The results days are done. Come and gone. And right now, our schools and colleges stand largely empty for the last few days of the summer, skeleton crews rattling around their soon-to-be-filled rooms. This has been the very strangest few years of any of our collective professional lives, I am sure. And some of us may wish to toss these last few years immediately onto the old rotting pile marked “best forgotten”. But I think it is important for us to remember, even when we might far rather forget. Remembering is the very essence of identity. Some of us sadly know all too well that when we lose our memories, we also start to let slip our identities themselves. We have to remember, because experiences mark us and make us who we are. 

The Israelites of the Exodus were told to raise memorials on sites of significance where major things happened. Still, we raise cairns in hill country to show people who come later the way. We place flowers next to roadsides after accidents. We are creatures who inhabit our surroundings and personalise them. We mark the way we have come, so we can look back to see where we’ve been. That is what gives us the foundation to move on from.  

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From David Murray: Why teaching can feel like living in a dark cave

So, if I were in charge of all the nation’s schools and colleges, at the end of every academic year I would give each student in the country a set of blue plaques. The kind of English Heritage plaques you see on the sides of buildings where important people lived or significant events took place. (It turns out you can buy personalised ones online and then affix them to your own house - now that appeals to the egotist within.)

But the blue plaques I’d give out to our country’s students would be little blue stickers. That would be cheaper. And we don’t want things to get out of hand, after all. All of my blue stickers would have space to write things in, to personalise them and every student in the country would receive a handful. My instruction on handing out these stickers would be for students to put them up everywhere where they have a significant memory of their time at school or college.  

During the Covid lockdown, a group of old schoolfriends of mine started to have regular Zoom meetings. For 45 minutes every week, we still meet remotely from all over the country and all over the world, usually with beer in hands. And I can tell you from personal experience that even men in their fifties can recall their schooldays with surprising clarity. Embarrassing clarity at times. I want our students to remember their days in education like that in the decades to come, with all the accompanying joy of reminiscence. 

Vivid memories

I could still draw the floorplans of the schools I went to, even though it’s been decades since I was there. I could describe the rooms. I could tell you what happened there. The corridor where a boy set off a fire extinguisher by mistake. The classroom where a teacher held a boy against the wall by the neck (the ’80s were different days). The playground where there was that enormous fight which just dissolved into air when a teacher approached, leaving one poor lad standing there alone, dishevelled and in trouble.   

So, I would ask our students to place their stickers wherever they wanted and to write in them what memory they associate with that site. I’d expect all sorts of things: “On this spot, we saw Mr Parkes drop all the books he was carrying”; “Here, Milly Mollings admitted she fancied Billy Boggins”; “Here, Susie Smith got Miss Twigg’s name wrong and called her Mrs Logg and then turned red”; “We sat in this room for five long years and hardly understood a thing”; “Here was where Mr Hill helped me to understand what poetry is about”; “Here is where Mr McNicol was kind to me when I was sad”; “In this chemistry classroom, Miss Lancaster exploded a test tube”, that sort of thing.

All very mundane, perhaps, but no less significant for that. These are the moments of a life. These are the memories that make us. And I want students to celebrate this as they move on.  

I hope our students will carry good memories of their schools and colleges with them into adulthood and as they start new things. In the meantime, now another cohort have left our care, I really do wish we could have given them my blue plaque stickers and let them record their memories on the sites where they happened, to record, to remember, to somehow carry their memories with them as they go. I am sure our colleges and schools would soon be festooned in blue. I am sure my blue plaque sticker scheme would work wonders. We’d learn a lot about our students, and a lot about our lasting influence as schools and colleges. And, of course, we might also find out where we should be placing security cameras.  

David Murray is an English teacher at City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College