Carrying It
Carrying It explores what responsibility creates in people.
Through conversations with people who hold responsibility, and people who feel it, the podcast examines how pressure, behaviour and influence move through work, relationships and everyday life.
Because responsibility doesn't disappear. It shifts, and someone carries it.
Carrying It
Who Can't Look Away?
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In this episode of Carrying It, Phil Scott speaks with Tony Davies, a primary school headteacher, about what responsibility feels like when the people affected are impossible to emotionally distance yourself from.
Together they explore the realities of leading a school where decisions ripple through children, families and staff, and where the consequences rarely end when the school day does. The conversation examines moral distress, difficult compromises, and what it means to keep caring when there are no perfect outcomes.
They discuss school leadership, shrinking resources, safeguarding, wellbeing, and the growing responsibilities schools now carry beyond education itself.
If responsibility feels different when you can't stop seeing its consequences, how do you keep carrying it without losing yourself?
Responsibility doesn't disappear. It shifts, and someone carries it.
That's true inside organisations, but it's also true in society. Every episode of Carrying It supports organisations working to improve how responsibility and mental health are understood and supported in real systems.
You can learn more about the organisations we're supporting through the links below.
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/local-minds/
http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/
Responsibility is unavoidable in leadership and influence. In all kinds of roles, from nurses to head teachers to social workers. What matters isn't whether it exists, but what it creates and where it travels. Responsibility creates emotional load. That load doesn't disappear, it shifts, and someone carries it. Welcome to carrying it when responsibility doesn't stop. That's what this podcast is interested in. Not how hard leadership is, but what responsibility creates. This conversation is about proximity. What happens when responsibility stays close enough that you can't stop seeing its consequences? Today I'm joined by Tony Davis, a primary school head teacher, who carries responsibility not just for outcomes, but for people, families, and situations that don't need the end when the school day finishes. Welcome, Tony. Hello. Nice to meet you, Phil. All right, let's dive straight in. What is it about education that makes responsibility different to corporate life?
SPEAKER_01I think for me, it is usually why people have entered education in the first place. You know, I I can remember I left university, not entirely sure what I wanted to do with life, but feeling that I wanted to make some kind of difference to society and so on. And it's those values that kind of give you that calling to do the work that you do that means you are really fully invested in it, you know, beyond nine to five, well beyond nine to five. And so you can't just turn off work and go, right, I've finished, I'm done, I go home, because you are carrying all those thoughts and the impacts that the decisions you've been making all day are still having ongoing repercussions for the children and families and staff that you've been working with. That doesn't just go away at the weekend, it's there with you and waiting for you again on Monday morning when you start again.
SPEAKER_00Schools, though, have a similar sort of hierarchical structure as you might find in a corporate world. You've got teachers, you've got teaching assistants, you've got heads of departments, key stage leaders, and then all the way up to the head teacher who you could liken to the CEO of the school. What responsibilities do people assume that head teachers carry as that de facto CEO of the school?
SPEAKER_01I'd like to think of it not as a hierarchy, but as a web, if you like, which is kind of a flat structure, but I'm at the middle of it, and all of those threads ultimately end in that web connect back to me. On one level, people can feel that every single aspect of everything that is going on in a school and all of everybody else's jobs ultimately lie with the head teacher. I think that's one of the reasons why it's so important to make sure your staff feel empowered and that they've got the responsibility, and with that responsibility, they've got the power to make decisions, otherwise, everything can come back to you. Someone once said to me that being a headteacher is one of the loneliest jobs in the world because you're there carrying everything. And I know it is true sometimes. When I was a deputy headteacher, for example, I knew there were moments where I could just kind of go, I turn it off, in the end, this is your responsibility, head teacher. You do this, the book finally starts with you. Uh, when I've reached the end of what I can do, it's over to you. And so sometimes that can be the weight that you carry as a head, which maybe you don't carry in other roles within a stool. But actually, having said that, I know for myself, one of the things I've always wanted to do is surround myself with people who are just amazing colleagues, who do feel empowered, who do see it as our mutual responsibility to do all this work. So that I have to say, I've never really felt lonely. And that's about how you organise and manage your school and your structure. We felt lonely collectively sometimes. You can feel very isolated increasingly, as lots of the services that have surrounded schools have collapsed, and you can feel like you're here fighting this battle on your own and it doesn't always feel right. But if you organize yourselves well, you can feel like you're a force to be reckoned with within that context.
