EduKIT: One Year On: Symbols, Struggles and the Call to Educators
2025-10-21 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | Online
A year has passed since riots unsettled some of our communities. While the visible unrest has subsided, the deeper fractures remain. Across the UK, flags continue to be raised and marches unfold weekly. For some, these represent pride and identity. For others, they trigger unease and exclusion. As an educator who has witnessed these divisions play out in our classrooms and corridors, I’ve seen firsthand how these tensions ripple through our young people’s lives.
These moments stir complex emotions: pride, belonging, unease, and sometimes fear. They remind us that symbols are never neutral they carry history, meaning, and consequence. As educators and leaders, we cannot afford to stand on the sidelines.
Now is the time to create intentional spaces for professional dialogue where we, as leaders, can gather to ask and answer difficult questions together:
The Questions We Must Ask and Answer

How do we help young people process complex emotions around identity and belonging when our own communities often feel divided?
What practical steps can we take to address the deeper inequalities and mistrust that fuel these tensions?
How do we lead with both compassion and clarity when faced with symbols and narratives that divide our communities?

These are not abstract questions. They require us to examine our curriculum choices, our response to playground tensions, our parent engagement strategies, and our own unconscious biases.
This work demands three core commitments:
Courage: The willingness to have uncomfortable conversations and examine difficult truths about inequality and exclusion in our communities.
Humility: Recognizing that we don’t have all the answers and that our young people may teach us as much as we teach them.
Solidarity: Understanding that this cannot be individual work it requires sustained collaboration across schools, communities, and professional networks.
The Invitation
This is an opportunity to engage in a professional dialogue where educators can reflect honestly without judgment on our challenges and responsibilities. Together, looking at practical approaches we can implement in our settings.
Some of us may feel unprepared for this work. Others may question whether it’s truly our role. Many of us are already stretched thin. Some of us are exploring or managing successful approaches. Concerns are valid and important and they’re precisely why we need to support each other through structured, professional dialogue.
This is not easy work. It requires us to resist the temptation of quick fixes and instead commit to the patient, transformative work of building inclusive and resilient communities. But it also offers hope: the possibility that we can prepare our young people to navigate these realities with empathy, wisdom, and genuine understanding.
The question a year on is not simply how we respond to flags or marches. The real question is: how do we equip our young people to build the cohesive, just communities we all want to see?
That answer begins with us and with the conversations we choose to have now.

Registration:
RSVP via the AoEA Hub – CLICK HERE TO RSVP
If you are not a member of the AoEA, get in touch with us at info@aoea.co.uk to learn more about EduKITs and becoming a member of the AoEA.

Briefing Session: IQSEA October 2025
2025-10-23 16:00 - 17:00 | Microsoft Teams
Interested in enhancing the quality of education advice? Learn more about the benefits of our International Quality Standard for Education Advisers.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
The Association of Education Advisers (AoEA) has been established to help ensure quality and consistency in the advice given by school and college improvement advisers working in the education system.
These colleagues play a critical role and are increasingly deployed to provide specialist advice in the areas of educational improvement, governance, change management, finance and people development. Significant numbers of education leaders now work for national, international and local government,
individual schools, academies and colleges and other educational settings. The need for quality and consistency of advice is a very important concern. While government departments make their own judgements about the strengths and weaknesses of individual schools, it is essential that schools and colleges are confident their self-evaluation is sound and will withstand scrutiny by regulatory bodies.
The diverse education systems across the UK and overseas comprise a wide range of education leaders with different titles, who work to a variety of guidelines and standards and adopt differing approaches to the various requirements and priorities of providers. The system requires better quality and greater consistency and reliability in the advice received.
In the past, the accreditation of education advisers has tended to concentrate on data analysis and the key aspects of school and college improvement, as identified by government. The education context has significantly changed and requires a broader focus on corporate governance, establishing and developing educational organisations and quality management systems. The AoEA has developed an accreditation process based on clearly defined competence criteria which will allow people intending to provide advice to schools and colleges to demonstrate that they meet rigorous standards.
To learn more please join us for one of our briefing sessions about our quality standard and benefits for becoming a member.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
