Starting with The End

The Longest Goodbye to Teaching

Not many stories start with The End, but this one does. After 20 years as a classroom practitioner and school leader, I am saying goodbye to the only profession I have ever known: teaching.

And I am terrified.

If I think about it a little harder than I should, I have been ‘in school’ since I was six years old. Through primary education, through secondary, through further and higher education, an MA - and then straight into my first post as an unqualified Teach First trainee in 2003 (yes, the first cohort), I have never really known a life outside of school: timetables, bells, everything planned to the minute. Learning, or teaching, then teaching and learning. More learning than teaching most days.

The first year was a baptism of photocopying. Back then, there was a smoking room I would retreat to in my breaks because all of the coolest people sat in there and gave me perspective because they had seen it all. I learned my trade in East London, with old school teachers, some of whom I still in touch with today. My gruff but loving mentor. My first ever work-wife.

Although my memories of students come and go - there have been many - some stand out. That clever little gang in my first school went on to become journalists and policy makers, sports commentators and all round decent human beings. The sarcastic, funny and stylish Hackney kids who wrote poetry and played instruments - who went on to study in the UK and internationally. The Jazz Player. The Theatre Kid. The Natural Scientist. The One Who Hated Me and Did Really Well.

Then that one boy in Walthamstow in my form group with the longest lashes I have ever seen, who was gentle and kind and cried when he was frustrated. His father was hard on him. His social circle was hard on him. He didn’t make it to be a journalist, he went to prison. I think about him often and how our society brings up boys like him.

He wasn’t the only one. I have a list of ‘Lost Boys’. The one who did his GCSE in Literature a year early, achieved a Grade B, then stabbed someone and was convicted of attempted murder. The ones who fought their way through their days. The ones who died in police custody. The ones who couldn’t pull back from crime and lost their lives early, at 16, 17, 18.

In those years, I am ashamed to say I didn’t always think about the act of teaching with it politics and policy. I loved it because it was my life. And slowly, as certain, I suppose, as the sunrise, I started to see Education with a Capital E.

Never knowingly shy and retiring, I stood up on podiums and started talking about language, literature, race, gender, sexuality, leadership, society, crime, culture and schools. It was scattergun at best, but once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. The Whys and Hows of Education with a Capital E poured out of me when I stepped out of my teaching room.

Is it tiredness that did for me in the end? I wonder when it was that I started to feel that I couldn’t give any more of myself to teaching. Was it when I was being screamed at by parents about their misbehaving child? Was it when I couldn’t recruit the best teachers - any teachers - to posts that were continuously vacant? Was it when I became a timetabler and couldn’t please anyone, least of all myself? Was it when I heard time and time again that teachers - people like me - were lazy, demanding, inadequate, failing, uppity groomers?

I keep asking myself: did I change anything? In twenty years, did I do what I set out to do as a naïve, fresh faced trainee with a mission and new planner? I’m not sure.

Somehow, the smell of new exercise books, the joy of a fresh set of glue sticks, the wonder at the shiny new children in a perfectly arranged seating plan, the feeling of achievement when my students smash it, the small consolations for those who don’t - somehow those aren’t enough to keep me going.

I am 42 and I don’t know who I am when I am not a teacher.

So I resigned at Christmas without a job to go to and this marked the longest goodbye. I do know what what I will do. I am not unemployed (I have to remind myself), I am a freelance speaker, consultant, writer and trainer. I have been doing that on the aforementioned podia for the last five years, except now that will be my job. And I am absolutely certain I will have to create a timetable for myself or I might melt into a unstructured mess.

I think I will miss teaching until the day I die. How can you be something for twenty years, be immersed in from 7 in the morning (my preferred arrival time) to 6 at night (my preferred leaving time) and not miss it with every cell in you? Of course, I am not locking the door on this one. If I can’t cope with the time and the space and the quiet, watch me run back into the open arms of a profession that has too few teachers in it. But for now, I will miss it inside my bones.

Not the admin, not the data, not the forms, not the press articles about how awful schools are.

The first good morning of the day, in winter, when the sun isn’t even up yet. Frost on railings. The cup of tea in morning briefing. The catching up, the watching to see who’s yawning. The mischievous winks. The keen ones who come to the door first, and that one who always comes in last (and always will) but you love them anyway. The newness of a chisel tip marker on a crisp whiteboard. Blossom. The conversations about books with people who read books. The meticulous timing of a well planned lesson. That girl who stands with you at break time, on duty, just because and for so many reasons. The smell of freshly cut grass. The ones you have to chivvy. The ones who run for the lunch queue. The turning out at the end of the day: the skippers and dancers on their way to the bus. The phone call that makes a parent cry because it’s good news. The reply to last email for the day, knowing you’ll start again tomorrow. The sun set over the school field.

The End.