SPEAKER_00I'd love to get into that collective responsibility a little bit later on. But you talked there about ultimately the buck stops with the head teacher. Which of the responsibilities that end up coming to you feel the heaviest to deal with and to carry?
SPEAKER_01I think for me, when I first became a head teacher, the biggest difference was having that ultimate responsibility for the well-being of my staff. And that was one of the key differences because I'd always felt the responsibility for the children I was working with and their families. That had always been there. That responsibility for my staff and realizing that the decisions I was making for my staff had got real implications for their workload and their well-being, their stress levels, their feeling of agency and the work that they're doing, which ultimately rolls down into the children and families. That was a big weight for me. Because also I'd been on the receiving end of some amazing support, but sometimes other less good quality decisions around my well-being and welfare in my work as deputy head and senior leader and teacher and teaching assistant. I've kind of done it all in a way over the years. So I knew how decisions affect everybody all the way across that web network, if you like, and I felt a big responsibility to make sure I was getting that right, and also that sense that sometimes you can't get it right for everybody, and that I was gonna cause some stress and pain and difficulty for some people who didn't really deserve it, and that there was nothing I could do about that.
SPEAKER_00Those kinds of situations, are they the ones that stay with you? You mentioned earlier it's not a nine to five, you take things home. Are they the ones that stay with you, or are there very specific individual scenarios that are the ones that stay with you more?
SPEAKER_01I would say it's that generic ongoing sense of the burden of it rather than specifics. Obviously, all those specifics add up to that ongoing feeling. I think I've been in my current post for 20 years now, so there are so many specific decisions that I've learned that those specific decisions kind of melt away, and also just how adaptable we are as individuals and as institutions. So there's that experience helps because you realise you make a difficult decision which has an impact on somebody, but you see that to some extent those people adapt around that, and that within a week or two or a month or two, or whatever, whatever the time scale is, things are okay again. And I think also with that experience, you learn how to make the right decisions more often than not in those situations, and you learn how to communicate them effectively, uh how to explain the rationale and all of those kinds of things, which makes a difference to how people accept those decisions, and you also learn how to map out for people how this is going to be okay, or it's going to be better than you think it is, and I think that sense of purpose that underpins all of these different decisions is what can help carry you and your team and people through some very challenging situations at times.
SPEAKER_00I can imagine there are situations that are largely out of your control where you have to make some decisions, but there are other decisions that aren't within your remit to be able to make. How does that change your sense of responsibility and the feelings that come along with that?
SPEAKER_01There's a really interesting concept called moral distress. And uh it kind of originated out of the Vietnam War, actually, and the kind of impacts of soldiers having to make decisions that were contrary to their values, if you like. And it talks about precisely this: that there are uh situations where there are factors that are completely outside of your control, where you are forced to make decisions that feel like really difficult compromises, and that compromise is around perhaps making a decision as to who is going to feel the biggest weight of this particular decision. I could give one little example that I had to do in the last 12 months. We had a member of staff leaving, we knew the budget meant that we were not going to be able to replace that member of staff, so I had to take this member of staff's workload and divide it between my team, myself included. And this is a team where we are all working at full capacity, and I took some of it upon myself, and that is a challenge as well. I think for your own kind of how much of this can I take on? And you recognise you have your responsibility for your own well-being, but you have a responsibility also to the jobs that need doing, so you have to be realistic because you're not doing anybody favours if you take on a bunch of tasks that you know you're not gonna be able to deliver on. So there's that awkward moment, but I had to go to one of my amazing, ridiculously overworked assistant head teachers and say, I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to put this on your plate as well. And she's just amazing. She said, Yeah, that's fine, I will do that. Uh that's what she said to my face anyway. I think when I left her office, she might have said something else. But she did it, and it's a classic example of a situation where these tasks have got to be done, there's no question about it. It's not fair and it's not right that I'm giving this particular task to this person, but I've literally got no choice, and that feels very compromising and it feels very unfair, and it's there in a context of school budget cuts, etc., etc., etc. And that creates more distress. And I really carry that weight. That's a good example.
