Introduction
A warm welcome to the many thousands of life members who read our newsletter. I sincerely hope you find it informative and a worthwhile read.
As a sector council, we are always open to new ideas and suggestions of what could be added to benefit our readership. The sector council, which has representation from all regions as well as Northern Ireland and Wales, held its most recent meeting in London at the end of February 2024. It had a full agenda, and the four-hour meeting was well attended by members, as well as senior officers from the NAHT team.
As many of you will be aware, we have had detailed discussions over the last year as to where life members who still want to play an active role in NAHT sit within the organisation. Following the Constitution and Rules Conference in January, there has been a greater clarity on procedures and roles. As a result, the new rule book was discussed at length by the life member sector council (LMSC), both during Paul Whiteman’s general secretary’s report, and during the assistant general secretary – democracy and governance’s report.
The LMSC was brought up to date with the process of ratifying the new book and the separation of the democratic rules from the operating procedures. It was confirmed that the route by which life members are able to influence these procedures will be via their chair’s seat on the national executive committee. The clarification brought about from the new rule book allowed the role of life members as active participants in the union to be fully covered.
Paul Whiteman stressed the value that NAHT places upon the contribution of life members at all levels, and that without this important role the union would be much the poorer. Magnus Gorham confirmed that the updated constitution still allowed the branches and regions flexibility in their organisational make-up, and that a number of branches were already being creative in their committee structures to promote the contribution life members.
It is recognised that the experience that life members bring and the possible free time they may have available to give to support to individual members, branches and regions needs to be actively promoted. The LMSC will be working with Magnus Gorham to share some of these successful arrangements with all regions and branches. It is the LMSC’s aspiration that each branch and region has at least one life member on their committee.
Thank you to all life members who have contributed to this debate. It has been truly appreciated. Other issues that were discussed where life members could get more involved included the next government’s tax and social care ambitions, and pension policy – all things which affect life members, and all things NAHT could and should get more involved in.
We are constantly looking for new opportunities where the benefits of being a life member can be enhanced and we are pleased to announce that these discussions are bearing fruit. NAHT’s team is close to completing contracts that will afford new elements on offer to all members. These will be launched at the NAHT Annual Conference in May, and I look forward to sharing the detail with you in our summer edition.
Kind regards
John Killeen
Life member sector council chair
Click on the links below to read more on each topic
An ideal retirement and the psychological impact of retiring from work
Many of us spend years picturing our ideal retirement – whether it’s traveling the world, spending more time with family and friends, pursuing hobbies such as painting, gardening, cooking, playing golf or fishing, or simply enjoying the freedom to relax and take it easy for a change. But while we tend to give lots of thought to planning for the financial aspects of retirement, we often overlook the psychological impact of retiring from work.
Many new retirees find that after a few months, the novelty of being on ‘permanent vacation’ starts to wear off. You may miss the sense of identity, meaning and purpose that came with your job, the structure it gave your days, or the social aspect of having co-workers. Instead of feeling free, relaxed, and fulfilled, you may feel depressed, aimless and isolated. You may grieve the loss of your old life, feel stressed about how you’re going to fill your days, or worried about the toll that being at home all day is taking on your relationship with your spouse or partner. Some new retirees even experience mental health issues such as clinical depression or anxiety. The truth is that no matter how much you’ve been looking forward to it, retiring from work is a major life change that can bring stress and depression as well as benefits. In fact, some studies have linked retirement to a decline in health.
One ongoing study found that retired people, especially those in the first year of retirement, are about 40 per cent more likely to experience a heart attack or stroke than those who keep working. While some difficulties adjusting to retirement can be linked to how much you enjoyed your job (it’s less of a wrench to give up a job you hated), there are steps you can take to cope with the stress, depression, and other common challenges of retirement.
Whether you’re already retired and struggling with the change, planning to make the transition soon, or facing a forced or early retirement, there are healthy ways to adjust to this new chapter in your life and ensure your retirement is both happy and rewarding.
Retirement challenges
Whatever your circumstances, ending your working life changes things – some for the better, others in unexpected or even difficult ways.
If your job was physically draining or left you feeling burned out, for example, retiring can feel like a great burden has been lifted. But if you enjoyed your work, found it gratifying and built your social life around your career, retirement can present sterner challenges.
Things can be especially tough if you made sacrifices in your personal or family life for the sake of your educational leadership role, were forced to retire before you felt ready or have health issues that limit what you’re now able to do in your retirement.
Your outlook on life can also influence how well you handle the transition from work to retirement. If you tend to have a positive, optimistic viewpoint, you’ll more likely handle the change better than if you’re prone to worrying or struggle to cope with uncertainty in life.
