Absence

And we’re back! Did you miss it? The thirty seconds you got to catch up with your work buddies? The rush of thirty (or more) faces looking at you, waiting for you to fill them with your knowledge and expertise? The feeling of panic when you see the queue at the photocopier?

Relax, it’s the summer term. The sun is shining¹, exam classes are building towards The End, and everything is good with the world – right?

So why doesn’t it feel like that? Why has the low level anxiety from the end of last term come back with a vengeance? And why on Earth are you getting a tickle at the back of your throat that usually means a cold is coming²? There’s no way you can be sick this week, you’ve just had two weeks off for God’s sake!

And there, right there, is a big issue for teachers. You can’t be ill after a holiday, people will think you’re taking the piss. You can’t be ill the week before a holiday either, because people will think you’re taking the piss. Or the week with a parents evening. Or the week of mock exams. Or the week you are down to deliver an assembly on the virtues of Pi⁴. Or, or, or….

Like many jobs, there’s no ‘good’ time to be ill, but teachers get it really bad. Now if you’re not a teacher reading that, you may well scoff, but imagine your typical day at work. Now imagine you’re ill – not that ill, but definitely under the weather, definitely would be better off staying in bed or on the sofa – and you’re at work, doing your normal work stuff, but it starts answering you back. Starts refusing to do what you want it to do. Starts talking to someone else whilst you’re explaining what needs to be done. It’s okay though, because you have a break coming up, but now you have to cover someone else who has actually called in sick and so now you’re out on break duty with a thousand loud kids. And then SLT do a lesson drop in…

There are other consequences to being ill in teaching too. When you return, someone else has been using your room and your equipment. It’s like someone has slept in your bed. The room feels wrong. Paperwork has been moved from it’s ‘this is really important’ pile into the ‘I don’t know what that is, so I’ll keep it until there’s loads then bin the lot in one go’ pile. Your pens are not in the right drawer or pot. Exercise books are not in their clearly labelled trays but in some sort of mass blob like they’re waiting for Steve McQueen to turn up⁵. And what the fuck has happened to all the glue sticks? Why are they on the ceiling?

So teachers drag themselves in, fight through illness that would be better treated sat in bed or on a sofa binging a TV show⁶. They leave themselves exhausted – or at least more exhausted than usual – and pass the illness to colleagues and students. It’s insane really. I once saw a member of SLT throwing up into the bin in his office, but he needed to stay in work for-

Well, I can’t actually remember why he needed to stay. I’d guess he doesn’t either. Pretty sure the cleaner didn’t thank him for his service that day.

What happens when a teacher is ill is a bit crazy too. Usually you have to ring in each morning you are sick, and usually before 7:30 a.m. and then you have to set cover for the classes you are due to teach. If you have a five, hour long periods over the day, then that’s a lot of work to type up and send in. Planning a lesson to teach yourself is very different to planning it for someone else to teach. You see your planner, and then realise that lesson 3 is a follow up lesson on simultaneous equations⁷ and there’s no way you can explain that for a cover supervisor⁸ to teach. You haven’t photocopied the resources for period 5 and in fact the whole day is shot as there’s so much explaining to do for every lesson.

Christ, might as well go in.

And if you don’t? Hopefully there is a cover supervisor available, and if not, it’s one of your colleagues⁹ who has to teach the lesson as you’re not in. Yay! You’re now really popular with the massively overworked head of English who got pulled to teach your lesson. See, you rarely get covered by someone who actually knows your subject and so now your students are behind where they should be.

So teachers don’t take sick days lightly – or at least, most don’t.

In the last 10 year, the percentage of teachers taking absence has increased by 10%, and the average number of days has gone up by more than one. The average sickness over the school year is over a week, and the trend is upwards. With everything I just said about it’s more hassle than it’s worth, teachers still take sick days. Why is this?