SPEAKER_00That's very interesting because one of the themes that's been emerging from some of the other people I've spoken to is that idea of responsibility moving. And sometimes it moves in ways and to places that are unintentional. In that scenario, responsibility for the task, you sort of move that on to this isn't head, but the moral responsibility or the emotional responsibility actually stayed with you. So you've kind of split that responsibility in two and you've consciously kept part of it to not load too much weight onto your colleague? Or was that unintentional that you kept that emotional responsibility as well?
SPEAKER_01There's a point where you have to do your best to separate your emotions and that emotional responsibility from the task at hand, which is easier said than done. And I know one of the ideas you talk about in that proximity, you carry that weight because you see the ongoing impact on that person. You see they're good gracious me, they're sending emails at eight o'clock in the evening. You know, they've clearly got too much work to do. So the emotional impact on myself and on my colleague is having to do this, uh, not militant for a moment, could still weigh heavy there. But you have to separate and let go of some of that. Otherwise, you can't make these decisions, you can't operate. The analogy I once gave somebody who I was supporting with this kind of work was saying it's a bit like being a brain surgeon. Not that I know much about being a brain surgeon, but what I can imagine a brain surgeon is not doing as they're doing their operation is their hands aren't shaking, going, Oh my goodness, if I mess this up, this person's never gonna be able to talk again. They're calm and they're detached at that decision-making point. But equally, I'm sure you have situations where you lose patience and you can't carry that excessively for months ahead, otherwise, you're never gonna be able to perform your operation again. And for myself, that's something which I've learned to do over the years is try and detach myself to a healthy degree from the emotional impacts of some of this work. I had a headteacher who's just started come to me a few months ago, and he was really struggling. And he said to me, Tony, is it always like this? Because this isn't kind of what I signed up for. And he was really feeling the weight of that moral distress of having to make some really, really difficult decisions in his school because there are things that are just completely outside of his control, and having to make decisions that he on one level disagreed with completely, and it was really impacting him. And I I I really felt for him, and I'm kind of glad in a way that when I started my headship, things weren't quite as challenging as they are now. And over 20 years I've seen it go up and down, up and down like a roller coaster. But I've seen that when you're in a low point, you do come out the other end of it at some point, so there is going to be a recovery, there is going to be a better time if you can hang in there.
SPEAKER_00To continue your brain surgeon analogy, you'd hope that when the patient has recovered, that that surgeon never sees that patient again. You may have a follow-up consultation, but you're not going to be in for brain surgery the following day or the following week. As a teacher and a headteacher, you see the same children every single day. So a decision that you make or a situation that arises on a Monday, that child is going to be back in again the following day, and every day after that. How does that change things for you and for the staff?
SPEAKER_01I think one of the things that I try and do when we're making these decisions, because usually these decisions are being made in a very grey area. That you could go this way, you could go that way, you could go down in the middle somewhere. And ultimately, my job is to turn all of that moral grey area into a black and white decision. Do we do A or do we do B? And I think for myself, one of the things that really helps me is you look at the impact of what each of those decisions could be, both positively and negatively, so that you are really aware as much as you can of what the repercussions of those decisions are going to be. And I think if you've got that mapped out for you, when you're looking at, I've made this decision to make a referral to social care about a child and a family, for example, you know what some of the implications might be in terms of the damage you might do to the relationship with that family, but you knew that was going to be the case. And you're not just sitting there looking at the damage of that decision, you're also looking at what would have happened if you'd made it a different decision.
SPEAKER_00You have to look at it in a practical way. Does that mean that there's a difference between being accountable and caring?
