Strike one

Before I took a job in something sensible and reasonably well paid, something that straddles the fence between slow but safe public and fast but brutal private sectors, something with a good work-life balance and ample opportunities to take my career in either a worthy or more lucrative direction in the future, I looked into teaching. 

I made multiple applications, to various courses; and as required, for work experience in the local area, contacting every secondary school – and there are many – within a mile or so’s radius. Despite my efforts, my glowing references from university professors long past and local friends for whose projects I recently volunteered, my first class degree in a sought after subject, and a massive national shortage of teachers, I was rejected from the Teach First leadership programme, and only secured work experience at one school, which has recently been in trouble for losing a couple of its pupils to ISIL. 

Finally, I was accepted onto an English programme at Goldsmith’s University, one of the UK’s most prestigious teaching institutions. But by then, I’d already been accepted onto two other masters programmes in more frivolous subjects that would enable me to indulge my childhood dreams, cultivated by my own teachers years ago, that little bit longer. I’d also realised that brushing my maths (even though I wanted to be an English teacher) up to the standard required to pass my teaching exams was beyond even my maths whizz ten-year-olds’ abilities to help. And I’d been offered a job whose salary it would take a least ten years in teaching to achieve, even if you pro rata it for the holidays –  with a lot less hassle along the way.

So today, with teachers across the country on strike over the deregulation of pay and conditions, a change which will affect a teacher’s right to maternity pay, sick pay and pay rises, putting increasing competition onto a sector already disproportionately affected by stress and staff shortages, I can’t help but feel relieved I escaped in the nick of time, despite feeling a good deal more empathy for them and their reasons for taking action.

In my current situation, I have no lessons to plan, no homework to mark, no pastoral care duties, no playground duties, and no need to deal with hormonal teenagers in tricky life situations of which I have zero experience to know how best to deal. I get to slope off at fiveish with nothing more to take home than my lunchbox. And when my kids’ school strikes over pay and conditions, I could, if I asked, work from home – except I was offered the same privilege last week so I could attend my daughter’s school sports day. At work, when I have a hangover, I get to hide behind my desk, and when I’m a bit bored, I get to browse the internet, or even, if I have a spare five mins, attend to some personal admin, or god forbid anyone from work reads this, I can even, occasionally, shop.

I certainly don’t have to spend three hours in the throw-a-wet-sponge at your teacher stalls at the summer fair, like my daughter’s wonderful teacher, who having written thirty thoughtfully personalised, individual reports, and having got a very mixed ability class through some of the most difficult SATs ever known, allowed his erstwhile pupils to torment him to raise money for a school he already worked hard for, glee etched all over their mischevious faces, and still had a smile and a kind, non-judgemental word to pass with the school’s array of over- and under- attached parents whose expectations he manages daily, all the while keeping a genuine regard, liking and concern for the pupils who would soon be leaving his class, and cultivating the same for those coming up anew.

To my mind, he couldn’t be more of a hero for sticking it out, this bright young man who is probably a year or two younger than me, for all he may be on some fast track graduate programme, and may soon be on his way to a headship or at least a senior leadership position, for all he has six weeks off over the summer, more or less (probably less when you take into consideration learning the names of next year’s pupils, dealing with a year’s worth of admin, home visits and lesson planning, not to mention inset days and training and planning the school trip)- while I just have to juggle childcare. When I mentioned, only half in jest, that he needed a pay rise, he just smiled wryly at me and said, sadly I’m not NUT, so I’m not striking on Tuesday. And it’s unusual for a teacher to make such a public political statement in any case – the scrutiny on teachers is at an all-time high, with most recommended not to have public social media profiles, and expected by parents and government alike to be at worst, squeaky clean and, on the surface at least, politically neutral, although from what I gather, most state school teachers are more likely to read the Guardian than the Daily Mail.

For these and other reasons, I’m glad I didn’t end up going into teaching. My colourful opinions and past would no doubt come back to bite me sooner or later. The relentless nose-to-the-grindstone expectations of the current Department of Education would no doubt get right on my tits in a climate of growing inequality; the counterintuitive drive for ever higher standards amid ruthless cuts, and the designed-to-fail testing of teachers and their charges in a world where most pupils will be lucky to get an unskilled job ensures the last vestiges of idealism, the reason many people teach in the first place, is squeezed out of the profession.

But it is a shame. There is lots I would have loved about teaching. The rare opportunity to do something I believe in, something, unlike many jobs these days, that feels real and worthwhile. The chance to impart wisdom, garner respect and give it in return, the chance to foster realtionships with a community, and inspire young people to surpass their circumstance is but a pipedream, but something I will now likely never do. All the teachers I do know are not only consumate professionals – they have to be to keep up with all the evolving top-down mantras and professionally expected standards that had me bolting at the first hurdles. They are, on the whole, wonderful, interesting, engaging and intelligent people who keep going, not for the paycheck or the holidays but for the flame of idealism that fuels their progress over all the many hurdles required to do a job they probably hoped at one point they would love. But I know enough of them who feel this it’s being snuffed out by what’s happening to education: the relentless march towards marketisation by a government who believes that selfish capitalism is what’s needed to shake up a profession that’s driven by individuals who go into it for often selfless reasons.

So to an Education Secretary who today argued that striking teachers are harming children’s education, I would say, fiddlesticks – they are offering them one: the lesson that making a stand is more important than accepting an eroding status quo; that negotiating is easier when you stand with others. And above all else, they learned that spending a day making lemon meringue pie with your father, who for the first time in his private sector career worked a day from home, can be as instructive as a day on the receiving end of a chalkface that seems increasingly removed from the world our children will one day inhabit. For one thing is certain, even in this most competitive age, we all have so much more to learn in life than how to pass an exam.