Common challenges include the following (just some examples):
- Struggling to ‘switch off’ from work mode and relax, especially in the early weeks or months of retirement
- Feeling anxious at having more time on your hands, but less money to spend
- Finding it difficult to fill the extra hours you now have with meaningful activity
- Losing your identity – if you’re no longer a school leader, for example, who are you?
- Feeling depressed and isolated without the social interaction of being around your school colleagues
- Experiencing a decline in how useful, important or self-confident you feel
- Adjusting your routine or maintaining your independence now you’re at home with your spouse during the day
- Some retirees even feel guilty about receiving money from a pension without directly working for it.
Whatever challenges you face as you prepare for this new chapter in life, the following tips can help you ease the transition, reduce stress and anxiety, and find new meaning and purpose in life.
Retirement-conscious consideration points – part one
Although it’s an inevitable part of life, coping with change is rarely easy. As we grow older, life can seem to change at an ever-quickening rate. Children leave home, you lose friends and loved ones, physical and health challenges mount, and retirement looms. It’s normal to respond to these changes with an array of mixed, often conflicting emotions. But just as you transitioned from childhood into adulthood, you can make the transition from work to retirement.
- Adjust your attitude – think of retirement as a journey rather than a destination.
Allow yourself time to figure everything out – you can always change direction if necessary. You can also adjust your attitude by focusing on what you’re gaining, rather than the things you’re losing.
- Build resilience – the more resilient you are, the better you’re able to cope with challenges like retirement.
You can improve the qualities of resiliency at any age to help you keep a healthy perspective when life is at its toughest.
- Acknowledge your emotions – there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to respond when dealing with a major life change, so don’t try to bully yourself into feeling a certain way about retirement.
Whether you feel angry, sad, anxious, grief-stricken or a mix of emotions, by acknowledging and accepting what you’re feeling, you’ll find that even the most intense or unpleasant emotions will soon pass. Talk to a close friend about what you’re going through, and/or record your feelings in a journal.
- Accept the things that you can’t change – railing against events that you have no control over can be as exhausting as it is futile.
Whatever the circumstances of your retirement, by accepting them you can refocus your energy to the things that you do have control over, such as the way you choose to react to obstacles. Look back at examples where you’ve coped with changes in the past to remind yourself that you’ll be able to manage this change as well.
- Redefine your identity – many of us define ourselves by what we do for a living.
After retirement, you can find new ways of defining yourself through different or non-work-related activities and relationships. Where you were once an school leader, for example, you’re now a mentor, volunteer, grandparent, student, adult carer, memoirist or artist.
- Set new goals – you may have already achieved many of your professional goals in life, but it’s important to keep setting yourself new ones to strive towards.
Having goals can energise you, provide a sense of purpose, and help to redefine your identity. Set goals that challenge and excite you and keep you moving forward in life. Many retirees find that now they’re no longer the family provider, they can focus more on their own hopes and dreams.
- Social support – you don’t have to face the challenges of retirement alone; many other people are going through the same difficulties.
Reaching out and sharing the burden can help ease your stress and bolster your coping skills.
But for many of us, our social ties are closely linked to our previous professional role – and they’re abruptly cut short when we retire. Make a point to stay in touch with old work colleagues after retirement and explore opportunities to broaden your social network beyond work. You’re never too old to build new, rewarding friendships.
- Enroll in a retirement transition program – NAHT offers retirement planning assistance or transition workshops, and you may also be able to find similar programs at local community centres.
As well as providing practical help on adjusting to retirement, they can also enable you to meet other recent retirees.
- Join a peer support group – some senior service and other community organisations offer support groups for older adults making the transition into retirement.
Talking to other people who understand what you’re going through can help reduce feelings of stress, anxiety and isolation. Web search for retirement groups in your area, including NAHT life member groups, and you could even start a new NAHT life member group if there is not one operating in your area – contact your local NAHT branch secretary or NAHT regional secretary for help.
If you have any helpful pointers for NAHT members considering retirement or those who have already retired, please email NAHT LMSC communication officer michael.wilson@nahtofficials.org.uk; Michael is an NAHT life member.
For more information see www.helpguide.org/ and www.educationsupport.org.uk/.
Part two of this article on retirement-conscious consideration points will follow in the summer 2024 NAHT life members' newsletter.
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NAHT's support line for members
NAHT provides a free and confidential NAHT support line to all members that can be reached on 0800 917 4055. This service is available all year round and during out-of-office hours. Open 24/7, it is staffed by qualified counsellors and offers you emotional and practical support. Find out more about Education Support here.
