An experienced supply teacher can usually pick up on any number of clues as to what kind of school they’ve ended up in. Sometimes, however, it’s less tangible and you’re struck by this feeling that it might be “one of those days…”

A few weeks ago, this happened to me. In hindsight I suppose there were a few overt indications of what I might be in for. There was the member of student services at the school gates, loudly berating students about untucked shirts, non-regulation footwear or that most heinous of all crimes: slouching. This was troubling on a few levels. Why were these relatively minor crimes deemed so important? Where were the actual teachers? Why was everyone slouching? This aside, there was an atmosphere which I could best describe as “ominous”.

I received my lesson plans but with no one around to show me where to go, I spent the first five minutes of the day in the wrong place. I listened in as a class were encouraged by their form tutor to volunteer for events at an upcoming sports day. Not one single student put themselves forward. Faced with this desultory response their teacher then began to yell at them, randomly assigning roles to the unlucky few (rather undermining the whole concept of what it meant to volunteer). She was met with groans of resignation and in some cases more spirited and quite inventive cries of protest. I began to sense that the issues here ran deep.

When I did get to the right room, I found myself overseeing an online aptitude test. Six terminals in the ICT suite didn’t work at all, several students claimed they’d never been given a log-on to access the school network, and those who could at least turn their computers on quickly discovered the link to the test was broken. None of this was a huge surprise, school IT systems are hardly cutting edge, but there was no plan B and no one around to offer any alternative lesson.

We muddled through with the help of a variety of educational and not so educational websites. I noticed that the students who’d claimed to be unable to access the network five minutes earlier for the aptitude test had no such problems accessing YouTube or ultraviolentgamez.com. Which, I suppose, demonstrates a certain aptitude in itself. With a stroke of good luck and some quick thinking, I managed to occupy the biggest pain-in-the-arse kid with the job of unclicking all the keys on the keyboards that had been switched around, and restoring them to their original positions. He was thrilled; I didn’t hear another peep from him until he’d finished the job 10 minutes before the end of the lesson, at which point he just wandered off.

In the corridors between lessons, when I asked students for directions, I was sent the wrong way. It didn’t feel like it was malevolent, more like they didn’t know themselves or just couldn’t be bothered to put any thought into the matter. As though perhaps all their mental resources were being channelled towards survival and self-preservation.

The catalogue of misery continued.

The carpeted floors in every classroom and corridor were covered in chewing gum. This was not the odd piece here and there, this was more like a Kusama retrospective of calcified, saprogenic pink and grey blobs. The underside of desks is one thing, but I’ve never seen it covering every floor of an entire school.

At the end of the lesson before lunch, like a rookie, I insisted the class return their worksheets to the front of the room and put their rubbish in the bin before I’d let them leave. The resulting stand-off did not end well. I decline to go into any more detail than to say that threats which could neither legally nor morally be enforced were issued on both sides.

There was a vending machine in the staffroom crammed with all manner of sugary drinks and sweets. It’s the only school where I’ve ever seen this. I’m not entirely sure why, but this just felt like another sign of an institution that had lost its way. Perhaps the adults here were as desperate as the kids for something to help stem the perpetual drain on their serotonin levels.

Sometimes the TA in the class is a help and sometimes they are a hindrance. Guess which way that swung today? And there were two of them in one of my classes. Hard to say if they argued more with each other or with the kids.

I’d taken the job that day because there was the offer of a regular part-time post at the school. I’d made my mind up by break time that I was going to be passing on it. I’d be able to leave at three o’clock knowing I’d never be returning.

But you’ve really got to feel for those kids who have to spend their formative years there. As I sat in the staffroom at the end of the day, decompressing, I asked another agency teacher who was there for the whole term whether things here were always this awful. He looked at me with the thousand-yard-stare of the battle-hardened supply, and with a rueful smile replied: “That was nothing. You should see the place on a bad day.”

The writer has recently taken up supply teaching after 20 years in a full-time teaching job