Why is it that the end of the academic year in a primary school seems to be so fantastically busy, with too little time to fit everything in? Just as everyone outside the profession presumes we must be winding down, I feel like I’m getting wound up!
If it’s not putting the finishing touches to reports, or the final assessments to be done, it’s the fight for hall space as leavers’ assemblies and summer productions squabble over the parquet flooring.
That’s before we even mention trying to fit in sports days (usually at least twice, after the first event is rained off), transition days and summer fairs, and all while trying not to upset the peripatetic music teachers’ timetables...
Thwarted plans
The worst of it all comes with those final rehearsals of the school performance. The teacher who started off so enthusiastic and keen to engage the children in a fantastical production is now to be found muttering in the stock cupboard about the need for a gorilla costume, or slumped at the back of the hall yelling - for the hundredth time - “you need to speak louder and slower” to the exhausted cast of 10-year-olds.
Each year, I feel determined that next year will be different. We’ll plan ahead more; book things in advance; make sure to avoid clashes. And then reality gets in the way. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it.
This year the problem has been exacerbated by the shifting sands of primary assessment. Year 2 and Year 6 teachers have been frantically striving to get the last exclamation sentence or semi-colon into place for evidence by the end of June, and so all of a sudden all the summer events find themselves even more squashed into July.
Ideally, this is the point in the article at which I’d offer the perfect solution; some ingenious way of organising events to satisfy everyone. Sadly, all I can offer is consolation: we’re all in the same boat. The saving grace of it all is the summer break on the horizon.
Catch-up time
I’ve always thought of it as something of a double-edged sword. Somehow, the prospect of a break away from it all at the end of each term seems to lull us into believing we have superhuman powers in the run-up to the final day.
Classroom’s in chaos? Sort it in the holidays!
Haven’t seen your husband/wife/children in weeks? You’ll catch up in the holidays.
Can’t remember the last time you slept for more than four hours? That’s what August is for.
What if it didn’t exist? What if we had just five weeks’ holiday a year? Might we be forced to rethink our exhausting timetables in the final weeks? If terms didn’t start and stop in such dramatic ways, might we stay on a more even keel all year round?
Sadly, as is so often the case with schools, the problem is the children. If only they could easily be slotted into an annual timetable that better managed teachers’ stresses. As it is, we’ll just have to do the best we can not to run ourselves into the ground over these final days - and make the most of those glorious weeks when they finally arrive.
Michael Tidd is deputy headteacher at Edgewood Primary School in Nottinghamshire. He tweets as @MichaelT1979
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