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely. The accountability obviously sits there, the book stops with you, and people can come back to you and ask you to justify your decision. But one of the ways of justifying that decision, I always feel like my ultimate accountability is to myself, and I if I can justify my decision on a practical level, I made decision A, and these are the benefits of it, and these were the consequences, you know, and some of those consequences are unintended, and maybe I didn't predict them, but given the information that I had, it was the right decision at the time, because if I'd made decision B, then we wouldn't be living with this set of consequences, we'd have this other set of consequences which would be even greater. And it's that moral reflection as well as the kind of practical reflection that means that usually I can live with the decisions that I've had to make. I might not like all of the outcomes, but I've still made the right decision in the end. A key concept for me that always supports me in the work that I do is thinking that I am trying to find fulfilment in my actions rather than in fulfilment in the outcomes of my actions. Because sometimes what the eventual outcomes are uh rely on things that are outside of my control, but my actions myself, what I'm actually doing, is within my control. So I'm making these decisions in some very difficult and compromising and challenging circumstances, but I'm applying my values within that context, and as long as I can kind of go home at night and think about a decision and go, oh, that was really tough. And yes, I'm worried about what will happen to this family as a result of that, or this child as a result of that, I'm still able to go, but I applied my values within the context, and that is what my job is, that is what my own sense of purpose is, and I am fulfilling that purpose in that sense, even though there are going to be some really difficult and challenging outcomes as a result of what I've decided.
SPEAKER_00So you're kind of thinking about the future state. If the tough decision now ends up in a future scenario that is better, then that sort of gives you that justification. One of the conversations that I had earlier in the series was about distance. And we discussed that a healthy amount of distance between the person holding the responsibility and the consequences of that is actually a good thing. How does that play into what you were just talking about?
SPEAKER_01I think that's very true. And I think one of the things that I think is interesting in my own personal situation, I've been in the same school for 20 years, and some of the stuff around me have been there for longer. So I've been working alongside them for many years, and we have got to know each other very, very well. We quite like each other. So some of that distance can be quite difficult, but actually, over those years, we've also learned that we have to have a certain amount of emotional distance in that decision making that we do. And we respect that between us, and we're so aligned in our thinking after all of this time that we all kind of recognize that, well, this is the decision that had to be made. And while it might impact and affect each other, we've talked through the consequences, we've talked through the consequences of alternative decisions. So that distance with staff is kind of maintained in that level of detachment from the decision-making process. Obviously, the really hard one is when you are making decisions about allocation of resources and support and things like that between children, and especially as school budgets have been massively cut, particularly for children with special educational needs over the last few years. And also you've seen so many of the services around schools either being closed or their thresholds rising exponentially, that you are increasingly making decisions that five or ten years ago would have been different, and you'd have been able to offer something to a child that you're unable to offer there, and that can really hurt, and that can really add to that moral distress. And the thing that sits alongside moral distress is moral injury. The difference between the two is moral injury is when you feel like you have actually made a decision that is causing immediate harm, and that can be very painful. And again, for me, that way to protect myself in those situations is always to be recognising that you've got your pretty well worked out sense of personal values and a clear sense of the purpose that you've come. Into your profession to try and accomplish, but that recognition that you are always applying that within a challenging context, and you can't sit back and just pretend that context isn't there. You have to go, I've got to make a decision within that context. I might not like it, it feels compromised, but it's my job to make those compromises. That is literally my job to make these compromising decisions to get the best balance moving forward.
SPEAKER_00Can you ever become detached enough to fully protect yourself?
SPEAKER_01No. I think there's always something. And actually, I think one of the things that can help is conversations like this, in a way, you're actually sitting there and talking through with your colleagues and with each other how you feel about things that have happened. And uh these kinds of conversations, they're quite abstract. We're talking quite generally here, and you can end up talking about ideals. So it's very easy for me to sit here and say, Well, I look at the different consequences of the different decisions, and I realise that decision A is better than decision B, and then I'm all happy and I go home and everything's fine. And of course it's not like that. But having strong relationships with your team and being able to have conversations a little bit like this around the particular context, the particular decision that has been made helps that moral reflection that can help put you back together again when you've had to do something really difficult.
SPEAKER_00You talked before about resource challenges. When you have a reduced capacity, naturally people have to do more. Your example earlier about the assistant head teacher who you didn't want to put more work on them, but there was no other choice, there was nowhere else for it to go. In in that web, and indeed beyond that web, the services in the local area and the local authority provide that do still exist. Who carries more in those scenarios than people might realise?
