My teaching days are over

The journalist Steve McCormack gave up a high-profile job at the BBC to follow his vocation as a teacher. He explains why, only a few years later, he is leaving the profession in despair

I can remember the pronouncement vividly. I was walking along the beach at Worthing, the town where I'd grown up. My older brother Pete and I were chatting about my plan to leave the BBC and train to be a schoolteacher. "Steve," he said, "you have no idea how hard you'll find it."

It was, I conceded, an opinion worth listening to. Unlike me, Pete had gone straight into teaching after university and was by this point the head of a secondary school in America. His experience, gathered from two decades in teaching, and his knowledge of his younger brother's strengths and weaknesses forced him, if not to try to dissuade me, then at least to ensure I walked this life-changing plank with my eyes wide open.

Many of my friends, too, thought I was mad. They'd followed my career as a BBC correspondent, reporting on radio and television from Parliament, the (first) Gulf War and most European countries, with a few World Cups and Olympic Games thrown in for good measure. Why leave that "dream job", they argued, for the classroom jungle?

It wasn't easy to explain but, if I was honest, I'd probably peaked at the Beeb, and, more importantly, I'd begun to be drawn by the desire to "do something worthwhile", something vocational. While covering domestic news in the UK, I'd been into schools and hospitals and reported from courts and council estates. I'd seen the fault-lines and frayed edges of British society and now wanted to do something, however small, to address them.

Teaching was the obvious choice. I'd always believed the most important function of a society was education and I'd always liked children. So I thanked my brother for his sincerity, but said that I knew best.

The following September I joined 13 others on the secondary maths PGCE course at St Mary's College in Twickenham and was soon map-reading my way to my first placement school, a mixed Home Counties comprehensive with 1,700 pupils crammed on to a higgledy-piggledy site designed for perhaps half as many.

Training as a teacher is not quite like being thrown into the deep end of a foaming pool of peckish piranhas. Swimming lessons are given first: you're told how to make friends with the scaly ones, many of whom actually turn out to be cuddly dolphins in disguise, and you have plenty of opportunities to observe experienced staff diving in and getting the fish to swim in neat rows, teeth retracted, and solving simultaneous equations.

Eventually the time came for me to enter a classroom on my own. My early lessons were mixed. Some worked well, with children clearly learning things; others were plodding but uneventful; and a few were disasters. I experienced the thrill of seeing teenagers put their hands up and give the right answer to something I had taught them, and also blind panic on realising I was pitching a lesson far too high for the students in front of me.

My kindly mentor at the time, a teacher of about six years' standing, observed that asking a class to move effortlessly from the two times' table to quantum mechanics was "rather a big step". Other classes disintegrated simply because I couldn't control the kids. I'd arrived with the naive expectation, based on vague assertions from college lecturers and senior teachers, that "most students want to learn". What I discovered, as does almost every trainee teacher sooner or later, is that it can be very, very difficult to establish an atmosphere in a classroom where anyone can learn anything.

One of my worst experiences was when, unbeknown to me, a girl was being nastily teased by a boy behind her while I was vainly blathering on about Pythagoras. Suddenly, she burst into tears and fled the room. It was a stark illustration of my inexperience.

Other classes were more successful, and the school offered me a job starting the following autumn, which I accepted. But, looking back, it is easy to see that the seeds were already being sown for my eventual decision to leave the profession, even though I was still burning with the idealism that had motivated me in the first place.

In September 2001, free of the tag of trainee, I started my first proper job. I was now on a full timetable, and had my own tutor group to register and administer pastoral care to twice a day. Within a couple of weeks I was exhausted, and beginning to doubt my ability to keep going. The workload was immense and the pressure relentless. Although some classes were going well, others were proving difficult and grinding me down.

In one nightmare week, while my teaching was being observed by a senior colleague, I was told to "F-off" by a Year 10 student, in another lesson, a Year 8 boy climbed out of the window, and, in the playground, I made a pretty pathetic attempt to stop a fight between a couple of 15-year-old girls.

After school in the pub one Friday, my concern about the pupils' attitude was confirmed when a gaggle of teachers from abroad began to compare notes. One, an Australian with 10 years' experience, said that until she came to England, she'd never had a pupil refuse to do something outright; in this school, it had happened three times in a week. Colleagues from France and South Africa agreed. The widespread lack of respect for teachers and teaching that they were coming up against in Britain would be unthinkable in most schools back home.

Everyone in public life in the UK needs to wake up to this fact. Something fundamental is going wrong. Not with all children, granted, but with a frighteningly large proportion. Year on year, it's getting worse. Pupil behaviour explains why so many teachers leave early, and I can't see any hope on the horizon of things changing.

I soldiered on, but midway through my second year I was offered a three-month job, wearing my old media hat, at the Cricket World Cup in South Africa. I took it, and used the time away to consider my future.

On my return, however, I was drawn back into teaching, and last summer started a job at a comprehensive in outer London. Again, I found myself among wonderfully committed and kind teachers, and large numbers of lovely children. But the workload remained ridiculously burdensome, and I was swamped by time-consuming bureaucratic tasks.

In every school, pupils have to meet targets - from the grades that they should hit by Year 9, say, to learning five new Spanish words a week. But the teacher who has to dream these targets up has, on average, more than 200 children to think about. All of their targets have to be written down, discussed with the student in question, and the pupil's performance monitored against them. The scale of the operation means that the quality of thought and implementation plummets. It's another factor chipping away at morale.

In my second job, I was again frequently demoralised by battling against pupils who were in the wrong frame of mind - children who were basically good-natured, but covered with a veneer of indifference, poor motivation and little perceptible respect for education. I found myself driving to school wishing I were somewhere else.

This job is about imposing your authority for benevolent ends. A few teachers can do this naturally. Most have to work at it, and use tricks, techniques and a bit of acting to get their way. I was firmly in the second category, but found the process, day in day out, draining. So I decided to leave school at Christmas and return to journalism.

Then, of course, fate got out its emotional knife and gave it a good twist. Out of the blue, pupils and teachers paid me kind compliments and said they wished I were staying. On the last day of term, my wonderful Year 10 tutor group unexpectedly floored me by showering me with presents and touching comments.

I don't for a moment regret my brief spell as a teacher. Although it's pulled me through the emotional wringer, it's left me with some wonderful memories. I've been touched by the warmth and kindness of many pupils, and made friends among teachers that I know I'll keep for life.

I have made a small difference to some young lives, and countless names and faces will stay with me for ever. But finally I had to decide. In the end, teaching wasn't the job I hoped it would be.

education@independent.co.uk

PLEASE, SIR: AN OPEN LETTER TO CHARLES CLARKE

Dear Secretary of State

Full marks for recruiting more graduates into teacher training, but you're wasting your time unless you can stop so many of them leaving. Retention is the key, and the current workload, allied to pupils' poor behaviour, is a recipe for early burnout.

Persuade your colleagues in the Cabinet to try to understand why so many teenagers are rootless, poorly motivated and with no thirst for learning. There are too many malign, and too few positive, influences on them from early childhood onwards.

Teachers' pay is not bad, but you have to find ways of tackling high living costs in the South East.

Press on with more vocational training after 14. Too many waste time on pointless GCSE courses when they could be preparing for apprenticeships.

Ditch coursework at GCSE. It's far too open to parental help and plagiarism.

Stop selling school playing fields. The amount of high-quality exercise most children get in schools is lamentable.

Yours, Steve