So you thought you’d be a good teacher…
Not every City banker has what it takes to make it in the classroom, says Lucy Kellaway
It’s 6pm, and a few dozen middle-aged professionals have gathered after work in an office building in Holborn. Until recently, they had one thing in common: they were all good at their jobs – in banking, law, journalism, the diplomatic service, IT or garden design. Since September, they have started new lives, training to be teachers in deprived schools. Now, they are out of their depth.
One man, a former executive at a FTSE 100 firm, groans: “I completely lost control of my Year 8s and my mentor [who is 25] had to keep coming in to stop the riot – but as soon as they left, it started up again.”
The others, who have gathered for moral support, nod in sympathy.
I listen with a mixture of pride and horror – each of them has turned their careers inside out because of an idea I had. Before this, I was a columnist on the Financial Times, but after three decades of doing the same thing, I was fantasising about breaking free. I had a hunch that there were others like me, who had had enough and longed to do something more useful. I set out to find them.
Now Teach, which I co-founded with social entrepreneur Katie Waldegrave, is exactly two years old and has been more successful than I dared hope. In our first year, we found 45 people – me included – who started training in challenging schools in London; this September, a further 75 started. We are now recruiting for 2019, looking for more than 100 teachers in London, Hastings, East Anglia and the West Midlands.
But every time I hear about the privations suffered by our ageing trainees, I blench. When I first discussed my idea I was accused of being a pied piper leading bankers to their certain death in the classroom. I laughed it off, but in truth I was entirely unprepared for the baptism of fire that awaited us all.
And reading the headline: “Bored bankers sought for maths teacher shortage”, I got a weird sense of déjà vu.
This new initiative has been created by Teach First (our training partner), which, since 2002, has recruited the brightest graduates and put them in the UK’S toughest schools. Its new scheme, Time to Teach, is aimed at getting younger professionals to retrain as maths and science teachers in rural areas, where the shortage is most acute. It’s a great idea, I hope it works.
However, as I’m sure Teach First knows, the fact that you are bored as a banker does not mean you are going to be any good as a teacher. One senior consultant, who started the training last year, dropped out midway, complaining that it wasn’t fun. I made a mental note to make our recruitment material even clearer: teaching can be rewarding. And exhausting. And
‘I delegated as an executive, but when you teach, you can’t switch off for one second’
humiliating. But “fun” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Another City high flyer, who had had a stellar career in private equity, texted me after his first day. “I hate this. Get me out. Now.” He didn’t last, either.
Yet what amazes me is not how many have quit, but how few. Maybe the relatively advanced age of the Now Teach trainees (in my year, the range was 42 to 72) works in our favour: “Older people have grit and resilience that carries us through,” said a trainee who used to work for JP Morgan.
“We regularly talk to each other. Without that, we wouldn’t survive,” says Zeynep Holmes, who started training as a maths teacher in September. In a previous life, she was a managing director at the ratings agency Standard & Poors. “I’ve done jobs I thought were difficult, but with hindsight my life at S&P was easy.” She describes the trauma of learning something new live in front of a hostile audience of 32.
“I was an executive and so I delegated, but you can’t switch off for even one second when you teach.”
There was a particularly horrific moment when she forgot how to solve a problem. “Thirty-two lively teenagers in front of you, laughing. I tried everything, punishment and praise – but it was like doing CPR on a corpse.”
For most professionals, used to hard work, the hours of teaching aren’t a shock, but the emotional exhaustion is – as well as being too busy to go to the loo. Other surprising things have got them down, including a careless waste of paper, rigid hierarchies, pointless data and endless spoon-feeding.
Yet for Zeynep, as for most of the Now Teach trainees, there is an odd sort of pleasure in the pain.
“Sometimes it feels like masochism, but I’m glad I’m doing it. In my old life, you got a high working on a transaction that made money. But being surrounded by people with their lives ahead of them, I often feel 17 myself,” she says. “And when a child can do something you’ve explained to them – that’s gold.”
The great thing is that more of those golden moments come along, the more teaching you do. I wince at how bad I was this time last year. Now, teaching business and economics in Hackney, I can control my class and I’m loving it.
Earlier this week, I introduced 13-yearolds to the slang of the stock market and every student can now decipher sentences as arcane as “NASDAQ dives as investors dump tech stock”.
Never in three decades as a financial journalist have I felt quite so engaged or quite so useful.