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State pension increase – April 2024
State pension payments are increasing, with the new rates coming into effect this April.
You can check how much state pension you should receive using the state pension forecast tool on the government’s website or through your personal tax account – www.gov.uk/check-state-pension.
National Pensioners Convention
Here are some useful resources and updates for life members from the National Pensioners Convention (NPC).
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Would you like to do something more for the future of education? Why not get more involved in NAHT and join other school leaders in making a difference.
There are many ways you can get involved with NAHT. You don’t have to commit a lot of time to get more involved and we offer an extensive national training programme – give it a try; you’ll be amazed how much you get out of it.
Get involved in your local NAHT branch
Every member of NAHT belongs to a branch. Why not get involved by going along to a branch event to meet other school leaders and find out what the branch is doing? You’ll be made very welcome and it’s a great chance to find out more about what NAHT is doing for you and for education, and to share your experiences with like-minded education professionals. Find out more about NAHT's branches.
Take on an official role
Help your colleagues and other members by becoming an NAHT official. Being an NAHT official gives you the opportunity to:
- make a positive difference to the working lives of school leaders and the challenges they face
- use your experience and experience to help others in the profession
- help create a better future for education.
Get involved in one of our networks
NAHT has three informal equality networks for members, led by members, for members. Facilitated by NAHT, each network meets online every half term, with an annual in-person meeting in the summer term. Each network helps amplify the voices of members within NAHT, as well as providing support, information and networking opportunities.
- Leaders for Race Equality Network
- LGBT+ Network
- Disabled Members' Network
Find out more about NAHT’s equality networks.
If you are not sure who to contact locally and want to get more active, email organising@naht.org.uk, find your branch's contact information here or you can get in touch using the contact details below.
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NAHT’s priority campaigns in 2024
At NAHT, we pride ourselves on our work to campaign on the key issues facing our members. Following extensive consultation with members, including our regional officials and national executive members, we have identified six key campaign areas and re-launched our priority campaigns, as we continue to campaign for the future of education.
Inspection and accountability
High-stakes accountability measures are driving unsustainable workload, teacher and leadership wastage, and damaging the health and well-being of education professionals.
NAHT is campaigning for immediate system reform, including:
- root and branch review of Ofsted’s inspection framework, methodology and notification periods; the abolition of single-word and graded judgements in favour of accurate reporting of a school’s strengths and areas for improvement; and the creation of a fully independent complaint process
- reduction of the excessive published performance measures and removal of the 'all schools and colleges comparison tables’ from the performance data website to avoid the damaging consequences of encouraging the public to compare institutions in league tables
- fully funded support to safeguard the mental health and well-being of school leaders and their staff.
Pay and funding
School leaders have suffered among the most significant real terms pay erosion of all workers. The value of school leaders’ pay has fallen by about a fifth in real terms since 2010, negatively affecting both leadership aspiration and retention. Even the September 2023 pay award was not sufficient to arrest the decline in real-terms pay.
NAHT’s immediate objective for the 2024 pay round is to secure a fully funded ‘inflation plus’ uplift from September 2024 to protect current salaries against further erosion by inflation and begin the restoration salaries to their 2010 value, setting a course that could be completed within the life of parliament.
NAHT is also pressing for systemic reform of the pay structure for teachers and leaders. This includes:
- a reformed national pay structure with mandatory minimum pay points and pay portability
- a comprehensive review of the factors that determine leadership pay, and work to tackle inequity in the pay structure and close the ‘pay gaps’
- a professional pay continuum that supports new career pathways and delivers pay progression for teachers and school leaders.
School funding is set to remain below 2010 levels in real terms until 2024/25. NAHT is campaigning for:
- sustained investment in pupils through year-on-year real-terms increases to core funding, and funding for high needs (in both mainstream and special settings)
- investment to ensure that the health, therapeutic and social care services are readily available and accessible to all schools to their support pupils
- all future pay uplifts to be fully funded.
Recruitment and retention
Lack of professional recognition and trust, unsustainable workload, high stakes inspection, and falling real pay, are driving leadership attrition and undermining aspiration to lead. These pressures exacerbate the existing lack of diversity across leadership roles and the challenges faced by leaders and aspiring leaders with certain protected characteristics.
