Anyone who’s ever left a school knows how hard it is. It doesn’t matter how valid or convincing your reasons are. “Can’t you just have the baby and come back after the holidays?” “But you can buy a house here!”
Students take it personally. “Why are you leaving us?” “Was it that time I swore in your classroom?” All of these are real lines from real students.
However much they might convince you of the opposite, if you are a teacher who works hard and is committed to improving the life chances of young people, your students value you. They value the time you put into planning their lessons (“I like Mr G - he always takes the time to ensure our learning is interesting”), the value the effort you put into marking their work - and they even value the moments when you think you’re being funny...
A close friend described one of the lowest points in her career: saying goodbye to a certain student who had given her hell for six months before gradually flourishing and attaining top grades. She didn’t cry. She didn’t shout. “I almost wish she had,” said my friend. “She just looked at me with studied blankness and said: ‘Not you as well?’ Then she walked away. That was the last time I saw her.”
Teacher retention and relationships
There was no choice but to move on. The job had taken my friend to the brink of what she could cope with, physically and emotionally. Her relationships were at breaking point. She hardly saw her young children because of the long working hours. There was no choice - but for the student in question, she was one of dozens of teachers to “disappear” during her time at the school.
Lots has been written about the impact of high staff turnover on teachers. Very little has been written about the catastrophic effect on young people. A piece of work done to analyse performance in GCSE exams showed that keeping the same teacher from Year 10 to 11 was almost always a positive factor. So let’s just imagine the impact of having four, five or six maths teachers through key stage 4. Or having an overseas-trained teacher who, however much they love the job, won’t be able to stay in the country for more than two years.
Relationships are everything in schools. There are few greater pleasures in life than seeing a group through from Year 7 to Year 11, through the rocky sweary Year 9 patch, to seeing them emerge as confident young adults: being able to laugh about the time when they “lost it” and called chemistry every word under the sun, remembering the school trip when they stepped on a beach for the first time in their lives.
Ultimately, it’s the students who suffer. It’s entirely unacceptable and is nothing less than a scandal.
Details in each of these accounts have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals
Emma Kell is a secondary teacher in north-east London and author of How to Survive in Teaching
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