“Every lesson shapes a life”, intones that earnest voice at the close of the teacher-recruitment ad.  I go into a mild panic whenever I hear those words.   

I was perhaps prepared to accept that, over a period of years, I might conceivably “make a difference” as a teacher (another slightly irksome phrase), though perhaps not always the desired difference. 

But I had no idea, until this mantra, that I was potentially making or wrecking lives in every damned lesson of the day.  Surely, in raising the teaching stakes to being A-and-E critical every time we walk into a classroom, the message is going to intimidate more potential teachers than it will inspire? 

The other morning, for instance, I heard the advert on Talksport - a national commercial radio station dedicated to discussing football, virtually non-stop for 24 hours a day. (I love taking occasional refuge there, start and end of day.) 

I was initially a bit surprised to hear the advert playing on there - in among more familiar adverts for gambling, power-tools, erectile issues and Jaguar car-purchase options - but was delighted that the Department for Education was thinking to lure more of us football-heads into teaching. Contrary to what my sniffier, Melvyn Bragg-loving Radio 4 friends might think, talkSport is the ideal radio station at which to target the recruitment drive. 

Teacher recruitment: We need to be on the ball 

For one thing - let’s not pretend otherwise - most of the listeners are men. This is a well-known but woefully untapped demographic group when it comes to teaching, where about 70 per cent of the workforce are women. Now I know that we men-people can be quite annoying, but more of us can definitely come in to schools and “do a job”, as they would say on Talksport. 

Secondly, an injection of Talksport listeners into the profession would help to make football chat easier among staff. At the moment relatively few teachers (male or female) are interested in the game and many positively loathe it. When a couple of football bores on the staff do occasionally meet up - during a cherished Tuesday morning break duty or whenever - it’s like a tryst with a secret lover, hastily making use of the moments together. Any riots in the playground are ignored; time for a two-minute knee-trembler over last night’s game and good old controversial VAR.  

But therein lies the problem with the mantra in the recruitment advert. Those of us who like listening to Talksport prefer to live inside that little fantasy football world, rather than in the actual one. So most of the targeted listeners are going to run an absolute country mile from teaching when they hear that “every lesson changes a life”.  This is not what they want to hear at all. They are classic “blokes”; they are not into real, serious “life” at all.  

To draw them into teaching, the ad needs to be much more in keeping with the Talksport tone. A gruff, no-nonsense voice needs to come on and deliver a song or slogan adapted from the football terraces, not something like the brainchild of Oscar in some fancy advertising agency. I quite like the idea of “Oh, Amanda Spielman!” (sung to the tune of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”), but there are plenty of other options out there. That would get those Talksport punters bursting through those turnstiles and into the teaching arena.  

Though then there’s the small matter of keeping them there, of course. For unless things are sorted soon, it’s only a matter of time before our new recruits will be off and away, singing the time-honoured “you don’t know what you’re doing”, or worse.  

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