Let Teachers SHINE Winner 2026: Sean Harris – Right To Rest
Sean Harris, a Teesside academy trust leader, has secured £20,000 from Let Teachers SHINE to develop Right To Rest, a transformative initiative tackling sleep inequality – a hidden barrier preventing thousands of children from reaching their full potential at school.
The Tees Valley Education project aims to address sleep poverty among children and young people, restoring dignity and supporting improved educational outcomes.
“Research estimates are that around 900,000 children experience sleep hardship nationally,” said Sean.
“That can be anything from disrupted routines to quite simply not having a bed, in some cases sleeping on the floor, or sharing a bed, or overcrowded bedrooms, and so on. Yet we know many of these issues are structural.”
Right To Rest aims to reframe the narrative that sleep hardship is always a result of ‘bad decisions’ in the home. Instead, the project focuses on working alongside children, giving them agency, and supporting them as active participants who have a say in shaping their own lives.
“We serve communities facing significant challenges For example, in the North East there are over 40% of children that are in poverty and about 70% of families locally that are experiencing work poverty,” said Sean, adding that “these are families who remain in significant financial hardship despite having one or more parents in paid work.”
Throughout the project pupils will learn about the importance of quality sleep and decide how to best communicate that information to their peers in other settings across the region. Children will then lead on the creation of resources which may include handbooks, lesson plans, social media reels, or video clips.
Sitting at the intersection of poverty, health and education, Right To Rest aims to boost children’s cognitive development and learning readiness. “If we can further tackle sleep hardship, it’s going to help children be ready to learn in classrooms, which then supports attendance, behaviour, belonging and all those other important aspects of a child’s life,” explained Sean.
Right To Rest outlines several proactive steps that schools can take to support students facing sleep hardship. The project forms part of a wider established place-based partnership to tackle these inequalities. School staff can make a referral to the sleep charity Zarach who can provide beds immediately to families in need.
In the classroom, staff are encouraged to be ‘sleep champions’, and balance high expectations with empathy. Through partnership with the Sleep Charity, teachers and support staff have been trained to monitor pupils for signs of fatigue and adapt their resources specifically for tired pupils. Right To Rest adds a further dimension to this work by giving children and young people the opportunity to also shape support and learning.
“Imagine a child in front of a teacher that is tired and facing many inequalities , imagine how the lesson content is going to land for that child facing the acute types of barriers we’re talking about and ask yourself what you might need to address in your planning?” said Sean.
In the long-term, Sean hopes that Right To Rest will create a blueprint for other academy trusts and local authorities to address the often-overlooked issue of sleep inequality.
“Schools need to think beyond what we do in the classroom in order to tackle and dismantle the kind of inequalities we’re seeing. The idea that SHINE would invest in the work we are doing, to understand sleep inequality and tackle it in such a way that brings dignity to communities, for us is just so inspirational, so humbling, and continues to sharpen what we’re trying to do for the communities we serve.”
“What SHINE is doing is investing not only in the project, but in the people that are driving this kind of place-based change.”