Boris Johnson is undeniably a master of rhetoric. Regularly compared to a fluffy-haired Churchill for his oratorical abilities, Johnson’s speeches have provided me on more than one occasion with material for the English classroom, helping students to understand the structure and features of a powerful persuasive speech. 

And the PM’s piece for the Mail on Sunday this weekend was no different.

Writing about the imperative for schools to reopen, Johnson, within the first few lines, employs emotive language (“social justice demands it”), a triplet (“their welfare, their health...their future”), and collective pronouns (“we can...we will”). 

Later, we have the seamless inclusion of hyperbole (home education was “a truly Herculean effort”), facts and statistics (“the attainment gap...could widen by more than a third”). He ends by extrapolating from the individual to the national (“nothing is more important for the future of our country”).

Blitz-spirit rhetoric

Yet the crux of Johnson’s argument turns on his oft-employed Blitz spirit rhetoric: it is, he writes, our “moral duty” to reopen schools. It would be “socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible” to delay opening schools any longer. 

As my GCSE students would (hopefully) tell you, that final leg of the triplet is the punchiest, the one you leave your reader musing on - here, the all-important ‘m’ word.

While I agree with the return to school, Johnson’s style leaves us to bear the weight of the intangible - and, therefore, hard to argue against - concept of “morality” in our own working lives. 

The idea of morality is one that pervades our profession. It is our moral duty as teachers to support every child both academically and pastorally, to plan increasingly stimulating lessons and provide increasingly meaningful feedback, to differentiate for a plethora of different needs in a class of 34 students when our teaching assistants have been taken away. 

And we do all of these things willingly (or, at least, we do them), because, at the very heart of our profession is just that: a heart that desires health, happiness and success for all of our young people. 

A stick to beat us with

But I am so tired of being told it is a moral mission - especially by those who did not deem it a moral duty to feed 1.3 million pupils in England over the summer holidays.

The rhetoric of moral obligation and vocation smacks of 19th-century colonial and missionary intervention. These terms are so often used as a stick to beat us with. If we complain about workload, we are reminded that that’s part and parcel of the job. If we find behaviour overwhelming, we are told that that’s why we’re there. If we ask for better but accept worse, we are commended for our commitment to the cause. 

The stick becomes a rod for your own back, becomes a heavy cross to bear, and it comes as no surprise that 73 per cent of classroom teachers reported being stressed in the past academic year. Alongside the physical demands of the job, the emotional demands can take an even greater toll.

Last academic year, I became part of that statistic, when I reached burnout. My health suffered as I dealt with a heavy workload across two sites, challenging behaviour and a lack of support. I had to take time off for stress, had to be seen by paramedics following a panic attack brought on by chest pains and breathlessness, and was prescribed medication. 

And yet, despite all this, I felt hidebound to return to work as soon as possible. I tormented myself, debating whether or not to “abandon” the school and the children. When loved ones reminded me it was “just a job”, I could not see it that way.

This most noble of vocations

The rhetoric of my moral duty and my commitment to this most noble of vocations had been pervasive since my training days, and I could not shake it off.

Such rhetoric leads us to trample over our boundaries and have unrealistic expectations of what we, as individuals, can achieve. This ideology creates an unsustainable working pattern that, as we have seen, leads many to fall by the wayside. 

There are realistic limitations to what we can do - especially now, when so much is out of our hands. These notions are antithetical to everything we hear about self-care and wellbeing. 

So it is time we resisted the pressures of being told to do our duty. It is enough to do what we can within the limits of our scope, time and health. 

It is not for far-off leaders to tell us where our ethos should lie. We know our own purpose, we know we are proponents of kindness and change, and our working lives are testament to that.

And that, I promise, is morality enough. 

Sophie Harrold is an English teacher moving from East Sussex to London for the new academic year. She tweets as @harrold_ms