They say it’s the best time of your life, school (whoever “they” are) and until I was about 14, it definitely was for me. My safe place, my little community where I felt seen and heard and special. I left with good GCSEs and - despite other challenges I had in my life - as well-rounded as a sixteen year old can be. College followed, university many years later, before I decided to go back to school and began my career as a teacher.
A career. I thought my life was sorted. I thought I had a job for life that would allow me to have weekends and holidays with my kids (I was a single mom at this point), where I’d be contributing to the lives of young people and earning pretty decent money. From very early on in my career, I was drawn to the challenging kids, the ones nobody wanted to teach; the kids who’d swear and punch and bite and spit. I learned new swear words along the way (mostly from a lively group of seven year olds I taught) and during the six hours the kids were in school, I was their teacher, parent, best friend and enemy all rolled into one. And I loved it. During my twelve years in education, I worked as a teacher, phase leader, mentor, SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator), in mainstream schools and specialist provisions with young people aged between five and eighteen.
Last summer, I decided to leave. I gave my life to my job, literally. The time I thought I’d spend with my kids was actually spent working; most nights I’d be up until near-midnight, planning, marking, preparing resources, completing data. Every Sunday evening - after working all day - I’d get a knot in my stomach, worrying about what the week ahead would bring. My focus was no longer on the children - my own, nor those I taught - but on completing box-ticking exercises and catching up on things that I didn’t have time to do during my working day because we were so short staffed. I wasn’t eating or having a wee all day; I’d go to bed with work swimming around my head and then wake up the same; my kids barely saw me. I missed my own kids’ assemblies and parents evenings, I didn’t get to wave them off on their trips or help with homework. I was snappy and miserable all the time. All the time. I stopped spending time with friends because I didn’t have time and when I wasn’t working I was too knackered to do anything. The final straw came when I was working as a phase leader in a special school, with people who didn’t seem to even like children, never mind children with additional needs, and I was told that I had put my own needs ahead of the needs of the pupils. I was on my knees. And I decided that enough was enough and I walked away, ending my career with nothing to go to.
Over the past few weeks teachers have been striking. I’ve heard so many people complaining about the inconvenience - the usual, “well teachers have it easy, they only work 9-3 and have all those holidays off…” - but is anyone thinking about the bigger picture? When taking inflation into account, teacher salary has fallen by about 11% since I began my career according to the IFS, although unions believe this figure is a lot higher in reality. Academies have turned schools into businesses, where teachers and teaching staff are increasingly micromanaged by people who’ve not set foot in a classroom since they were pupils themselves. I know from first hand experience that funds aren’t always used how they should be, meaning that classrooms are often left without a safe ratio of adults to students because money meant for extra support staff gets spent on other things. Class sizes have increased and changes in society and life in general means that young people are dealing with a lot in their young lives; and how does this often manifest? As ‘behaviour’. With the best will in the world - which, let’s face it, many teachers don’t have anymore because of the endless pressure they’re under - it’s impossible to control thirty hormonal, stressed, hungry, angry young people, never mind impart any knowledge on them. Teacher recruitment and retention is devastatingly low, with around a third of teachers leaving the profession within the first five years. I read recently that a survey suggested almost half of the UK’s teachers are planning to leave within the next five years. I’m part of a Facebook group called “Life After Teaching - Exit the Classroom and Thrive” which has over 120,000 members; if this doesn’t scream the state of the education system, then I don’t know what does.
A few weeks ago, a Year 11 student at one of the schools I tutor in attempted to take his own life in the boys’ toilet. I was expected to continue my sessions as normal, revising Macbeth in preparation for mock GCSEs. It didn’t sit right with me. My students were confused, they wanted - needed - to talk about what had happened. Why had he done it? Why would anyone feel so bad that they needed to do that? Why do people get depressed? All seemed more important than examining Lady Macbeth’s complex relationship with her husband, so I allowed them to explore their feelings and discuss their thoughts in a safe way. Why is this not something they get to do regularly? Maybe if it was, the boy - who has since recovered, physically at least - may not have felt that his only option was to do what he did. Where are the life skills in our curriculum? I love Macbeth - and poetry, examining texts and writers’ choices and everything else English Language - but what’s the relevance for our young people today? What’s the use of teaching anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy to a student who feels neglected at home? How will knowing how Dickens presents denouement in A Christmas Carol help a student complete a job application form? These are just examples and I understand that there’s a lot to be learned across all subjects, but are we giving students the life skills needed to survive and thrive in society? What are we actually teaching our young people? This is how young people are measured. On their ability to remember abstract ideas that bare little meaning in their worlds. And teachers are measured by how well their students are able to do this.
Ofsted was founded in 1992 as a way for the government to assess the quality of provision in schools across the UK. Over the years, whether schools will admit it or not, the threat of a looming inspection has an effect on everyone and everything. Displays are done the way Ofsted like them; Ofsted like learning objectives and success criteria to be clear, so let’s put them in books and on PowerPoints; Ofsted don’t like that font so anywhere it’s been used, we need to get rid and change; Ofsted might check the planning so make sure you document every single minute that you plan to teach, for every lesson, differentiated six ways using this format and get it on the server by Friday. Oh and let’s have a staff meeting about all of the above. It’s tiring. It’s relentless. The control that Ofsted has over the way schools are operated is suffocating and not fit for purpose anyway, because I don’t believe an inspection ever truly shows what’s going on day in, day out, whether that’s good or bad. Towards the end of last year, Ofsted visited Caversham Primary School in Reading. Last inspected in 2009, it was judged as an Outstanding school. During the recent visit, the three inspectors described the school as “warm” and “vibrant” where pupils had “exemplary behaviour” and received “pastoral care” if they needed it. But despite this, the overall judgement given was Inadequate, with the report suggesting that there were issues around safeguarding. This ultimately fell on the shoulders of the head teacher.
Her name was Ruth Perry.
Ruth took her own life in January.
Ruth will have been given the outcome but told not to share it with anyone, so she carried this burden alone, unable to talk about it with colleagues or her family. The thought of how alone she must have felt makes my heart heavy. A bright, kind, loving woman who had devoted her life to encouraging and helping young people to grow was broken down to the deepest possible desperation by one word. Inadequate. One word that didn’t reflect the truth. One word that ignored the wonderful, selfless person that Ruth was. How has it come to this? Seriously, how? Something needs to be done because the system is a mess. Where young people and talented professionals are ending their lives, we need to do something.
We need to do something.
Danielle x
All views are my own
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