Would you be a teacher today?

Think teaching is a breezy 9- 3 job with excessive holiday allowance? Think again. Jennifer Savin investigates how the profession got to crisis point…

“Sometimes I teach classes of 40 kids, which are impossible to control”

Every day, as she settles down to work in her home office, Meg Long* looks at a framed photo on her desk and feels a knot tighten in her stomach. In the picture she’s smiling. A group of primary-school pupils in neat uniforms, hair smartly combed, stand beside her. She misses that class – and teaching – every day but she knows she can’t go back. Despite being aware from the start that it could be a challenging career path (during her training, Meg was routinely spat at, kicked and punched), that wasn’t what broke her. It was the daily panic attacks caused by the workload. “So many other teachers had them too, though – I figured it was normal,” she says. When she eventually did leave teaching, her doctors diagnosed her with anxiety and symptoms of PTSD. Years down the line, she says her confidence is still shattered, having “failed” at her dream occupation. Scratch the surface and stories like Meg’s are everywhere. Teaching, once a profession held up as the gold standard of both job security and satisfaction, is at breaking point. In 2015, junior doctors began fighting, and striking, for better contracts, fairer hours and greater support. Now, finally, they’ve started to win that fight. But what about the country’s educators? Currently, schools are facing a major staffing crisis, as almost one in three teachers at state schools quit within five years of qualifying, and every year an estimated 15,000 teachers leave the UK to work abroad instead. According to the Teacher Wellbeing Index 2018, 76% of education professionals have experienced behavioural, psychological or physical symptoms due to their work, compared to 60% of UK employees generally. In many schools, some advertised vacancies don’t receive a single application.

“I had an amazing primary-school teacher who told me I could be anything I wanted. After careers in engineering and investment banking, I realised that actually I wanted to be that person for another child,” says Temi Kamson, a former maths teacher from London. “I can’t compare my love of teaching to anything else, it’s a true calling.” Yet, eight years in, Temi quit too. She felt her hands were tied by the decaying school system, and that she’d achieve more elsewhere (she now runs the not-for-profit GT Scholars, tutoring young people from disadvantaged backgrounds). So what’s happening? There was only one way to find out. Step back into the classroom myself.

That classroom was in Westbourne Academy, a busy secondary school in Ipswich, Suffolk – not far from where I grew up. It was typical of what I remembered from my own teenage years – blue chairs that occasionally squeaked and laminated posters plastered across the walls – but the experience was more terrifying than any school talk I did back then. Nothing could prepare me for the feeling of 25 pairs of eyes, all staring at me expectantly, waiting for a lesson on Romeo And Juliet (which, unlike most well-prepared educators, I’d only ever skim-read). And my body reacted accordingly: my hands were shaking, a sheen of sweat formed on my top lip, yet I had to hide my nerves from this group of rowdy year-10s. Afterwards, relief washed over me. I’d done it. And then a pupil came over, smiling, her backpack bouncing behind her. She told me she’d been inspired to change the topic of her upcoming speaking exam to focus on the angle we’d chatted about today, as she now felt she “understood it better”. Pride rushed through me.

That, you’d be safe to assume, is the side of teaching that keeps the majority of those still in education going. The ability to inspire. The sense of purpose and making a tangible difference to the lives of young people. Think back to your own childhood: we all had that one teacher who made a real impact. Yet unfortunately, in 2019, those moments sound as though they’re becoming fewer and further between, marred by things like budget cuts (annual education funding has been slashed by £7bn since 2011) and although the government has pledged to refill that pot with £7.1bn per year by 2022/23, there’s still a worry that schools in deprived areas won’t reap the benefits as much as grammar schools. Pressure to hit academic targets is sweat-inducingly high too – if I actually was a teacher, the exam results of pupils would not only be my direct responsibility, but if they didn’t achieve what was expected of them, it could hit my pay packet (some teachers told me they’d been denied a salary review on these grounds). But small steps are being made: a few months ago, teacher’s wages were set to be raised by 2.75% and the Education Secretary has announced that salaries for new teachers will rise to £30,000 by 2022/23.