell me how to do it.
• We are supporting flexible staffing solutions in your school
  If you have women going out to do their Masters, or they are coming back from maternity…we will give you that .4 of a teacher
• We’ve welcomed our first female CEO

References