IMPLEMENTING BOTHEREDNESS 2026
You already know about botheredness – you’ve seen the difference between a class that’s merely compliant and one that’s genuinely alive.
What’s hard is the how: finding practical, sustainable ways to make that aliveness happen in real classrooms, day in and day out.
That’s what this is for.
Implementing Botheredness is a six-session online programme for teachers and leaders who want to build a culture where learning feels unmissable – where students lean in, care about their work, and genuinely get stuck in.
Each session is one hour, online, after school. No cover needed. No travel. No time away from school.
What you’ll get is a weekly dose of inspiration, practical strategies, and the company of educators who care about the same things you do.
These aren’t webinars
Every session pairs practical input with breakout discussions alongside educators from other settings – which is where most people tell us the real thinking happens. We record the input and send written summaries, but the breakouts only exist live.
What we’ll cover
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The core principles: professional imagination, story, stance – and what it means to do education with students, rather than to them
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Warming up the curriculum: practical techniques for making abstract knowledge vivid, meaningful and memorable, and transferable tools that will change how you think about what a ‘lived’ curriculum really means
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From engagement to investment: how to move students beyond surface-level participation towards genuine curiosity and deepening motivation
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Making change stick: tried-and-tested implementation tools to help you identify what needs to change, design a workable plan, and actually follow through
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Leading for botheredness: how to create the conditions where staff feel confident, valued and involved – because bothered adults make bothered children
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Building the culture: how joy, warmth and connection sit naturally alongside clarity, consistency and purposeful routines
By the end, you’ll have
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A clear, practical understanding of the pedagogy of botheredness – and how to apply it in your context
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A toolkit of transferable strategies for humanising and warming up curriculum content
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Concrete ways to move students from engagement to genuine investment
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A detailed implementation plan for embedding these ideas across your classroom or school
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Renewed energy and optimism for the work
Who it’s for
Teachers and school leaders at any phase – primary, secondary, post-16, special schools and alternative provision.
Whether you’re coming to botheredness fresh, or you’ve read the book and want to go deeper, you’ll leave each session with something you can use straight away.
Six live online sessions with Hywel Roberts and Dr James Mannion. A weekly source of positivity, inspiration – and tools you can use on Monday morning.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 4.30-5.30pm, from 3 November. £97.
For 6 or more, request an invoice to arrange a bulk deal
The details
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Format: six live online sessions, 4.30-5.30pm
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Dates: Tuesday 3 November, Tuesday 10 November, Tuesday 17 November, Wednesday 25 November, Wednesday 2 December, Wednesday 9 December
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Please note: the first three sessions fall on Tuesdays and the last three on Wednesdays
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Price: £97 per person for all six sessions, including recordings and written summaries (bulk deals available for groups of more than 5 - get in touch)
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Included: an e-book copy of Botheredness: Stories, Stance and Pedagogy by Hywel Roberts, and a PDF of Making Change Stick: A Practical Guide to Implementing School Improvement by Dr James Mannion
Places are limited, and booking closes on Monday 2 November – or sooner if we fill up.
How we work together
Booking a place means signing up to a few shared commitments. They’re what make the six sessions genuinely useful rather than six more things in the diary.
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Come with your mic and camera working – we want to see and hear you
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Close the other windows. Email and marking will still be there at 5.30
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Turn up. The breakouts are interactive, and other people are relying on you
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Expect to work alongside colleagues from settings very different from your own
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Professional respect, always
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Curiosity, open-mindedness and a willingness to change your mind
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Have a go at the intersessional tasks – small, practical and entirely within your control
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Chatham House rules. What’s said in the room stays in the room
Questions
What if it’s not for me?
Come to the first session. If it isn’t what you hoped for, tell us and we’ll refund you in full.
What if I can’t make a session live?
Every session is recorded and we send a written summary afterwards, so you can catch up. The breakout discussions can’t be recorded though, so come live wherever you can.
Can my school pay by invoice?
Yes. For six places or more, get in touch and we’ll invoice your school directly – just send us a purchase order number.
I’m a teaching assistant, not a teacher. Is it still for me?
Yes. Mattering isn’t the preserve of any one role – often it’s support staff who hold the strongest relationships with the students who need them most.
Is this about behaviour policy?
Not primarily. It’s about the conditions underneath the policy – why students disengage, what changes that, and how to embed the changes so they last.
How much work is there between sessions?
Short intersessional tasks, designed to be straightforward and entirely within your control. Nothing that needs anyone else’s permission.
What do I need?
A device with a working mic and camera, and an hour after school.
MEET YOUR FACILITATORS
Hywel Roberts is a teacher, writer, storyteller, humourist and ‘world leader in enthusiasm’.
He is as at home working with children on the carpets of their classrooms as he is in front of hundreds of headteachers on the conference circuit.
Hywel contributes to the national conversation around education at school and university level. He is also a well-respected and widely published author and columnist. Hywel contributed to BBC Bitesize acting as a content provider and script doctor during the pandemic in 2020.
Hywel's books include his award-winning book Oops! Getting Children to Learn Accidentally, Uncharted Territories (written with Dr Debra Kidd) and, most recently, the best-selling Botheredness. He has also contributed fiction to a prison-based literacy reading programme developed by The Shannon Trust.
Hywel holds an MA in Education and Poverty. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching. He also part-owns a commercial cask ale brewery with some pals, but that’s another story…
Dr James Mannion is a teacher trainer, author and government advisor who specialises in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry.
James is the author of Making Change Stick: A Practical Guide to Implementing School Improvement (2025) and Fear is the Mind Killer (2020, co-authored with Kate McAllister). He is the co-founder of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation dedicated to improving outcomes for children and young people through implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. He has worked with thousands of schools, multi-academy trusts and government agencies in the UK and internationally, supporting leaders to design, implement and sustain meaningful, lasting improvements.
Formerly a teacher and school leader for 15 years, James holds an MA in person-centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. He's an Associate of Oracy Cambridge, the Chair of the Education Policy Alliance, and the co-host (with "The Real" David Cameron) of the Rethinking Education podcast, which has had almost a million downloads to date.