Kate Hinks
Sometimes, at the end of the day, I sit down with my husband and say:
“I made three people cry today.”
Inevitably, he makes a joke about either my dreadfully cruel personality, personal body odour or how I bore them all to tears at home too.
But, of course, those aren’t the real reasons those people were crying (I hope!!). Instead, it’s usually one of the following:
- The frustration of the parent who is sick of fighting the system and feels that no one is helping them.
- The overwhelm of the SENCO who feels like they are spinning a million plates and making no impact (of course they are, but it’s not always easy to see).
- The embarrassment of the teacher who was observed struggling to meet the wide range of need in their class.
And in all those cases, the reason the often-bottled tears have finally been shed is because someone has taken the time to show them some empathy.To see their very real pain, acknowledge it, name it and tell them it’s OK to feel it.
By showing empathy in my role, I’ve prevented complaints, I’ve prevented resignations and, once or twice, I’ve prevented open warfare being declared in the classroom.
I am utterly convinced of the power of empathy. I’m convinced that it is essential in all leadership, but definitely in SEND leadership.
Empathy helps us understand what the daily lives of children with additional needs might be like, build trust with families, create safe cultures in teams and lead change without losing sight of the people it will impact.
But there is a question that has been increasingly bothering me:
How can we, as leaders, share in so much pain without suffering ourselves?
Empathy is not the same as sympathy. And neither is the same as compassion.
For me, empathy is about seeking to understand another person’s experience and emotional reality. Sympathy is feeling concern for someone. Compassion takes us one step further: recognising suffering and wanting to do something to ease it.
In SEND leadership, we need all three.
But they come with a cost.
It takes a huge amount of strength and skill to be empathetic as a leader: to recognise that those you lead are struggling but still hold them to account; to show understanding without rescuing; to challenge without humiliating; and to listen without promising.
The cost of this on a leader can be immense.
Women are more empathetic, right?
Most of the SEND leaders in Excalibur and nationally are women. (19/20 in Excalibur and 94% nationally – National Senco Workforce Survey 2020)
That’s because women are more empathetic, right?
There is evidence that women and girls score higher, on average, on some measures of emotional intelligence and emotion recognition. A major 2026 meta-analysis examined 1,279 articles, 1,428 samples and more than 609,000 participants across 76 countries. It found average female advantages in several emotional abilities, particularly other-focused abilities such as recognising and understanding emotion (Putting assumptions to the test: A meta-analytic review of gender differences in emotional intelligence and specific emotion abilities – PubMed).
That matters.
Because saying “women are more empathetic” is quite different from saying “women may, on average, demonstrate strengths in some emotional abilities.”
But neither conclusion tells us that women should therefore be responsible for managing the feelings of everyone around them.
And yet research consistently finds that women are stereotyped as being more emotional and communal than men.
In leadership, this creates a problematic double bind.
- We are expected to care… but not too much.
- We are expected to be warm… but also authoritative.
- We are expected to listen… but also to make the decision.
- We are expected to understand everyone’s perspective… but still to hold people accountable.
Women leaders can be penalised for displaying emotions associated with dominance, such as anger, but can also be penalised for appearing too soft and cuddly to be taken seriously as leaders (Leading with their hearts? How gender stereotypes of emotion lead to biased evaluations of female leaders | Institute of Coaching)
Research for the Department for Education found that female teachers were more likely than male teachers to leave teaching while of working age. And when women did leave, they were more likely than men to move into teaching assistant roles or lower-paid occupations, while men were more likely to move into professional and managerial roles outside education (What teachers do next after leaving and the implications for pay-setting).
So perhaps the question isn’t “Are women better at caring?”
Perhaps it is:
What happens when a profession becomes increasingly dependent on the people who are culturally expected to care?
From empathetic individuals to an empathetic system
If empathy is a strength of SEND leadership, but women are disproportionately expected to provide emotional labour, how do we keep the strength without paying the personal cost?
I think part of the answer lies in how we think about SEND leadership itself.
We are going through a national shift in how we think about SEND and inclusion. Leadership is increasingly understood as something that must be distributed across all leaders and stakeholders within the education system, rather than sitting with the SENCO or a single inclusion leader.
I think the same needs to be true of empathy.
If we recognise that SEND leadership requires empathy, but a school or Trust depends on a few exceptionally empathetic people to hold everything together, we haven’t created a distributed, empathetic SEND system.
We’ve created a system that relies on particular individuals to absorb its emotional load.
And even the best of these individuals won’t last long.
The SENCO shouldn’t be the only person who knows how to listen to a distressed parent. The inclusion leader shouldn’t be the only person who can have a difficult conversation about need. The headteacher shouldn’t be the only person holding the emotional temperature of the school. And the woman who has become everyone’s safe pair of hands shouldn’t have to be the emotional shock absorber for the whole organisation.
We need cultures where empathy is distributed. Where every leader understands that listening is part of leadership. Where difficult conversations are approached with dignity. Where staff can say, “I’m struggling,” without being seen as incapable. Where families don’t have to reach crisis point before someone listens. Where challenge and compassion can coexist. And where the people leading inclusion are given the same care, support and psychological safety that we expect them to create for everyone else.
Because empathy shouldn’t depend on whether the person in front of you happens to be an unusually caring woman. It should be how we lead.
Perhaps the real ambition isn’t to make women better at carrying the emotional weight of SEND. Perhaps it is to build a system where no one has to carry it alone.