Firstly, and I’ve really noticed over the course of this year, kids are full of germs. The average class size is around 26¹⁰, so in a five period day, that’s potentially 130 different families a teacher could come into contact with. That’s a lot of potential disease¹¹. Sometimes, you get sick and sometimes you get really sick. A school not that far from me closed for a few days in the Autumn term because too many teachers had flu so they couldn’t open. Flu jabs for teachers should be mandatory.

Workload and stress also have a lot to answer for. Much has been written about teachers’ workload, so I won’t go into that again here, but if teachers stopped work at exactly 1265 hours¹², nobody would be in school past Easter¹³.

Constant attacks from parents and the media really don’t help. I still hear the disdain about ‘had another holiday’ when chatting to people in the shops or pubs. Local town/village Facebook groups are full of people having a pop at their local school. The news is full of stories of shit teachers, or shit situations. Very rarely do you come across a good news story about teaching.

This all takes a toll. What happened to the respect teachers used to have? What happened to it being something people were impressed by? What happened to parents backing schools over their kids? And to be clear here, I don’t mean in things like accusations of assault (verbal or otherwise), I mean in HOMEWORK. Why do parents attack schools because we require their child to actually do some work?

I read an Instagram post this week where the mother was slagging the school off because her kid kept forgetting to ask for ingredients for his Food Tech lesson. How is that the school’s fault? Surely it’s the kid’s fault? But no, let’s go on Instagram and slag the school off¹⁴. Parents really need to step up! If you have a complaint, contact the school not AnonymousParticipant832 on Facebook¹⁵. If you’re kid isn’t doing homework, look at why. Schools offer homework clubs and other spaces to get the work done, so why not take advantage of that? Or maybe – just maybe, and here me out here – sanction your child. Take away their phone/PlayStation/Football practice whatever. Just, you know, parent.

But instead we blame the teachers and the school. And then we wonder why retention rates are diabolical – 25% of teachers quit within three years¹⁶. There are many, complex reasons for this, but shit parents are among them, and it’s increasing. Hmm, I’m uncovering something that’s deeply worrying and I’m aware you have things to do, so let’s pick this up next week.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Well, it is right now. Which means it’ll be raining by the time I press post. ↩︎
2. At this time of year, it’s adoringly called a ‘summer cold’, like it’s somehow not as bad being ill now as earlier in the year. I’m a man, so if I get a cold, the world is officially ending. ↩︎
3. Apologies for the American spelling. Image taken from 20 Man Flu Memes to Make Your Day So Much Better – SayingImages.com ↩︎
4. Shout out to Dave, who had to deliver an assembly I wrote on this! ↩︎
5. If you get this reference by the way, congratulations! You’re my kind of people. If you’d prefer Matt Dillon, then okay, I’ll give you that, but you are wrong. ↩︎
6. Highly, highly recommend The Pitt. ↩︎
7. Other, equally difficult topics are available in every subject. ↩︎
8. A cover supervisor is not usually a teacher. They are a Higher Level Teaching Assistant (HLTA). In other words, someone getting barely above minimum wage comes in to take the shit you should have. They are amazing people, but like all teaching assistants and office staff, woefully underpaid. ↩︎
9. One of the good ones. Crap teachers rarely get pulled for cover. ↩︎
10. Release home – Schools, pupils and their characteristics – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK ↩︎
11. Also, some kids personal hygiene is appalling…. ↩︎
12. The current mandated hours for a classroom teacher in the UK. Forty weeks teaching, plus training, plus parents evenings and meetings are all in this figure. So next time you feel the need to take the piss out of a teacher who is on holiday, try to remember they are not actually being paid… ↩︎
13. And more likely sooner than that. What other profession counts so much on the goodwill of the staff? It’s insane. ↩︎
14. The comments were probably 50/50 in terms of support and people laughing at her. ↩︎
15. FFS. ↩︎
16. More than 114,000 teachers have quit teaching since 2021/22 – SecEd ↩︎