Society must come to value teachers to improve education

Before we get started, I would like to hold my hands up and admit that I ran (screaming) from ­working in education. Yes, I couldn’t hack it, but I also smelt the whiff of being sold an ­absolute duck. Huge student debts? Check. Ridiculous ­working hours? Check. Total societal derision?

Gold star!

Education is ostensibly a vocation – but ­increasingly managing its workers in a corporate manner. This doesn’t work. That corporate oil is ­sitting ­stubbornly on top of the vocational water (­suffocating it and making it leave to work in any other sector.) A friend of mine, a head of physics by training, left ­education to work at Aldi.

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That is not a snobbish slight at ­retail workers. It’s an illustration that ­actually, as ­specialised/costly as one’s ­qualifications might be, it’s preferable to work outside of your area of ­expertise.

Someone I vaguely know (and wildly resent) said that he knew he had to change jobs when his boss was hammering on the toilet door, demanding he get back to work, while he was having a poo. He found it demeaning and left his role to find something more fulfilling. He was earning upwards of £200,000 in the City at the time though so, you know, wee violins all round.

Teachers are regularly proffered the very ­vocational end of the stick (“Are you sure you haven’t thought about being ill/becoming a parent during school holiday time?”) for very much not corporate ­remuneration.

Sure, corporate roles aren’t quite the picnic they once were – you can’t even put strip club jaunts on expenses any more without some woke ­accountant being a fun sponge, but the NEU ­calculates that teachers have taken a 20% pay cut since 2010. Despite what certain Red ­ Tops/politicians who rewired an entire village so as to heat their swimming pool would have you believe, most teacher pay is pretty crap given that it requires you to give of yourself, body and chuffing soul.

It is a vocation – this comes from the Latin ­vocatio meaning a call or summons. It seems that, ­increasingly, the summons just aren’t adding up any more and teachers are calling it like they see it.

Can’t get teachers; can’t keep ‘em ONE in four teachers leave the profession by their third year according to the Department for Education (who you imagine might want to ask less probing questions in their census) demonstrating that retention is a growing issue. Labour has pledged to pay/bribe early career teachers £2400 to not quit as soon as they’re qualified which is nice – but smacks of desperation.

On paper, I sound like a flake having only ­managed five years, but I’m now feeling quite smug at my ­relative longevity. I had a baby and after maxing out my maternity pay of six weeks at 90% before ­dropping to statutory, I couldn’t afford to go back to teaching because childcare costs far exceeded my ­salary. In part this seems unfair – in part, thank fook!

We also can’t recruit teachers because even to ­enthusiastic twenty-somethings, teaching doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun – especially when ­compared with selling jars of farts on OnlyFans.

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We can’t retain teachers because people cannot take an endless stream of flak without consequence. ­Holidays (the cause of enormous societal resentment) are used primarily as mental health recovery time – not a great line in the job ad.

The further corporatisation of ­education with metrics, value-adding, ­appraisals and approximately 15,000 words of report writing per cycle (which by the way, is 3000 more than I wrote for my dissertation) without the matching corporate pay is wearing thin.

A 2019 Leeds Beckett University study found that: “Children learned [sic] more when their teacher is happy and ­performing well.” That’s just ­science folks. Not pandering to the unions or teachers ­being ‘soft’ or any other such nonsense. ­Children thrive when teachers aren’t stupidly overburdened – go figure!

I’m fairly sensible, wholly unambitious and very much of the “it’s just a job” ilk and yet, there I was at my desk at 1am, 36 weeks pregnant, frantically preparing for an impending inspection. As you do. ­Totally normal professional behaviour.

The tragic suicide of Ruth Perry (below) ­owing to the pressures of inspections should ­sober us all. There’s an awkward ­irony that a profession which is built on ­compassion for those it serves, offers so little in the way of compassion for its servants.

If teachers feel bitter, we should ­understand.

CAST your mind back to chemistry ­lessons – that is if you were lucky enough to be taught by someone who was ­actually qualified in chemistry (science ­teachers are as rare as hens’ teeth) – and indulge me in an analogy.

Oil and water are ­unable to mix ­because oil is ­hydrophobic. If you pour some oil into your cup of ­water, it remains on the top of your water, making it feel crap about social mobility and youth anxiety levels being their worst ever.

If you want the two to mix, you need to add an ­emulsifier. You can use ­mustard, but with teachers (and, indeed, the ­corporate world) at this stage, it’s ­going to need to be money. ­Preferably of the order that keeps pace with inflation.

