A Global Teaching Workforce
A story of three women
In 2003, I was greener than green, working in Forest Gate in East London as an English teacher as an unqualified Teach First teacher. My inexperience was, in hindsight, terrifying then and equally as terrifying now, thinking back. I was suddenly thrust into the classroom, an awkward experiment in teacher recruitment, hardly offset by the depth of my moral and social imperative to teach.
I wasn’t shaped by the force of my early experiences in lessons, as force majeure as they were. My first days passed in what can only be described as fuzzy lurching from year group to year group, from text to text, laced with a blind hope that I might someday be blessed enough to know how to do my job well.
My first subject mentor in school abandoned me. What is more true to say is that she found another job, an event imbued with a sort of relief as it was clear from her demeanour that she disliked me intensely. I was too fresh, too raw - and she didn’t have the time or inclination to actually support me in any way.
Inadvertently, I found that support elsewhere.
Three women adopted me.
The first, Nishya, was an overseas trained teacher from India. She was just starting out in her career in teaching English, but my goodness, she was incredible to watch as a teacher. Her precision, organisation and resolve eclipsed anything I could manage at that stage. Her classes ran like clockwork. Her broad writing was the stuff of dreams. There were moments where she wobbled, like all of us at that stage of our careers, but she powered through with steely determination. And she watched me teach. She told me what I was doing wrong. It stung, but it stuck.
We ate lunch together every day in her classroom, bringing plates up from the canteen, unpicking students, teachers, the system. Through her I met Carol.
Now Carol was possibly the most intimidating woman I had ever met. Caribbean trained and heavily accented, she taught Geography with both an iron rod and a twinkle in her eye. Carol rolled her eyes a lot, but underneath her acerbic exterior was a woman who knew her subject and how to teach. She was experienced and didn’t stand for nonsense. Students were both scared of her and grateful for her.
She told me what I was doing wrong. It stung, but it stuck.
The final guest at the table was Shelene, a Maths teacher from Zimbabwe. It was hard not to love Shelene; you heard her before you saw her, most often in laughter with a student. She leaned towards pastoral work and I understood why. Maths teacher aside, she was a formidable head of year. When she hugged me, hard and with all her soul, she meant it.
They talked about India and Jamaica and Zimbabwe. They taught me what they had learned, but also that the world existed at this lunch table and at the school we taught in. I folded their knowledge and pragmatism, their wisdom and wit into my practice, and became, finally, a teacher.
They weren’t the only ones who moulded me, I know. But I felt their presence keenly whilst reading the NFER report into ‘Ethnic disparities in entry to teacher training, teacher retention and progression to leadership’, where I learned that the pipeline of overseas teachers into UK classrooms is often blocked before it even begins. I’ve heard recruiters say “they have an accent, our students won’t understand them”, and “the system is different over there, they won’t cope here”.
The report details how teachers from global majority backgrounds are applying for teaching posts, but are less likely to be accepted on to ITT courses, and if they do make it, less likely to find promotion in the UK. When we need teachers more than ever, and the government has an actual target of teachers to be recruited, these circumstances warrant further investigation.
The report recommends that recruiters have training on what inclusive and unbiased recruitment looks like. At Diverse Educators, we have been saying this for a very long time, and it forms part of our training package.
I look back at the global collection of teachers in my first school, and I can’t help thinking: who are we missing?