I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I tipped over into “experienced older teacher”. 

For a while now, I’ve been noticing that most teachers are younger than me. Now I realise that most headteachers are also younger. 

Which in itself isn’t a problem. Since I’m completely devoid of managerial ambition, my main hope is for a head who will simply trust me to get on with the job. 

It’s a fairly modest wish, but one that is far from guaranteed, as this week’s news story about older teachers being bullied out of their jobs reveals. 

While children, parents and NQTs tend to like experienced teachers, school bosses are a divided fanbase. For every head who sees you as a valuable, reliable pair of hands, there’s one who sees a budget-gobbling obstruction. 

The albatross of higher pay

I’ve only once taught in a school where the management was blatantly ageist. New head, academisation and we were all in the spotlight. 

Teachers with a solid track record and several Ofsted ‘outstanding’ gradings were suddenly found wanting. 

Being on the upper pay scale hung around your neck like an albatross. Every single thing you did was measured and recorded, your data plotted against impossible targets and invariably found wanting.  

Younger (and cheaper) teachers were singled out for public praise, given the largest classrooms, called upon and listened to in staff meetings. 

If the goal was to get rid of all older teachers, it worked. Within three years, nearly 90 per cent of all original staff had cleared out. 

The year after I left, there were more NQTs and Teach First students in the school than there were experienced staff to mentor them. These invariably left after a year, to be replaced with another unsuspecting twentysomething. 

Calling out ageism

What these bullying autocrats need is to be taken to task. Ageism should be called out for what it is. There should be tribunals, official complaints and some form of holding to account. 

Of course, this is never going to happen. Older, experienced teachers are possibly the least likely people to put up a fight. They have spent so long in the classroom fighting for their pupils that they’ve completely forgotten how to fight for themselves. 

Plus, this kind of behaviour is incredibly hard to prove. School leaders can put up a plethora of plausible reasons as to why their actions don’t constitute ageism. 

There also exists the uncomfortable truth that, if you are a leader going into someone’s classroom looking for flaws in their teaching, you are probably going to find some. Nobody’s perfect. 

Some experienced teachers won’t be as effective as younger teachers and vice versa, but the days of inadequate teachers coasting to retirement are long gone. In the current climate, you simply don’t last that long if you’re not doing something right.  

The brilliance of experience

With one-in-three new teachers leaving the profession within five years, why on earth would you not be trying to hold on to those teachers who have stayed? 

We may not buy into all the new educational philosophies. And we’re still unconvinced that simply putting the word “knowledge” in front of everything will make children more intelligent.

But the fact that we’ve stuck it out through the literacy-hour years, through thinking hats and brain gym and dialogic marking and APP and we’re still here should surely count for something? 

It is also a fact (and this is not said nearly enough) that many experienced teachers are brilliant. I spent my NQT year in awe of several of them, and I am still in awe of others now. 

They control behaviour effortlessly, they have a presence that is impossible to quantify, they teach and encourage and inspire and have a knack of bringing out the very best in children, in parents, in other teachers.

Now why on earth would you want to drive that away?

Jo Brighouse is a pseudonym for a primary teacher in the West Midlands. She tweets @jo_brighouse