If you take away the social aspect of teaching - certainly in a primary school - I reckon about half of the teachers wouldn’t do it. 

In surveys, teachers always say that they like it because the money’s good and because they’re doing something worthwhile. But there’s also the social aspect. My team say that the friendships they make are the number-one reason they all come to work. 

And then there’s the offloading: I always say that’s by far and away the best part of being a teacher. When I was a teacher, we used to go to the pub at least a couple of nights a week, to offload and unwind. 

But we won’t have any of that this term. Instead, we’ll have bubbles. 

Teacher in a bubble

With no staffroom, the adults are effectively in the bubble as well. So: you have 30 children and a teacher and, if you’re lucky, a teaching assistant. The adults go straight to their bubble when they come in. They’re all eating in the classroom. And, at the end of the day, they wipe down their classroom and go straight home. There’s no interaction with other bubbles. 

There’s a woman who works for me - let’s call her Tanya - who ended up teaching in a bubble for eight weeks last term. She was happy to have the children back; she was happy to be back. 

But what Tanya reported was a massive sense of isolation. She was cut off from her friends, and from other members of staff. 

And there’s more to it than that. It’s also to do with the fact that there’s a teaching assistant in that bubble in most cases. 

Tanya had a TA called Mavis. Mavis is the easiest person to get on with. But Tanya said to me, “I’m going to kill her. She’s lovely, but I live on my own. The only adult I’ve seen in the last eight weeks has been Mavis, and I don’t want to see her any more.”

Eight-week silence

And then you have to factor in age as well. I’ve got a teacher who’s been doing the job for 20-odd years. She does her job well when she’s there, but she’s mostly focused on her family and what she does outside school. She doesn’t really mix with the young, dynamic, want-to-change-the-world members of staff. 

Before summer, we allocated a TA to her bubble - the TA is 18, and super-super-keen. We allocated that TA to that class because she already knew some of the children. 

We told the teacher she’d be with Anna, and she said, “Who’s Anna?” She was the TA next door, but they’d never even said hello to each other. 

I have no idea what they said to each other. Possibly they didn’t speak for eight weeks. 

You’ve got your little tribes in the staffroom, and in the leadership team, and then you have strata within the staffroom: experienced and inexperienced teachers. And then you have the admin team, who don’t talk to the teachers at all. They see the teachers as the enemy: they’re the ones who lose the glue sticks. But, in smaller schools, you’ll end up with admin staff associated with bubbles. They’re going to kill each other.

Wanting to chuck it all in

Teachers nowadays are so much younger than they were previously, so a lot of them live alone. Maybe 30 or 40 per cent of them go home, and there’s nobody there. The teachers who were single found it way harder than the non-single members of staff - especially those who weren’t seeing parents, or didn’t get on with their parents.

On top of all that, they’ll be spending 14-15 weeks with someone who - maybe - they get on with a bit, but maybe they don’t get on with at all. 

You see the same issue in professional golfing: players and their caddies never normally talk to each other. They might see each other on the course and say a brusque hello, and that would be it. But now, the golfers and their caddies are in the same bubble, and they’re expected to eat together and spend time together. Several golfers have walked out of the tour as a result.

And that’s exactly the same as a lot of teachers are going to feel by the end of term. Two weeks before Christmas, there are coughs and colds on a good day, and migraines on a bad day. Everyone feels like they want to chuck it all in.

Bubbling with your Facebook friends

As headteacher, I’ve no idea who gets on with each other. We put them together because of the relationships that the TAs had with the pupils, primarily - which is obviously as it should be. But we’ve had to rethink that. 

We’ve now tried to create bubble teams where people get on with each other. Or at least where they’re not going to throttle each other after three weeks. Who’s friends with who on Facebook? It primarily comes down to that. Who’s all over each other’s Instagram? Who comments on whose Snapchat? 

We’ve closed our staffroom, but we’ve created staff social spaces. If you can sit in a restaurant, then you must be able to create something similar for staff. They’re tiny spaces, for three people, maximum, and it’s all socially distanced. But we’ve been able to say to staff: “Who are your friends? Who do you want to spend your lunchtimes and breaktimes with?” 

And staff open up a Zoom room as soon as the pupils have gone so that they can offload: kick the cat about, at the end of the day. It’s a small thing, but it just lets people relax at the end of the day. 

The partners of teachers are a pretty understanding bunch, but if you’re bringing your woes home, on top of everything else - nobody wants to hear what little Bobby’s been doing ad nauseam. You’ve got to leave some of it at work. 

Otherwise, it’s like Big Brother, isn’t it? How long does Big Brother last? About 12 weeks, and you see completely nutty behaviour going on there. 

And then you think about all the things that teachers would normally be doing in the autumn term: the things that they moan about, but love really. So: school plays, nativity plays, residential trips, swimming lessons. 

All those things that make it fun to be a teacher are going to go. And, at the same time, you’re stuck in a room with Mavis. It’s not looking good, is it? 

The author is the headteacher of a primary school in the North of England