The Truth About Teaching
Why I loved it, why I left, and how the government f*cked it up.
Morning all, this is an extract from my new book - Un(educated): My Life As A Teacher.
It’s a frank and hilarious collection of my best (and worst) stories from my 12 years of teaching. This is, admittedly, a more serious passage, but one I think worth sharing.
If you want to buy the book, it’s available here.
There is no greater tragedy in education, and indeed in life itself, than wasted talent.
I believe we all have talents, and it is the duty of our parents, schools and teachers to identify them, nurture them and help them flourish so that we can have the greatest chance of success in adulthood. That’s what every child deserves.
Unfortunately, we’ve designed an education system that fails everyone: the teachers, parents and, most importantly, the children. No one gets into teaching for the money and the cocaine. We all know that the pay is going to be terrible, the conditions are lousy, and the job is going to be tougher than a cheap steak ordered at a crap steakhouse.
But we do the job because we want to make a difference to kids’ lives. We all do. It’s the only reason to do that job. I can’t count the number of times I sat in a classroom on the verge of tears because of awful behaviour, sheer exhaustion or simply wanting to give up because the job is simply so bloody tough. Every teacher has, no matter how tough or how gifted. It’s a brutal and, at times, isolated existence. When your lesson goes down the proverbial shitter, there is no lonelier place to be than in front of a classroom watching your lesson crumble. It’s humiliating and demoralising. But when the lesson is flying, the kids are engaged and everyone is learning, there is no better place to be.
As I write these words, there’s still some small part of me that misses it. My experiences in the class have left a small but significant scar on my soul. And just like all scars, there’s normally a good story behind it.
But I couldn’t take it anymore. And sadly, I’m not in the minority. The reality is: I’m the majority. The reality is that we need to solve the behaviour crisis that is destroying our schools. And I’m not being hyperbolic when I use the word ‘crisis’. If anything, that’s playing down what’s happening in classrooms in the UK. Schools are at risk of losing control and, in many cases, they’ve completely lost it.
An old head of department used to mutter “the lunatics have taken over the asylum” after every terrible breakdown she had to witness. Whether it was in the classroom or on the playground. And she was right. They had. The kids behaved however they wanted because they knew that deep down there was nothing we could do. All it takes is a few people not wanting to follow the rules and you have total chaos.
COVID has, unfortunately, only made things worse. Lockdowns were detrimental for everyone’s mental health, but they were a total disaster for children and teenagers in particular. Kids were robbed of the most important years of their life. But they were also robbed of the chance to develop valuable social skills and learn how to regulate their behaviour. This has meant that when schools reopened after COVID, not only were kids’ academic progress stunted – so was their emotional development. This has resulted in a further degeneration in behaviour. Some of my former colleagues have mentioned to me that some classes have become near impossible to teach. It is my view that the lockdown policy harmed all of us, but it also did irreparable damage to an entire generation, and we haven’t even begun to see what the long-term effects are.
One thing we do know is that the number of children who have gone missing from school has risen significantly. The Department for Education in a 2023 report said that around 117,000 children were identified as ‘missing education’. This means that they were not attending school, and neither were they registered as being educated at home. For context, in 2014 (nearly ten years before) the number was 14,800.
This is disastrous and an issue that nobody is discussing. However, there are some education think tanks like the Educational Policy Institute (having conducted their own research) who put the figure at around 300,000. That should be terrifying to anyone, parents or otherwise.
What’s going to happen to these kids when they reach adulthood? How are they going to get a job, become functioning members of society? Are they even able to read and write? Are we just creating an entire generation of people whose only option to make money is to enter a life of crime? And how are we going to reintegrate them back into society?
The teachers are facing the backlash every day for that disastrous policy decision to lock schools down for months on end during the pandemic and it’s one of the major reasons why they’re leaving en masse. This needs to be a national conversation but, like a lot of the discussions around COVID, we’ve treated it like a bad one-night stand.
We’ve all just walked away from the experience and none of us want to remember what happened. The unfortunate thing is that this will continue to haunt us for a very long time.
For more, order your copy here.