- The Guardian,
- Tuesday January 9 2001
Carmel Fitzsimons qualified last week, but there's no way she's going to be a teacher
This week, buried in the post with the last limping Christmas cards, came a thin brown envelope containing a certificate. It says, simply, that I am now a Newly Qualified Teacher.
Standing in the hall I felt quite young, being new at something again. Then came the deep swelling ocean of gratitude that it was over. After almost two years of two days a week in London schools, countless essays and assignments, and the almost unbearable tension of 10 weeks' teaching practice, I have this tissue-fine piece of paper in my hands saying I've made it.
If I had been going to start this term as a class teacher I would probably have gone whooping down to the kitchen to interrupt the kids' breakfast with my great news. As it was, I put the letter in the drawer where I fondly hide the letters from boyfriends who I'd rather liked but realised were not really good for me. It's a cul-de-sac place sort of place.
It's a way of saying that I have worked out that I cannot do it. I can do a morning of metaphor or help on a trip to the mosaics at St Albans but I can't do the day-in, no-nights-out stuff. Not for any snooty reason like I can't stand teachers or the pay is rubbish, but because it turned out to be too hard.
When I was clocking up 12-hour days in school I became a pharmacist's dream, with every stress-related ailment from 3am sleeplessness through killer cold sores to phantom marking at parties. I found myself congratulating my mother-in-law for sitting so nicely at the table. The job was so tough that waitressing 16-hour shifts at the Cats' Whiskers in Purley was transformed in my memory into the working equivalent of a day in a jacuzzi with Antonio Banderas.
It started out so well. I took on the training partly because my Irish emigrant parents had instilled in us that teaching was an honourable profession. My sister had done it without a murmur of complaint, but that might have been because I wasn't really listening. I was also idealistic - wanting to give something back, thinking I could help children from underprivileged families, like my own, to turn their lives around.
Perhaps I was naive when I took up the course. It was part-time, so I could still look after my four children and keep up a bit of journalism, which had been my career for 15 years. I had just won a poetry prize and was putting together an anthology for children and I needed to know more about what children were reading. I thought, what with the short school day and the holidays, maybe I could be the Playstation generation Renaissance woman and teach and inspire daily, write in the evening and perhaps fit in poetry in my spare time.
What I discovered is that the job itself is the root of the teacher shortage. You can train as many teachers as you like but once they have taken a good hard look at what it involves, few will go for it. There is hope for the young and single and also for those older people who never had families or whose children have long flown the nest. But for anyone who thinks teaching is a family-friendly profession - forget it.
A friend who trained as a mature teacher a couple of years ago but is not teaching, said: "The hours were a nightmare, and when I was not in school I was preparing. I could not get time off to go with my toddler to settle him into nursery and I could not make my older child's parent-teacher evening because we had one, too. Every other job I have ever had has been a thousand times more flexible."
Certainly the rigidity of school timetabling is a nightmare. You can only go to the toilet when it's break, only phone when it's break and lunch is usually a chance to fix the overhead projector. A teacher's regular diet is Tesco Bourbon biscuits. Although the school day is short, most teachers are in at 7.30am and do not leave until 12 hours later. Then they mark. They work in the holidays, their children go to and from school with child-minders, and worst of all, they worry.
As one trainee teacher who decided not to pursue it said to me, "I thought that I would meet loads of creative Dead Poets' Society people but I just met people who were really into tick-boxes. All the emphasis was on super-organisation."
I don't think teachers are uncreative - but creativity is being crushed out of them by the grinding cogs of bureaucracy and filing.
To give you a glimpse: for every lesson a teacher is supposed to prepare assessment sheets from the previous lesson; they must then reflect upon the issues the assessment throws up. Then they must prepare a lesson plan - based on long-term, medium-term and short-term objectives from the curriculum; and having delivered the lesson, they must write up an evaluation of how the lesson went and then individually assess the progression of each child's learning. This can mean five sheets of written paper per lesson for each of the five lessons a day. Add the individual record of each child, the reading records and the collection of money for the school trip and you start to wonder whether there is any time left for getting your coat on before legging it across the playground.
The final straw was the parents. Most of the children were so interesting that I could easily have taken out adoption papers. Even the ones who were sticking lead pencils in each other's legs and who made me cry when they would not listen. But the parents! They swore at teachers as if we were worse than traffic wardens. They thought nothing of taking kids out every Friday to "go down the caravan" and the only cultural experience they worshipped was shopping.
I look at the wonderful cards my classes have sent me, one with each child making a paper flower to create a bouquet, another a gallery with each child's self-portrait. It's a shame that while schools should be places where all of us can offer our talents, they have become arid academies where only the most totally efficient can survive.I have to say that while in so many ways I love teaching, it is so much easier just writing about it.
Bob Hewitt has taught for 30 years, but this will be his last
I'm a man of principle. And I'm so dim it hurts. Not long ago, we had our open evening for prospective pupils. The school was decked out with displays, the head gave the same speech twice, and the dance teacher and I shared a large classroom from which all furniture had been cleared except three rows of chairs. The place was packed. Thirty pupils put on dance displays while their teacher attended to the CD player. I did a couple of drama sessions.