SPEAKER_01I think all of these decisions roll through to everybody. To give an example, we're facing big budget cuts. We need to reallocate a teaching assistant from one area of support to another, from one child to another. And everybody carries something. I carry the weight of knowing what is going to roll through as a result of that. A class teacher is then sitting there feeling like I've just lost this support for this child that is going to have some impact on other children in the class, as well as on that child. The teaching assistant might be feeling like I've worked a long time with this child, and now that child is not going to have the level of support that they're really benefiting from, so the teaching assistant carries it. The child themselves is carrying it because they might be struggling more than they were. Their parents will carry it because they're suddenly feeling like their child might be struggling, and they're trying to understand why last year they were getting this level of support, and the next year they're not getting that level of support. So I think everybody carries a little piece. I think the thing about carrying it is that different people will carry it in different ways, and some people are going to be better than others at actually saying, I'm carrying this, I'm seeing this impact, but I'm just going to put that down and get on with my job. And the more you can do that, actually the better you are at doing your job, because it's very difficult to get on and perform really effectively if you're just also walking around carrying that sense of responsibility or failure or disappointment or anger or whatever it is, especially that's going to get in the way. So you have to find ways of parking it, and for me, I have to find ways of supporting my staff to put that weight to one side and carry on in the new context that they're working. So you also have to be aware of how different people will react in what is essentially the same situation and support them as best you can. So knowing your staff team is really, really important all the way through, knowing the children and indeed knowing the parents, because you've got to try and get all of those people through what might be a difficult situation.
SPEAKER_00Trying to park that, put it on a shelf, put it to one side is obviously a very important thing to be able to do for your own self. Do you think it stays parked, it stays on the shelf, or do you think it may transfer elsewhere unintentionally?
SPEAKER_01I think that's a very good point. I said I've been in my current position for over 20 years now, and I'm going to be leaving at the end of this academic year to do some work supporting leaders who are in stressful, challenging jobs, to look at how they can protect themselves psychologically, because I think that weight and that sense of moral distress that we were talking about can have an ongoing impact in all aspects of your life. I kind of made a decision to try and do this a couple of years ago. I was at a head teacher's conference, and we'd had that kind of early morning cup of coffee before it all starts, and everyone was doing their meet and greet and go, Hello, how are you? Oh, I'm fine, how are you? And there were just these little pauses as people were going, How are you? Okay, and some people go, you know, I'm okay. But it was that little phrase, you know, because what we were all saying to each other really was, you know, I'm not okay. I'm really feeling this. So I stopped that morning going, Oh, I'm okay. And I just started saying to people, I'm exhausted, I'm quite stressed at the moment. This is really difficult, isn't it? And everybody was going, Yeah, oh my goodness, yeah. And I suddenly realized I was in a room of 120 really unhappy people. And as much as we uh were trying to carry on, morale was astonishingly low. And it didn't seem right or fair. And when you look at the statistics around teachers resigning, uh, this is not head teachers, but teachers in general, something like a third of teachers leave teaching within the first five years of qualifying. So we're losing a third of our teaching workforce within five years. We're losing about eight, nine percent of teachers every single year. And something like sixty percent of teachers have said that they don't see themselves being a teacher within three years' time. And I think that is an indication that within my profession people are not really successfully parking it, that it is having a major impact. And I think that is absolutely criminal because these are people who have entered the profession with a real sense of wanting to do good in the world, with a real sense of purpose and drive, and they are being made to feel like they are failing, that the sacrifices they are making are too great, and that they're not able to fulfil their purpose and are stepping out, and that there are ways of thinking and behaving, uh, the way we conceptualize things like success, that we can change and that we need to change, so that we can work in these really difficult circumstances, but still feel a degree of fulfilment, and for want of a better word, happy in our work. I think it is something that we really have to challenge within teaching, but I think actually across all sectors, particularly post-COVID, there's a real sense of a loss of purpose and drive. I'd almost term it as like an existential crisis of people who are sitting there and evaluating what they're doing and beginning to feel like what they're doing is not making sense to them anymore. But lots of people still feel very trapped within that situation and not sure what to do. And particularly, I think, within teaching, people should be feeling positive about what they're doing because the more challenging it becomes, the more people should be feeling extremely proud that they are hanging in there and doing remarkable work in very, very difficult circumstances.
SPEAKER_00My mind is going to the quote: with great power comes great responsibility. As circumstances become more challenging, the power to fix them becomes more important, and then that responsibility increases. So, what responsibilities do people in schools carry now that were never supposed to belong to schools?
