The first week

A school year starts something like this:

Day one: 9am start (earlier if you’re really unlucky). You’ve just had the worst night of sleep you’ve had in the last six weeks, possibly ever. You turn up early, because you want to set a good impression¹. The staff room/hall/wherever you’re meant to meet is full of people with quickly fading tans chatting about their holidays and what a shit night’s sleep they just had.

At about 9:05, the head starts talking. They’ve given you five minutes grace, to show they are not monsters.² They then proceed to talk about results for half an hour, using words like ‘marginal gains’, ‘outstanding results in Geography’, ‘the gender gap’ and ‘the PP gap³‘. Then it’s on to procedures and then…

At about 10 (scheduled for 9:30, but the head overran), some luckless soul has to do the Safeguarding⁴ refresher.

11 is laughably called breaktime. In reality, everyone realises they’ve just had six weeks off and now it’s back to the grind. Rooms need tidying, classlists and seating plans need sorting, someone in your new tutor group has a parent you need to contact immediately, your head of year needs a word, your head of department needs twenty and you’re meant to be at a new staff induction. I’m always surprised more people aren’t openly weeping at this point.

11:15 and we’re back to presentations. Now it’s on to teaching and learning, or as the more experienced staff⁵ call it, ‘sucking eggs’.

And so it goes. As a new teacher, this could well be exciting, but it’s probably bewildering and you’re thinking, possibly panicking, about just how do you get to have a wee.

Day 2 has some department time, if you’re lucky. In this, the head of department⁶ will go through results in more detail. Again, if you are new to the school, the next hour is spent discussing students you’ve not, and never will, meet. Somebody, usually an older member of staff, will make excuses about how the students should have done better. With the pressure on teachers and students now, this generally doesn’t end well.

So, at the end of the second day, you go home, head spinning and knackered. The kids haven’t even arrived yet. That’s tomorrow, so cue your actual worst nights sleep ever. Honestly, I did this for 31 years, and always walked into school in day 3 thinking ‘I have completely forgotten how to do this’. That slight panic sets in when 30 students are staring at you, for period 1. This is usually your tutor group, and thier first impression of you⁷ quickly becomes ‘who is the old person⁸ doing a goldfish impression?’ By breaktime, two hours later, you are exhausted but have three hours to go.

Welcome to teaching. Only 39 weeks to go.

1. For my last school in Devon, I was used to London time, so I actually turned up before the caretakers and couldn’t get in the building. My eagerness made me look like a twat. ↩︎
2. They may well be, but I’ve worked with really good heads. I’ll probably revisit this in a later blog. ↩︎
3. PP is Pupil Premium and covers a wide range of students from those who are on free school meals, and forces children. There are lots of other reasons a student may be considered PP, but what they have in common is they usually do worse than non-PP students. Trying to tackle this is a massive challenge for education, particularly in deprived rural areas. ↩︎
4. Safeguarding is vital in schools, it just doesn’t need to be a two hour boring presentation. ↩︎
5. At this point, this could well be everyone, especially if the topic is ‘how to get the students to enter the room’. ↩︎
6. This was me, for most of my career. ↩︎
7. The one that counts. ↩︎
8. This verb changes depending on the year of the student. Year 7 may well think ‘person’ by by year 11, it’s more like ‘twat’ or ‘senile fuckwit’. ↩︎