In defence of teachers

Enough! Does no one have anything nice to say about our schools? If it’s not headlines about monstrous behaviour driving teachers out of the profession, or apparently rampant wokism colonising our classrooms, then it’s Bear Grylls opining that modern education is ‘boring’.

The respective merits of these claims aside, if you listened only to these and many others similar, you’d soon succumb to the insidious narrative that there’s nothing good about our schools. And you’d be wrong.

I’m no Pollyanna. I’m a full-time teacher in the state sector, and I’m all too aware of the long hours, the pressures of Ofsted, and the serious need for sustained investment in our schools. I’m not the first to point out just how wide the chasm has grown between the funding of healthcare and the funding of education. I’m aware, too, that there are significant disparities between individual schools, and that it’s getting ludicrously difficult for schools in many regions to recruit teachers for subjects like physics and maths.

I don’t deny any of this, but I do question whether a diet of unremitting negativity is going to help anything. It’s particularly galling to the thousands of teachers like me who still love our jobs, because it obscures the many joys of what remains a deeply satisfying profession. Indeed, in some ways the rewards are most obvious in these summer months, when many pupils – and their parents – explicitly thank teachers for the past year’s work as they finish exams or move into new classes.

In an increasingly atomised society, teaching is also about the camaraderie with colleagues engaged in the shared endeavour of passing on knowledge to the next generation. It’s about being on the front line and working to change young lives, the impact of which was made so apparent by the recent study which rated children in England among the best readers in the western world. It’s about the latest research in fields like cognitive psychology and the hum of new ideas being shared between teachers online and in person, facilitated by impressive grass-roots organisations like researchED. It’s about rapid career progression and opportunities to gain experience managing people and institutions.

Schools in challenging areas are achieving remarkable things which belie the gloomy tone of our national conversation about education. Yes, there are immense difficulties, but who apart from the most stoical is going to join the ranks of a profession which is presented as being forever in the doldrums? More balance is needed, and perhaps it would help to attract the best talent to work in our schools if we provided a more holistic picture of what it really means to teach.