I have been a classroom teacher for 19 years and I have been writing for Tes for the last six of those.
It started, as so much does, on Twitter. I tweeted that being married to a fellow teacher eased the burden somewhat; they understood some of the stresses and strains of the job more clearly than others might. Jon Severs, who was then commissioning editor, spotted my tweet, and got in touch to ask if I fancied writing about this in more detail. I did, and thought little more of it.
The article went down well and Jon got in touch again to say that if I had anything else to say about education, he’d be happy to have a proposal from me. I took him at his word and here I am, six years and more than 100 articles later, having written about reducing marking, not wasting teachers’ time, the problem with the holiday revision class arms race, and I have even argued with a lord about how remote teaching should be approached.
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As a result of writing for Tes, I have written books about teaching, supported CPD in schools all around the country, worked with the Chartered College of Teaching, worked on the new National Professional Qualifications, and I have been invited on to various working groups and advisory panels. Throughout all of this, I’ve remained a classroom teacher.
And I think this matters.
Education is surrounded by people with a view on what teachers should do. They all have memories of being at school themselves or more recent experiences as parents and therefore think they have a good idea of what teaching involves and what schools should be doing. They are wrong.
Why teacher voice is essential
Teaching looks very different from inside a classroom. Few others appreciate just how early teachers tend to start working and how late they stay. If they see them heading out of the car park at a reasonable hour, they assume they are off to get on with their own lives, rather than to plan and assess from the comfort of their dining room.
Unless you have done it, you have no idea what teaching for five hours, interspersed with break duties, detentions and urgent emails, feels like. Five hours of improvised theatre, in which you are expected to make a thousand micro-decisions and respond in the moment to 30-plus children with their individual needs and wants, is draining.
If you have never been a teacher, you may think that what is euphemistically called “low-level disruption” must be quite annoying. It isn’t annoying; it is utterly horrible. Low-level disruption is rudeness: it’s people talking over you, arguing back, being sullen and snappy. As teachers, we experience others being unbearably rude hour after hour, day after day. We wouldn’t accept it in other walks of life. It is crushing, but it is something that all too many teachers experience.
People outside of the classroom tend to have their own pet project, their niche interest or bugbear that they think schools should either teach or eradicate. “Teach kids how to do their taxes!” they cry, or the basics of car mechanics, gardening or bakery. Schools should also stop knife crime, climate change and war. All of this is proposed with little idea of what schools are already doing or what they are trying to achieve.
This is why we need teachers writing, talking and joining national organisations. These bodies aren’t going away. You may want to close your classroom door and be left alone but that isn’t happening.
If teachers don’t speak out and join in, others will. People who haven’t set foot in a classroom since childhood, or who haven’t been near a board marker in a decade, will fill the space that you could have had. It will be their voices that are heard and their ideas that are listened to.
Some of those ideas might be great. They may have specialisms in areas that we lack. They may know a huge amount about the needs of particular students or have insight into how learning happens.
But no matter how great the idea, it will still need filtering through the experience of those with a cold cup of coffee on their desk and board pen stains on their hands. It is our professional knowledge and experience that shows whether those ideas will work in the context of real schools dealing with myriad other concerns that those specialists cannot, or will not, see.
After 19 years in the classroom, I am stepping away, and therefore I am also stepping away from writing about education. What I would like to use my final article to do is to urge other teachers to fill this space, and urge everyone else to listen to what they have to say.
Mark Enser is, for a few more weeks, head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex. His latest book, The CPD Curriculum, is available now. He tweets @EnserMark
