A parent, who was initially delighted to have been awarded a high-profile qualification in medicine, lamented to me recently that it might not have been worth the effort. Teachers are prone to feel beleaguered and unappreciated for what they do, while the Church is imbalanced with a disproportionately ageing clergy. And the criminal justice system is on its knees because crime, it seems, doesn’t pay.
It’s not just about the money, although that is the headline over which doctors, nurses, teachers and criminal barristers find themselves arguing with government - alongside train drivers and just about any essential public service these days. We all know that real-terms pay has fallen, yet the unhappiness runs deeper than that and the picture is more nuanced.
Systemic devaluation of vocation in public life has made such jobs hard to endure for many, and subsequently less attractive as graduate opportunities compared with the quick bucks available in financial and professional services.
Teaching as a vocation
Doctors, nurses and teachers, and many other professionals, including journalists, traditionally were driven by a sense of doing good by others. To make a difference.
Mostly that’s still true, deep down, but it’s hard to hold on to that intrinsic motivation when the odds are stacked against you. At some point we stopped trusting those who choose vocations, we undermined their professional autonomy and we stopped paying them properly, and thus we stopped valuing them.
Teaching and school leadership is now essentially an executive task of keeping within the rules - rules that seem to have little bearing on what people need. That’s not only disrespectful, it’s dull. And most importantly, it runs counter to what we are here for: if we are not giving people what they need, then why are we doing it?
I’m not for a minute suggesting that schools should throw caution to the wind and do entirely as they please, and any article that fails to acknowledge safeguarding invites brickbats.
Professional trust in teaching
Yet where has the professional trust gone that allowed really able and motivated people to get on with their jobs and be rewarded properly for it?
Those of us in the teaching game are browbeaten by inspectorates that expect us to conjure miracles and solve societal problems not of our making. Inspectorates are then quick to blame governments. They are simply following orders. That’s a lazy escape route.
Government, meanwhile, shows no trust at all in us. And that rubs off.
We all have a duty to reignite the pride and passion of being in a vocational profession, to reclaim that sense of performing a public good and to help the public re-engage its trust in - and support of - those whose lives make everything better for all.
How could that happen?
Restoring the pride
Governments and compliance officers should look to core principles rather than inventing ever more complex policy that straitjackets the human imagination.
Much is written about long working hours, and schools have depended on goodwill for decades. To an extent that’s fine, and teaching has its own intrinsic reward if the tasks ahead of people are meaningful. But so much of the work isn’t that useful, and the endless auditing and reporting begin to strip out both enjoyment and professional trust. As a friend suggests, we are in the age of compliancy.
Teaching is a noble profession, and a great many teachers are proud of what they do and care deeply about the positive impact they have on young people. Teachers change lives, and a political class that sees education only in terms of a cash return on investment, with all the auditing that comes with that, deprives the profession of its nobility and power to make a better world.
If teaching ceases to be a vocation, we will have lost something of great value. It will become a series of measured tasks to be inflicted on the young.
Simon Larter-Evans is headteacher at St Paul’s Cathedral School
