Having your own classroom is fairly common and essential in primary schools, but in the secondary sector it is something of a luxury. We usually need to have been at a school a good many years before we might be able to nest and “bed in” somewhere, rather like a fondly loved domesticated rodent.

The trick is to become gradually synonymous with that one room. Everything in that classroom then starts to convey a clear territorial message to those of us who might happen to be timetabled there for the odd lesson each week. Whether it’s a little pot plant arrangement on the window-sill behind the teacher’s desk or the framed picture of beaming loved ones or the personalised labelling of all the equipment in permanent-ink or the permanently-locked desk, the implication is the same: "This is mine. You are only here on sufferance. Don’t mess up."  

At the other extreme, there are classrooms with no clear identity at all, because so many different teachers, classes and subjects flow in and out of there like travellers on the Circle Line. While many teachers happily go with that flow, it can lead to some intense conflict, particularly over the layout of the desks and chairs.

Teachers claiming their classrooms

Some teachers will keep moving them back into their preferred single “horse-shoe” formation.  Others will come in, quietly curse, and rearrange them into rectangular clusters. A third group will then turn them into traditional rows and columns. Any attempt at a compromise formation would just upset everybody. Deadlock over Brexit just does not compare.

Meanwhile, there might be an entirely separate war ensuing over legal title-deed ownership of the wall display areas. Given the heavy traffic in and out, no one has any clear idea what the historic border agreement is there between the different subjects and teachers.

As a result, the history teacher covering Nazi Germany might swoop overnight and annex an English teacher’s Romeo and Juliet zone without the poor English teacher realising until it is too late. But maybe that same history teacher has overstretched in making that reckless eastwards advance? Have they not perhaps noticed the gradual build-up of French irregular verbs invading their Western front?

There does, however, always seem to be one particular classroom in a school that absolutely no one wants to teach in. Sometimes it’s because the room is not really a classroom at all. Perhaps it was crudely converted into one decades ago after previously being a wartime air-raid shelter or some kind of old-school punishment centre or maybe a holding-room for a former headteacher’s mistresses.

Alternatively, the nightmare classroom is the oldest surviving so-called “temporary” classroom, put there in 1978. With all its contemporaries now living in some terrapin nursing home, it is now completely isolated from the rest of the school building, like some prefab version of the Addams Family house. It survives because there are always certain points in the weekly timetable when there is literally nowhere else to put a class.

This room is another “shared” space, though this time the sharing is between resentful teachers, members of the local wildlife and the odd bit of foliage coming up through the floor and flirting with the creeper coming down through the ceiling. Any damp or unpleasant smells, however, are always overwhelmed by the fumes coming from the vintage oil heater rattling away in the corner.

Sadly, my own school recently did away with our oldest temporary classroom.  A shame. I actually quite liked that smell of yesteryear toxicity and the way I could make the whole room shake by simply walking up and down. Having been at the school a while now – and being almost completely domesticated now – I was rather hoping to bed in there one day.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire