One Saturday last July, a couple of hundred people gathered in a conference centre on the bank of the Thames to talk about education. In an earlier life they were lawyers, bankers, engineers, publishers and software engineers, but now they are all secondary school teachers and here they were giving up part of their weekend to talk about how better to help the kids they teach and the schools they work in.
All these people joined the profession through Now Teach, the charity I co-found in 2017 when I was still a columnist on the Financial Times. Back then, at the age of 58, I wanted to become a teacher but didn’t know how to begin. Surely, I thought, given that schools struggle to find teachers and that many ageing professionals out there want to retrain to do something meaningful, there should be an organisation aimed at putting the two together. There wasn’t, so I joined forces with Katie Waldegrave, an ex-teacher, to set one up.
As I surveyed the room, I marvelled not only at how many of the 800 or so teachers we’ve recruited so far had turned up, but at their sheer enthusiasm for teaching – even after a grim year of strikes, Ofsted terror and unbearable workload.
That spirit of optimism seems like another world. The Department for Education has just informed us that it is cutting our funding. We have done nothing wrong it seems: it has simply been cleaned out by the teacher pay rise, which is costing an estimated £1.5 billion, and so it can no longer afford the £1.4 million a year it pays us.
This makes no sense at all. The government is in the middle of a teacher recruitment crisis and so to scrap a scheme that beats its targets in bringing great new people into schools is madness.
Anyone who is a parent of school-age kids must have noticed how bad things are: there simply aren’t enough teachers. Last week it emerged that in primary schools, teachers who have quit or are off sick are being replaced by underpaid and untrained teaching assistants. In secondary schools, the government last year only recruited half the number of teachers it needed and fewer still in STEM, where Now Teach is strongest. This means that vital subjects like maths, physics and computer science are routinely being taught by any old randomer who happens to have a free period. One year I was roped into teaching computer science – which might have been comic, given my sheer incompetence with tech, were it not so worrying. In the language of economics, (which I usually teach) this is a micro disaster for individual children and a macro catastrophe for the economy.
‘I definitely wouldn’t have stayed without Now Teach. I wept
my way through the first year’
Now Teach is a small part of the answer to teacher shortage. We are aimed at older people, which is the only group of trainee teachers that is growing. While the numbers of university leavers wanting to teach are shrinking, fifty somethings joining the profession this year are up by a third. We can’t claim credit for all the rise, but we know that the positive noise we have generated has helped. Since our launch, the idea of the ex-banker-turned-teacher has caught the public imagination to the extent that there have been nearly 250 stories about us, reaching an estimated 24 million people.
When we announced that we were being axed by the DfE, I expected an outpouring of angst on social media from Now Teachers. ‘Bonkers news,’ wrote one of our best maths teachers. He said if it wasn’t for the article he’d read in the FT in 2016 calling for people to join me in the classroom, he would still be working in the City. ‘That’s 850 students I would not have taught over the last seven years. What a disgrace.’
What I did not expect were protests from students themselves. On LinkedIn, one who was taught by a Now Teacher at a school in east London wrote how much she’d benefited from the experience. She has turned into the sort of student Rishi Sunak would love: she’s doing a PhD in maths.
The government has answered our outrage by saying that it values career-changers and will take over the mantle of doing the recruitment itself in future.
I’d like to see it try. I daresay some older people will continue to become teachers, and some of those will be great. But there is another group that may never make the switch. We know that the promise of our network and support draws people in. One of the Now Teachers who joined at the same time as me said the last time she’d felt part of a gang was 30 years earlier, when she’d been at university. It felt that way for me, too.
Even if the government does find older trainee teachers, it may not manage to keep them. The latest figures show Now Teachers are 20 per cent more likely to stick with it than older trainees who go it alone. Part of the secret is the network, but it’s also that we’ve learnt how to deal with the inevitable wobbles that go with such a bracing shift in career. One Now Teacher who has recently been promoted to head of sixth form at her school posted online: ‘I definitely wouldn’t have stayed without Now Teach. I wept my way through the first year.’
Last Monday, the schools minister was asked by the Lib Dems what on earth he was doing in cutting our money. By way of an answer, Damian Hinds pointed out that we’re a small organisation – last year we recruited only 250 people. That simply won’t do. For a start, our influence goes far beyond head count. And second, we are growing and would like the chance to grow more. But since his own longevity may be limited, perhaps that doesn’t interest him.
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