Past, Present and Future: 4 Years of Joy by Lou Mycroft

A Symbolic Moment

Slide from Dr Lou Mycroft’s thinknote: Story of the future – A Story of Advanced Practice as part of the Education and Training Foundation’s fourth, annual AP conference, 25 March 2022

At the National Advanced Practitioners conference in March 2022, more than 100 people celebrated a solemn and symbolic moment: the handing over of ‘the work’ from the stewardship of touchconsulting Ltd* to its rightful owners: advanced practitioners (‘APs’) and the pan-organisational communities and constellations they have formed together over four joyful years. 

The timing of this transition, nearly two years to the day from the first pandemic ‘moment’, carried symbolic significance in itself. APConnect will be forever in our memories as a coherent game of two halves: the pre-Covid building of solid Advanced Practice evidence and experience (Years 1 and 2) and the intra-Covid flourishing of the role as the engine room of change in FE (Years 3 and 4). When the pandemic moment came, APs stepped into their own potentia, the joyful, can-do activism which characterises the role. 

APConnect did not set out to be intentionally rhizomatic, a metaphor for a way of working which has spread its roots deep into the sector, transgressing organisational boundaries by connecting APs up with other constellations to inform, inspire and strengthen their practice. But by the time of APConnectLive 2020, our second national conference held just days after the start of the first lockdown, it was clear that the strength of the programme was in its connections and that the ‘Constellations’ community, centred on Slack and diffusing across social media and online events, was its heart. As I wrote back then: 

Rhizomatic learning is taken out from a central point by participants themselves – the community, in effect, becomes the curriculum.  Some threads will flourish, others will die off. What happens centrally is not about control, it’s about providing stimuli + space in which to process.

This way of working is unapologetically messy, because there is nothing to be gained from tracking and monitoring the way in which people energise and inspire one another. All that needs to be boxed off to work rhizomatically in public sector spaces are the KPIs and APs lack nothing by way of accountability. Figure out what you need to achieve, design systems to achieve it efficiently and accurately, do your monitoring with the minimum of fuss…then get on with the work of values-led practice**. The Bowerbird, described here as part of a 2020 writing project, provided both metaphor and encouragement for APs to amplify, document and safeguard the “blue shiny things” of their practice; all those powerful learning moments which would otherwise end up on the cutting room floor. 

Our fourth and final conference presented to APs their own history. Dr Colin Forrest re-connected us with the history of advanced practice (in many guises), Joss Kang walked us through the rich repository of our 2018-22 ‘present’ and I had the privilege of holding the symbolic moment where we transferred stewardship of the work to you. 

It was a day of mixed emotions. Celebration, certainly – APs have changed cultures in our beloved sector with their spirit, energy, collaboration, endurance and deeply values-led practice. Appreciation – that we have collectively reached a point where advanced practice is sustainable (in those organisations which invest in it and allow it to happen). APs are not only building but releasing the capacity of colleagues to work not harder – surely we’ve reached the limits of that? – but more joyfully. And, inevitably, sadness at this parting of ways, tempered with a rightful pride in the work we have done together, recognition of our continuing relationships and anticipation of what’s yet to come. In that sadness, there is much hope: 

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present.

Inhabitable. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Hope in the Dark’

*The National Advanced Practitioners Programme 2018-2022 (‘APConnect’) was funded by the Department of Education and commissioned by the Education and Training Foundation.

**Our Year 3 co-evaluation project, Rethinking the Role of the Advanced Practitioner provides evidence, rationale and a model for this way of working.