I’m a teacher get me out of this classroom

This month, I found a grey, well technically white, patch in my beard. With that one discovery, I have convinced myself that I am now officially a wise old man. My youth is slowly ebbing away like blood being sucked by a vampire. Education, sadly,  has an issue with ageism and management. 

I haven’t always been an English teacher. In fact, I worked in the building trade and insurance before I even stepped before a white board. By my late twenties, I had experienced numerous leaders and working contexts. Then, I started working in schools and, to be honest, that’s where I found things different. Instead of working to be the best at your job, there was a constant narrative about promotion to leave the classroom. Promotion was viewed as spending less time in the classroom. The classroom was seen as toxic. I even had a fellow student teacher telling me on my PGCE course how they only wanted to spend three years teaching and then after that they’d consult for schools.

From the beginning of my career, the narrative was that to survive in schools you needed to reduce the amount of teaching on your timetable. That alone created this thread of promotion or ‘stagnation’. Yet, alongside this, ran this other problem: what happens to the teachers who were weak? Simple answer: occasionally they were promoted to roles where there were less teaching hours. All roads lead away from the classroom. 

We have a massive problem in education. Those that can teach… are subconsciously and consciously told to move out of the classroom. 

The classroom, the beating heart of all schools, is the one aspect of schools people are clambering to get away from. Clambering away from it if you are good at teaching. Clambering away from it if you are bad at teaching. Surely, we have to ask ourselves why the classroom is such a problem.

If we want to address teaching retention numbers and the number of teachers joining the profession, we need to change the narrative. We need to stop the idea that the classroom is the stepping stone for headship, consultancy or a three-year book deal. This ephemeral nature to education, and the role, is damaging. It gives this idea that things can be obtained quickly. Things can be improved suddenly. That schools can change in a heartbeat. The speed and immediacy of this approach means that ‘crafting’ and ‘refining’ the art of teaching is lost. The emphasis on quick fixes and ‘identikit’ teaching methods is a problem. Instead of schools honing experience and skills, we are looking for quick fixes. 

Look at how all adverts for teaching training feature a young teacher supposedly inspiring young minds because he / she is young. The narrative is that  ‘young blood’’ in the classroom is good and ‘old blood’ in the classroom is bad. It’s a damaging narrative because it conveys that you have to be young to be engaging in the classroom. Somehow, a whiff of Ariana Grande perfume or a Superdry top is going to inspire people for life. Something more is needed. Youth doesn’t mean a natural passion for the subject. It just means their trousers or skirts might fit a bit better. 

Mr Llewlllyn was my equivalent in my school. He was a DT teacher, but he had a perm and he played rugby. That was catnip to students in a Welsh secondary school in my day. There wasn’t a whiff of grey in that chemically permed hair- it wasn’t natural and I wonder if he is paying for it now with baldness. Anyway, the teachers that I enjoyed were greying. Mr Bic who made us write stories in lessons. Mrs Keeling who read the Guardian and was enthused about reading all the time. Mr Ross who loved literature and shared it. They all made me the English teacher I am. They stoked the fire without a whiff of Lynx Africa, a perm or Adidas - it was the 90s! 

We need a massive change in how the classroom is viewed. The narrative is broken. Our structures are broken. The management of schools is broken.  The SLT office is the pivot in which schools move around. The classroom should be the pivot. It should be the beating heart. It should be the centre of what we do. If it isn’t working in that classroom, it doesn’t matter how silent or noisy your classroom is, it doesn’t matter what uniform they wear, it doesn’t matter what structure you have in the lesson, it simply doesn’t matter. Everything boils down to that experience. Too much of the time in education is focused on ‘the outside looking in’ on the classroom when we should be looking at the ‘inside looking out’ of the classroom. The people. The teachers. The experience. The crafting. The skills. Their value. 

You can paint or rename schools as much as you like, but we are not going to retain teachers or attract teachers if we build negativity around the classroom experience. Now, I am not talking about the behaviour of pupils (but that also doesn’t help), but I mean the experience. We paint such a bad picture of classroom life. We equate success in teaching in terms of leadership roles, but we don’t equate it to time spent in the classroom. That is where the problem lies. We view success as being something outside the classroom. Not in it. 

I am not anti-leadership (in fact, I work with a great team), but I feel we have such a problem around this narrative.  I have been on leadership courses, led things across schools, participated in leadership teams, but, at the moment, I haven’t committed to moving to senior leadership because it will move me out of the classroom. Therein lies another issue. The disjoint between leadership and teaching in the classroom. Yes, we have teaching leaders, but you cannot deny that it is hard to straddle both camps.  You are, generally, either a classroom teacher or a leader. Rarely can you be both. Therein lies another problem. Why can’t we have both? I am not prepared to have the platitude ‘I might not be teaching a class, but I am having an impact on all students’ as the one thing that excuses why I am in a role, when I could be teaching a whole class. I teach full time as an English teacher and a curriculum leader. I don’t have a desire to run a consultancy firm, run off into the sunset and write teaching books or anything else that takes me out of the classroom. Change happens in the classroom. I want to be where that happens. Not in a meeting talking about it. I want to see and experience it with my own eyes. 

We need to work on making the classroom a better experience and form a better narrative around the classroom. Being in the classroom shouldn’t be the equivalent of Boxer waiting for his time to be sold by the farmer to the glue factor. The classroom is the beating heart of schools. 

We are in danger of becoming a profession of people who talk the talk and not walk the walk. We must never lose sight of the classroom or the classroom teacher's role in improvement. People improve schools. Systems and strategies don’t work without people. 

I salute all the teachers working the classroom full time.

I salute all the teachers who haven’t taken on promotion.

I salute all the teachers that want to stay in the classroom. 

For they have experience, knowledge and skills that everyone should learn from.

Have a good holiday, 

Xris 

P.S. An alternative title to this blog was 'The Crystal Maze'; however, I felt that might be showing my age. Well, at least, highlighting the white patch.