When the topic of classrooms came up during my secondary English PGCE, our tutor would wistfully recall a former student of hers who had a classroom on the Pembrokeshire coast, with big picture windows overlooking the sea. At this point in my career, I assumed that I would get my own classroom which I could decorate with intricate displays on my favourite texts which would delight my students and make me akin to Miss Honey in Matilda.

My current classroom situation is more like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, and display boards featured a lot less prominently in my early career than I was led to believe while training.

Last academic year I was determined to get my own classroom and once again get myself into the Miss Honey bracket. I didn’t like my chances of finding a well-equipped and attractive classroom, so borrowed a strategy I have employed in my dating life: I decided to find the worst and most unwanted one and tried to make it marginally better. I noticed an unloved and underused classroom which was right next to my office but tucked away at the end of a corridor. It had been mistakenly categorised as a music practice room on our resource database because it contained an electric piano. This meant that people idly browsing for classrooms assumed it would be a pokey soundproofed room with no desks and no IT equipment when in reality it was a huge soundproofed room (with many desks and no IT equipment).

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An unclaimed display board is a golden opportunity for the homeless teacher looking to plant a flag. It’s the perfect crime - no one can complain about you marking your territory because they have never bothered to put up a display themselves. And this room, my magical unicorn room, had five blank display boards. It was basically uncharted territory, and it only took a half-day armed with a staple gun and some backing paper for people to start calling it “Kirsty’s classroom”. I had pulled off the Great Classroom Heist, and it felt good.

However, my pride was my undoing. Full of hubris, I showed off my classroom to everyone. Before long, its listing on the resource database was changed back to “general teaching”. At the start of the new academic year, I was invaded by maths resit classes and while I managed to keep 70 per cent of my timetable in my lovely room, the hunt began again.

At the time of writing, I have successfully encroached upon another mislabelled practice room for two of my homeless classes. I also noticed with delight that there is an IT room next door to it...with a blank display board.

This time I have a new strategy. I have the students making a display for the board as an activity, giving me a new line of defence in the event of a hostile takeover. I need to strategise: during the summer, “Kirsty’s classroom” is being bulldozed to transform the ground floor of the building into a new, open-plan layout. In order to keep myself housed appropriately, I will have to embark on yet another search for mislabelled, unloved rooms. Then I just need to work on a clear line of sight to the Pembrokeshire coast and I will have fulfilled my destiny.

Kirsty Walker teaches at a college in the North West of England