SPEAKER_01You know, my wife is a teacher as well, and we did a little brainstorm on this this morning. Uh, we were just thinking about what are all the things that we were doing, and we kind of just went on and on and on. So it's everything from making sure that children are fed and clothed when they come into school, knowing where food banks are, knowing where they can get charity donations as housing advice, supporting families on the brink of becoming homeless, dealing with drug and alcohol dependence, becoming experts in all kinds of medical conditions and health, visual impairment, hearing loss, diabetes, administering medications, mental health support is becoming an increasingly large part of the work that we do, but also increasingly a part that is becoming very, very difficult to maintain. Lots of schools have been employing their own counsellors or using senior leaders or staff to support mental health and wider family support for parents, and schools are now reaching the point where having stepped into the gaps that have appeared in local authority services, schools themselves are now having to drop some of that support because the budgets just aren't there. You've got kind of scenarios where police aren't attending calls, ambulances aren't coming in time, so you're taking children to hospital. You've got needing to become an expert in domestic abuse, accessing refuge for people, you're having to do home visits to make sure the children who are in school are safe and being looked after at home. Post-pandemic, where we became responsible for home education, that has kind of continued. So we're now responsible for making sure those children who aren't coming into school are still getting an education in their homes. Benefits advice. I could go on and on and on. And in one way, I'm not saying that it is wrong because parents should be getting access to that level of support and advice. What is wrong is that it is leaving us finding it extremely difficult to keep a focus on our core function, which is delivering lessons and supporting children to learn. And sometimes we're having to work on the edge of our professional knowledge and having to really educate ourselves because the services that used to be there to provide some of this support and advice is slowly and at times quite rapidly dissipating. So there is a huge weight there, and I think also that's one of those additional weights that you carry when you are kind of beginning to operate on the edge of your professional expertise. You're kind of going, it's the advice, is the support that I'm giving, is it accurate? Am I getting this right? And that can be something that you do sit there over the weekend going, Oh, I suggested this. Was that right? I better just go check that. I mean, some ways as heads we carry that. Sometimes it's some of the staff a little bit more at the chalk face who are carrying some of that more because they've got those more direct contacts with families and children. So yeah, there's a lot to carry.
SPEAKER_00I think we could have a whole nother podcast conversation about society delegating responsibility without transferring resources to meet that demand. Um, but I'll save that one for another day. We're coming up to towards the end of time, so I'll just ask you one more question. You listed 50 different things there, which all take time and resource and effort and mental capacity. Who is it that ends up absorbing the cost when the people responsible for care, you and and your team, are overwhelmed themselves?
SPEAKER_01Well, ultimately, if we do reach that point in being overwhelmed, it's the children and families who will be impacted because they're not getting that support that they deserve. We know in schools that we are the last resort, if you like, but also the first resort. So if we don't deliver, then it's not going to happen. And for the most part, we refuse to let that happen. So we will be there at eight o'clock in the evening with the children who can't go home because of risks of what might happen to them, and we're there talking to the police and talking to social services saying somebody needs to come. You know, we do our level best, so then it never actually comes to that. So at times that cost is borne by loss. But in the end, it is the children and families who are left struggling with that ongoing lack of the professional support that they should be getting at the level that they should be getting it. And what you talked about, that kind of proximity, we are left seeing that, and with that at times, sense of powerlessness, which is deeply, deeply frustrating. What I should just add is I love my job and I've had the most amazing time, and ultimately, when I reflect on it, I feel like I am in an extremely privileged position to be able to make a difference. And yes, for all of those frustrations and so on, the thing that I've always felt is really lucky that I'm in a position to make these challenging decisions to make the difference. That's why I came into education. Whatever service you're working in, whatever industry you're working in, that's the thing to hold on to. Is that actually if it wasn't me here applying my values and principles, then uh things wouldn't be as good as they are.
SPEAKER_00I think Tony, that is a good point at which to end the conversation today. Leave that one with our listeners to reflect on. Thank you ever so much for taking the time to talk with me. Uh, it's been really wonderful to get your perspectives on these things. Thank you, Phil. Each episode of Carrying It supports organizations working to improve how responsibility and mental health are handled in real systems. Links are in the show notes. This conversation was about proximity and the reality that responsibility feels different when you can't look away. Because the things we keep seeing are often the things that we keep carrying.