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More Grit Needed?

Last week, I spotted quite a bit of online condemnation of the current Secretary of State for Education, so I decided to investigate. I wanted to see if the criticism was justified or politically motivated.

Although she was in the media following an announcement of increased funding and support to tackle the mental health crisis in young people, the focus seems to be on her use of the word 'grit'. She used the word in the context of young people needing to show more grit, which she qualified as meaning the same as resilience. 

Whilst anyone who has worked in education cannot argue that our children and young people need to be supported to become more resilient, the press have jumped on the use of the word 'grit', and I can see why. The word really does not sit comfortably within our enlightened vocabulary and definitely harks back to a different age, where we were all taught to 'suck it up and get on with our lives'. If you really listen to what she was saying, it was clear that she didn't intend the word to be taken that way, and I suspect that the (deliberate) misinterpretation by the press was at least partly due to her straight-talking northern ways.

I should qualify all this as I don't want to fall into the trap myself of being too political, that having worked in education for nearly thirty years I remain sceptical about what the Secretary of State was promising to support mental health work in schools, and I will believe it when I see it, but on paper it sounds like a good step forward.

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