Recently, I went for a weekend away in the town where I used to teach. I’d moved house just before I had my kids and we had decided to take the family there for a weekend and show them around.
Feeling the need for a bottle of wine at the end of a busy day of sightseeing, I popped into our old local supermarket and, as I was waiting for my age to be confirmed (although sadly, I no longer look anywhere near 25), the young lady on duty asked me an unexpected question.
“Excuse me,” she said, “did you used to be a teacher?”
Leaving aside the fact that I still am, I nodded.
“Did you used to be my teacher?” she continued. “Did you used to be Ms Gedge?”
I confirmed her suspicion (despite the fact that I never stopped being Ms Gedge) and she rewarded me with a big smile and an introduction of her own.
“Hello!” she said, “I’m Anna Moreton!”
She proceeded to tell me what she was up to now (applying for uni) and that I wasn’t to worry about the rest of the class because no one had had a baby. As we chatted, I began to see shadows of the person I had known, whose spellings I had corrected, playground arguments I had helped to sort and whose earrings I had consistently refused to remove for PE (I don’t do earrings; I have a thing about piercings). In my mind, she had been frozen at nine years old, and here she was, all grown up. I was touched that she remembered me.
‘Working towards the day they leave’
And then she told me something that made me sad. She told me that out of the class, one boy, Tim, had gone wrong. He’d got in with the wrong sort, into drugs and into trouble with the police.
I remembered him too. He was a bouncy, enthusiastic boy who worked hard and tried his best; one of those who told me that he preferred school to the holidays. Looking back, I’d like to think that his trajectory had more to do with his family circumstances than with deficiencies in his education. But, I can think of a number of young people I have met through my professional life about whom I can’t be sure that the same would apply: sweet, feisty kids who, as they grew and found it more and more difficult to adhere to school rules, had an educational experience that was more about containment than it was about preparation for the future.
As part of my Senco training, I had visited National Star College, an independent specialist further education college for people with physical disabilities. As I was chatting to staff about their way of working, something that a tutor said really stood out to me: “From the day they start, we are working towards the day they leave.”
This statement should apply to all of us working in education. Although sometimes I wonder whether we always remember that - or if it only occurs to us when we run into a student again, years later.
Nancy Gedge is Tes SEND columnist, coordinator of the Ormerod Resource Base at the Marlborough School, Woodstock, and author of Inclusion for Primary Teachers.