A father sought me out afterwards. "Excellent," he said. "They were hanging on your every word. It's a pleasure to meet you." I lowered my eyes - I'm leaving at Easter. I also put off the dozen kids who were clamouring to know about the next school play - I don't know if there'll be one.
For 30 years, I've tried every way I know to stay in teaching because a) I need an income, and b) I've grown to be bloody brilliant at it. I mean, I'm a 56-year-old drama teacher, and the kids still tell me I'm cool.
But every year, it has got harder to stay on. I have left jobs in the past: once in the 1980s, when I refused to write a new syllabus I didn't believe in; and again in 1993, when, as an English teacher, I refused to follow the national curriculum (I'd rather be a motorbike courier). And once, in 1996, a contract was not renewed because, though the head said I was a brilliant teacher, he thought I'd get the place shut down when Ofsted came. But now, I am leaving for good.
Lesson plans are the problem. They were an excellent discipline when I was a student. I once spent two hours in 1970 getting the words right for the plan for the 40-minute lesson my tutor was going to see. I laid my plan on the desk the following day as the lesson began, and the next time I looked at it was after the bell had gone. I hadn't abandoned it as a policy decision. I'd forgotten it. There and then I resolved never to write one again (and I still got a double distinction for my PGCE).
Despite my lack of planning, I became head of drama at a local comprehensive in 1998. Drama is not a national curriculum subject, so I was delighted to take the job. I started in November. Ofsted came a week later.
I was teaching a year 11 GCSE class who'd had no teacher since June. My first priority was to give them some success, so we did lots of basic master-and-servant work. The inspector who watched the lesson failed it on both attainment and progress, but he hastened to calm me all the same. "Don't worry," he said. "You wrought a marvellous transformation in the first five minutes. You'll do wonders with them." But the school as a whole was placed in special measures. Out went the head. In came a new man. A straight-down-the-line, this-is-how-it-is, I-take-no-prisoners man.
When could he see me teach? Any lesson he wanted, just come in. I saw him a fortnight later at the back of the hall. He stood there for 10 minutes, then came forward to shake my hand. "Thank you, Bob, for the wonderful things you're doing for the children in this school," he said in front of all my year 8s. That was 11 months ago.
In March this year, however, he implemented a new Ofsted recommendation. All teachers were to write lesson plans broken down into five-minute segments. My heart sank.
How could I tell the head that I won't write lesson plans because I was right when I was 26? How can I tell him that I need my sleep, and that writing lesson plans would send me barmy inside a fortnight (hands up anyone who doesn't know of a teacher who's had a nervous breakdown). So I explain instead that much of my drama work is spontaneous. The only thing I know about any lesson is how I'm going to begin. Because the only way kids will perform spontaneously is if I set them the example.
But the head was unimpressed. Of course he was. We were in special measures. His instruction to all staff to write lesson plans in five-minute segments was a recommendation from our very own senior inspector. How could he have made an exception for me?
I refused to comply. A former pupil, Lee Simpson, came up from London for my disciplinary hearing. A Comedy Store player for 10 years, he explained that even when he taught at the National Theatre the only thing he knew in advance was the first thing he was going to do.
But Lee's evidence made no difference. The book of National Teaching Standards dictates that all lessons be planned. So I was up before the school governors. Twenty former pupils wrote to tell them what a great teacher I am, but they gave me a final written warning. I appealed. My appeal was turned down. The final ultimatum came: I must write lesson plans.
I love this job very much, but my instinct was just to let go. "Refusal to comply with a reasonable instruction is professional misconduct." Amen! Oh, amen! What a blessed release dismissal would be! But I have year 11s coming up to their GCSEs next spring, and if I continue to refuse to write the plans the head can't guarantee that I'll be allowed to stay that long. So although there's far less glory walking out the door than being thrown out, I will be writing lesson plans long enough to ensure that I can remain until Easter, and have resigned from that date.
Lesson plans are as good a peg as any upon which to hang up my coat. Although the £2,000 threshold would do just as well; or the health and safety rules that have banned my most challenging trust-exercise even though I've used it for 20 years without accident; or the new reward systems that are just cheap bribes; or the setting of targets that have nothing to do with educating children, and everything to do with performance-related pay; or the management's fear of Ofsted; or the new culture of improving all schools by encouraging pupils to inform on their mates.
To see schools these days as filled just with bureaucratic bullshit is to seriously miss the point, however. Education has traditionally been about freedom. But there is no freedom anymore. It's gone. Initiative and resourcefulness are banned. Every school has become a part of the gulag. How else could inspectors time the literacy hour with stopwatches, or a teacher be dismissed over a bit of missing paperwork?
It's all right for me to say so, mind. I've no more mortgage to pay. The head and the governors want me to stay, and my colleagues urge me to stick with it. "Just write the blooming lesson plans, Bob! The kids still need what you have to offer!" Well, maybe, but they'll get by.
I'm not happy about leaving. I was hoping to find out whether I could still be cool at 65. And I don't know how to tell my pupils I'm going. And if that father sends his kid to this school because he liked the look of the drama teacher, I won't be here to teach him. But I value my sanity too much to stay. And one thing's for sure: they cannot run gulags on their own.