To improve leadership supply, NAHT is campaigning for government to:
- restore leaders’ real pay, restore the leadership pay differential, and pressing for an STRB remit to consult with trade unions to devise a new professional pay structure to support all teachers and leaders throughout their careers
- restore trust by empowering school leaders to make the decisions that best meet their learners’ needs, free from centralised diktat and control
- reform inspection and accountability measures to remove drivers of unnecessary workload, fear and stress
- commit to full and meaningful engagement, consultation and collaboration with the profession’s representative bodies when developing policy
- value school leaders and teachers by removing the drivers of the mental health and well-being crisis, and providing accessible, fully funded support (including the delivery of supervision and measures to increase diversity in leadership).
School buildings and estates
NAHT is pressing for an ambitious and long-term school estate strategy to ensure that every pupil is taught in a school that is safe and structurally sound, accessible and fit for purpose. Last autumn’s ‘crumbly concrete’ (RAAC) crisis shows clearly the appalling state of disrepair that too many of our school buildings have been reduced to.
Ambitious sustainability and climate change goals should be integrated within capital programmes to deliver investment in school buildings that will play a significant part in our journey towards net zero.
Our campaign seeks to:
- reverse the long-term cuts to capital funding for maintenance, refurbishment and rebuilding to bring the school estate back up to at least a minimum ‘acceptable’ level
- ensure that capital funding increases, in real terms, year on year
- ensure that dangerous RAAC and similar materials are removed from every single school site in a safe and timely manner with as little disruption to learning as is possible and that schools that need appropriate temporary accommodation and other financial help and support are provided with it as soon as possible by government
- take this opportunity to remove at the same time lethal asbestos that is shockingly still present in over four-fifths of school sites, starting with the most dangerous first.
SEND
Following the launch of the government’s SEND and alternative provision improvement plan and despite years of compelling evidence, school leaders are now facing a perfect storm of chronically underfunded high-needs budgets and an underinvested system of wider external SEND support, all while the numbers of pupils requiring SEND support continues to increase.
NAHT is campaigning for a significant shift from the government’s resource-limited policy approach to a genuine, needs-led SEND system.
There is an urgent need for increased and protected new funding for children with special needs which should be for more than a single financial year, to maximise meaningful support in the longer term.
NAHT is campaigning for:
- a high-needs funding strategy that ensures long-term sufficiency to properly meet pupils’ needs
- cancellation of local authority high-needs deficits to stop the debt from consuming funding set aside for children and young people with SEND
- greater consistency in high-needs funding nationally to fully meet SEND provision costs
- long-term investment in specialist external support services to build capacity and improve speed of access for pupils with SEND
- an EHCP system that ensures schools do not have to cover the insufficiencies in health and social care capacity.
Workload and well-being
Crushing workload, driven by high stakes accountability measures, funding pressures, spiralling pupil need caused by poverty and the disintegration of the social, health and care services that schools need access to are driving a mental health and well-being crisis among school leaders and their staff.
This further undermines leadership aspiration and retention, exacerbating the leadership supply crisis. Almost a third of school leaders (31%) appointed aged under 50 leave their post within five years, more than half (53%) of whom quit teaching in state funded schools.
To relieve the immediate pressures NAHT is campaigning for:
- the removal of performance-related pay progression
- a statement on reasonably expected working hours for school leaders
- protected leadership time for school leaders.
To support our campaigning work, we have worked with members and key campaigners from across all of our regions to develop dedicated toolkits that will help to provide some of the resources and briefing guides that enable our call to action.
Within the toolkits you will find a short guide in relation to the specific campaign area and our overarching objectives. You’ll also find PowerPoints, short videos, features and, crucially, tools to enable you to take forward the campaigns in your local areas. You can find more about our priorities in 2024 on NAHT's website at www.naht.org.uk/our-priorities.
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Here are the details of meetings of NAHT's executive committee and life member sector council in 2024:
- NAHT Annual Conference and AGM – 3 to 5 May 2024 at the ICC in Newport, Wales
The International Convention Centre Wales is a 5,000-capacity venue in the city of Newport, Wales. The venue has a main auditorium with fixed seating for 1,500 delegates, six rooms of exhibition space and 43,000 sq ft of pillar-free space.
Located in: The Celtic Manor Resort
Address: The Coldra, Catsash Road, Caerleon, Newport NP18 1HQ
- Life member sector council meeting – 11am to 3pm on Tuesday 11 June 2024, Millbank Tower, London, and via Teams
- Life member sector council meeting – 11am to 3pm on Tuesday 12 November 2024, Millbank Tower, London, and via Teams
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Please contact your NAHT national office for support, guidance, representation and advice
Life member sector council: who's who?
Click here to see information about who's who on the LMSC.
Each NAHT LMSC member is annually elected by the appropriate NAHT region executive committee or NAHT devolved nation (NAHT Cymru and NAHT NI) executive committee.
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