Vociferous complaints about primary assessment, academisation, recruitment issues, stress and workload have preoccupied teachers for what feels like an age. In fact, looking back over the 30 years since I first stood at the front of a classroom (and a child stuck my gold Sheaffer pen into a gas fire after I’d loaned it to him), complaints from teachers have been at the heart of how the profession as a whole engages with the public.

The first state school staffroom in which I ever dunked a chocolate digestive crackled constantly with dissatisfaction, while the last one felt, on occasions, like a doctor’s waiting room. Both schools were really struggling. In between, I was fortunate enough to spend the bulk of my teaching career in successful, strong, school environments. But even in those schools, colleagues were never slow to express dissatisfaction.

Many newly qualified teachers will recognise the disturbing realisation that the profession you have just signed up to is chronically malcontent. Why? And what can be done about it?

I’m not a lifelong learner or a guide on the side or any other of those excruciatingly trite neologisms. Like so many teachers, I’m passionate about one subject: in my case English literature. So for me, rereading great novels is habitual, not part of some faddish, irrelevant CPD programme.

Rereading Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (which, together with Frances Trollope’s blissfully named Domestic Manners of the Americans, could teach your pupils more about Donald Trump than any amount of social media prattle) I stumbled across part of the answer. Furious at the way his sister, a governess in a nouveau riche household, has been treated, the inestimably kind Tom Pinch says: “Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe and imitate; and why or how they should respect whom no one else respects, and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow - oh very partial! - to their studies, when they see to what pass proficiency in those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect!”

For governess: read teacher. As a teacher, I have never felt respected by the general public, the media or anyone from the non-school management strata that I worked beneath. This was one of the key reasons I decided to leave the profession.

When I left the classroom for business, it was rare to find a colleague who respected my academic ability or credentials and far more common to find quite the opposite. The simple fact that I had been a teacher was enough licence for some people to adopt a relationship towards me - and other former teachers I worked with - that neither their commercial nor their professional performance merited. Disrespect for teachers is so embedded in the general population that it’s genuinely difficult for many people to know they are doing it.

Imagine the accumulated weight of disrespect each teacher has to overcome every time they stand up in front of children they’ve never met before. The part played by weak dramas and reality television in this is beyond repair, but there is something that can be done about it now by schools and teachers.

Schools - by which I mean governors and headteachers - need to behave like the most responsible businesses do and treat their employees respectfully.

This was not the case for the governors at a successful school where I recently observed a consultation evening for parents about becoming a multi-academy trust. That meeting was run by the headteacher of another school, who subsequently became the chief executive without the role being advertised or the existing headteacher or staff being consulted about this person’s involvement.

Schools should emulate those unusual, model businesses that work hard to ensure staff are proud to be employed by them and would happily recommend them to others. How many schools could honestly claim that they have pursued this kind of strategy? How many school leaders or Ofsted inspectors would even understand the term “internal customer” or know how to go about creating a high-quality employee care culture within their organisation?

High standards

Teachers, in turn, should demand and expect this kind of treatment from the people who manage them and run the schools they work in. Good teachers know that they cannot function unless they command respect, and too many become adept at doing this inside their classes because senior managers do nothing to help them and respect ends at their classroom door.

Staff should behave like shareholders in their school rather than stakeholders, insisting not on profitability but on high standards and success. You can’t abdicate this responsibility to others. You have to regard it as a professional skill in the same way as command of subject knowledge or lesson design.

It is easier to moan in the staffroom than to have a difficult conversation with the people paid to lead you, but in the long run it doesn’t help you, your colleagues or the children you teach. This is one change that can come only from the bottom up.

It’s time for the profession to jettison its chronic discontent and demand respect instead of sympathy from the public, just as they demand it from the children they teach. That way UK teachers may finally become widely and genuinely respected for the job they do day after day, year after year - often against the kind of odds that few of my business colleagues have ever experienced.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

This is an article from the 20 May edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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