LIFE is not a family
The LIFE Education Trust is not a family. Not a nuclear family. Not a wider family. Not a family of schools. And I think it is time to explain why.
There are 5 of us in my family. I want to say 7 and include the 2 cats but it’s really 5. Me, my wife, 2 sons and a daughter. According to Wikipedia we are a nuclear family.
The word family comes from the Latin “Familia” which literally means “household” or “slave staff”. A Roman family would not be nuclear. It would include parents and children but also wider relatives, staff and slaves. It would not normally include any cats but often dogs and small monkeys. And birds. Parrots and blackbirds were much loved by Roman women. This is a helpful but slightly incomplete start.
My family of 5 is a family. We would not think of ourselves as a household anymore. The children are grown up and have flown the nest (maybe like the Roman birds in Pompeii). They return to consume and join us on holidays considered great and paid for by me. They would have considered themselves a household at one time but no longer. They would also never have wanted to view themselves as “slave staff” although I expect when they threatened to call Childline because I was forcing them to tidy their rooms or empty the dishwasher, they wanted to claim that they were being treated as slaves. My family is not even technically a nuclear family now, given that we do not live in one house or household.
But we know we are a family.
We are united by blood or marriage, committed legally to each other and love each other despite everything. I think I would stick with my children whatever they did. That’s the plan.
LIFE Education Trust is NOT a family.
We are a multi academy Trust, a hybrid, a company and a charity. We are not a household and we are not slave staff. Seriously. As an adult working in our Trust, if you want to leave, you can, and if we feel you need you to leave, you will. That sounds brutal but it is simply a fact. I know some of us who work in schools feel like we are slave staff but we are not. We can resign. We have rights. We are not permanently connected to our schools and Trusts like my children have a permanent attachment to me and I to them.
This is important.
Our employees have certain rights and responsibilities. They also have expectations. And we have expectations of them. We want them to flourish, to belong, to achieve and to contribute but we also know that they do not belong to us. This is work. A job. And it must remain so. Whether we believe in the work/life balance dichotomy or not, as employers we must be clear about the dangers of the family metaphor. It can imply that people must offer too much. It suggests that they owe us more than is written in the legal contract between us. At worst, it borders, often unintentionally, on emotional blackmail.
I do not believe for one minute that when any of us talk about our Trust or our school as a family, we mean to cause harm. Quite the opposite. Those who use the term almost always see being a family as positive, supportive, empowering and nurturing. In fact, I have heard school and Trust leaders speak eloquently and powerfully about being a family. I get what they mean and what they are trying to do.
But the word is inaccurate, inappropriate and potentially dangerous.
At best calling a trust or school a family is an analogy. We are similar. “Our Trust is like a family” is probably ok I suppose because this is a way of likening certain features of what happens at work to what happens at “home”. So maybe use a simile if you must. But stop the metaphors. Our School is a family. Our Trust is a family. No. That is simply not true.
We will be doing our employees a great favour if we drop the metaphor and focus on making our organisations great places to work. This is the real work. By all means explore the differences between a family and a brilliant organisation. Definitely consider what makes a fantastic culture. But please drop the metaphor so that people have time for their family. And friends. And hobbies. And rest.
