Kids are awful – so teachers deserve a lot more than ‘extra lie-ins’

If the government is really serious about making the profession more attractive to Gen Z, they’re going to have to have to go a lot further than the occasional day off, writes former teacher Ryan Coogan

Teaching is the hardest job in the world – but it doesn’t have to be (Getty Images)

Kids are awful. They are messy, socially challenged semi-people who we only tolerate because of that knowledge that one day, by the infinite mercy of the Lord our God, they will no longer be children.

It’s why teachers are so important. They corral our children, keep them isolated from polite society and stuff their heads with knowledge until they emerge blinking in the light, civilised and ready to contribute. In a perfect world, we would pay teacher £1m a year and build statues to them in our cultural and political institutions, as a small way to repay them for the critical service they provide to the nation.

But we do not live in a perfect world, and so instead we treat our teachers with contempt. The actual mechanisms of teaching and learning take a back seat to form filling, tedious meetings, pedagogical experiments – and endless preparation for sadistic, arbitrary inspections. It’s no wonder that they’re leaving the profession in droves.

With the election of a new Labour government, it was hoped that we would finally start affording our teachers the respect they deserve – and after 14 years in the political wilderness they finally have a silver bullet that will fix our schools and make teaching attractive again: the occasional lie-in and a three-day weekend once every fortnight.

That’s right: the charity Teach First says changes are needed to attract Gen Z towards teaching, so they’ve proposed teachers receive a “flexibility entitlement” to address the recruitment and retention crisis. Schools have chosen to interpret the initiative in their own ways: Dixons Academies Trust has introduced a nine-day fortnight for teachers in some of their schools, while All Saints Catholic College west London is allowing teachers to come into school at 10:30am to come in once a week.

Now, in another life, I was a teacher. All my friends were teachers. My partner was a teacher. Notice the use of past tense – most of us bailed when we realised we’d been sold a false bill of goods. What was supposed to be an affirming use of our academic expertise was very quickly revealed to be a Kafkaesque labyrinth. I don’t think there was a day where one of us wouldn’t break down in tears and threaten to quit due to the pressures of the job, the complete lack of support we received – and the constantly-changing ruleset by a government that didn’t seem to consider us as anything other than textbook delivery machines.

And don’t get me wrong, everybody loves a lie-in. But the idea that this extra time off every two weeks will allow teachers a better work/life balance is a bit of a fallacy. Because of the pressures of the job, when you’re a teacher there isn’t really any such thing as “time off”. What these schools are offering, in practical terms, is more time to prep for lessons, more time to make PowerPoints, and more time to stress out about things they were already stressed out about. Which is great – I’m not saying they won’t find that extra breathing room useful – but it’s a little fanciful to imply that they’ll finally have time to catch up on Breaking Bad.

One thing the government has already done that actually might make a difference is scrapping one-word Ofsted ratings, meaning that struggling schools will no longer be under so much pressure to avoid being labelled “inadequate”. While I’m sure there’s a way to do school inspections without turning everybody in the building into a neurotic, blubbering mess, Ofsted inspections as they have existed for the past decade plus are clearly not the way, as tragically punctuated by the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry.

But if the goal is to make teaching more attractive to people, there’s still a long way to go. Do you know what really puts people off teaching? When they show up to the first day of their PGCE and realise that their academic practice is going to take a back seat to something called “professional studies” – a series of half-baked seminars that teach you “theories” of teaching that have limited or no applicability when faced with a real, flesh-and-blood child.

It’s at that point that it becomes clear that the top minds in our educational sector are a bunch of middle-management bureaucrats who fetishise the philosophy of pedagogy without ever actually checking to see if it works in practice. Think you’re the next Ms Honey or Mr Keating? Sorry buddy, that hippie stuff doesn’t fly anymore – you’ll be planning your lessons down to the second and marking all your essays according to the least-comprehensible rubrics science can muster.

What teachers really need – what really would make the job seem worth doing and perhaps help scrounge up those 6,500 extra bodies Labour has promised – is to be treated as the adults and experts that they are. The clue is in the name – they are teachers. They are educators. They are people who are there to impart knowledge. They are not circus animals, there to jump through Ofsted’s hoops to no real benefit. Treat them – and pay them – the way they deserve.

That’s the real change that’s needed – if not for their sake, than for the sake of our kids, who are being failed by the system just as much as our educators, if not more. Teaching is the hardest job in the world – but it doesn’t have to be.