Teachers feel they have been misrepresented, misunderstood and “presented as villains who passed up the opportunity to be heroes” during the pandemic, research suggests.

A University of York study has found that teachers strongly resent the way in which their profession has been portrayed in society and in the media during the coronavirus outbreak.

Research participants also reported feeling angry and frustrated at what they perceived to be the government’s failure to engage with teachers as a profession and to communicate effectively with them.

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On a brighter note, teachers also said they felt more valued than ever by their students’ parents.

Dr Kathryn Asbury, one of the paper’s authors, told Tes: “The question of how teachers are valued has been an issue of growing international concern and we hypothesised that teachers’ perceptions of how they are valued would be affected by Covid-19 and the high profile of the profession in debates about school closures.”

Coronavirus: Teachers ‘portrayed as villains in the media’

The findings are based on discussions conducted with 24 teachers each month since April. Despite the small sample size, Dr Asbury said she felt it was “likely that lots of teachers feel the same way”.

“This is a small sample and so we can’t say with any confidence that the findings will generalise,” she said. “However, the teachers in our sample come from primary and secondary schools and all career stages are represented - from NQT through to executive headteacher. 

“They work in both urban and rural schools with diversity in how advantaged the communities they serve are. Therefore, I think it is likely that lots of teachers feel the same way, although we would need a large quantitative study to test this properly.”

Analysing the interviews with the participants, Dr Asbury and co-author Dr Lisa Kim found four themes.

First of all, teachers felt that society and the media in particular during the pandemic had “presented them as villains that passed on the opportunity to be heroes”.

The paper explains that teachers perceived a great deal of pressure to embrace the school reopenings in June and felt criticised for questioning the safety of the decision.

“The teachers are coming across as this whingeing, work-shy group, who don’t want to go back to work,” commented one participant.

They also reported feeling somewhat blamed for the perceived widening of the disadvantage-related attainment gap during lockdown, and they said that fingers had been pointed at teachers for not “stepping up”.

The teachers also said they felt angered and depressed by the narrative around schools’ reopening, which they said gave the wrong impression that teachers had not been working since March.

They felt that the media was pushing for them to go back to work - when, in reality, they had never stopped working, either from home or in school with key workers’ children and vulnerable pupils.

A participant said that people think “[teachers] you’re all lazy sods and need to go back to work”, and another commented: “It’s coming from this hateful, even spiteful reporting.”

Many said they had decided to ignore the media for “self-preservation”.

“You shouldn’t read anything because you could get horribly depressed and angry ... If you are a Twitter user, oh my goodness, you could be torturing yourself,” said one of the participants.

Another theme focused on the relationship between the profession and the government. Here, the study explains, it’s “clear that bridges need to be built”.

The shared view of teachers was that the Department for Education had not consulted with them and had shown little interest in hearing their views and had no respect of and trust in their expertise.

The way the DfE communicated with the profession during the pandemic was particularly criticised by participants in senior leadership positions, who lamented the fact that policies were announced to them at the same time as the public.

The study explains that it was clear across all interviews that teachers felt their relationship with the government was “dysfunctional or broken”, and that they didn’t feel they had a voice in how education policy is made in England - either during the pandemic or before it.

However, teachers also said they had felt supported by their local communities, students’ parents and also some local authorities, with some saying the pandemic had strengthened the home-school relationship.

One of the participants reported: “We’ve had a message saying ‘I can’t believe you’ve not throttled my child’ ... that really made me chuckle.”

The paper has been published as a pre-print and has been submitted to a journal.

The researchers will be speaking to the same group of teachers in the autumn to ask how the return to school has gone.

Commenting on the findings, a DfE spokesperson said: “We know that schools and teachers have gone to enormous lengths over recent months to support children at home and enable many to return to the classroom already and we are immensely grateful to them for this.

 “We have always engaged with school leaders, teaching unions and the wider sector to ensure that their trusted expertise and views are heard, and we will continue to do so ahead of September, as well as working closely with the scientific and medical experts.”