There’s also a very real child safety ­issue beneath my snarking. Sometimes people give you the ick factor when you ­interview them and they might ­ordinarily go in the “not for us” pile ­because you thought they were potentially a bit dodgy. Beggars with no-one to drag Year 11 through their Foundation Maths ­exams can ill-afford to be so choosy. This might lead (have led to) schools ­making ­appointments so as to have boots on the ground – even if the candidates are ­wholly unsuitable/a potential “worry”.

Simple as A, B, C CENTRAL government crows about its “ongoing work to attract the brightest and the best to the profession” and the fact there are 468,371 teachers currently serving in the UK. Here’s the thing – gone are the days when teaching hitched its wagon to the church, to notions of suitable pre-marriage employment for women or before a cost of living crisis made root vegetables too costly to cook.

Bills, fuel, food and housing are a lot more expensive than they were ­pre-Austerity, Brexit, Covid. Also, no one clapped for teachers. Sure, you can’t pay your lecky bill with claps, but still, might’ve been nice.

There are plenty of jobs where you have to go to work when your mental health is getting shredded. There aren’t so many where you have an audience ­watching you spiral and, having worked with 11-18-year-olds – trust me, it makes stand-up look like child’s play. An idea ­vindicated by just how many stand-ups are former teachers – I’m not kidding – Romesh Ranganathan, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Greg Davies were all originally educators.

Being a teacher is like doing five shows a day, for theatre critics, who openly tut and then make you type up their ­scathing review of you when you should be ­sleeping/eating/spending time with your loved ones.

School cultures matter and some schools are very supportive of their staff. However, it’s clear that this is the ­exception rather than the norm – ­probably because almost everyone in ­education is hugely overstretched and subject to unsustainable pressure – this does not facilitate people to be at their most compassionate and supportive ­towards colleagues and subordinates.

Behaviour is also a massive issue. You have not felt torment until you’re forced to spend five hours a week with a “bad” class.

Society regards it as incumbent upon teachers to “make” their students ­behave to maximise undisrupted learning. Just how in the name of all that is holy do they expect them to do that? Most adults ­cannot get one teenager to follow a ­simple instruction – try that times 34 with a ­hostile audience.

Most parents damn near lost their minds trying to work and look after their little/bigger ones ­during the lockdowns. Imagine for a moment if you were working under these ­conditions always – if that was your professional ­reality - working whilst in charge of ­trainee adults. Yeah, ick.

Also, have you met a teenager ­recently? They are brutal. Every previous generation which has whined, “kids, these days!” can piss off. It’s an entirely modern phenomenon that your fourth years can AI a deep fake porno of you if they didn’t like Tuesday night’s homework.

Speaking of AI, lots of teachers now spend much of their marking time ­trying to ascertain if a kid wrote something or they cheated using AI – ironically this involves asking AI if an AI bot wrote it – possibly the most meta question ever.

If you’re poorly, I’ll send an unseen poetry assessment THE Facebook group Life After Teaching – Exit the Classroom and Thrive has 132,198 active members and frankly it’s a harrowing read. The desperation and strife that the groups’ members express is sad and alarmingly uniform. Over worked, over burdened – over it.

But holidays… There is definitely an element of no one liking teachers very much because we all have unresolved issues from ­childhood where one wasn’t very nice to us, or worse.

Also, a six-week summer holiday is a source of resentment that cannot be readily overcome. For this, there really is a valid case. You know that feeling after you’ve attended a really noisy children’s party? Your head is pounding, your ears are ringing and, my God, you want a drink/cigarette/full frontal lobotomy? You need quiet and calm to return to yourself.

Yes, teachers get bloody long holidays. But genuinely, almost all teachers aren’t paid enough to do anything fun with that time and many of them take extra work during the holidays to make ends meet. Or stare at the walls because they have absolutely nothing left to give.

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Education Support’s annual Teacher Wellbeing Index found that in 2022, 78% of teaching staff experienced mental health symptoms due to their work and nearly 60% of teachers had considered leaving the profession in the last year due to pressures on their mental health and wellbeing. Ouch. They assert that “there are long-term health implications for the education workforce”. This sounds to me like an argument for danger money, if ever I heard it.

I will leave an extra percentage point.

How do we fix this? Hours cap, sensible expectations and more mustard, I mean money. It’s past time the government realised that holding back on the sauce is having society-wide impact on student outcomes, the economy and too many people’s mental health.

Emulsify education or deal with the consequences/the children yourself.