PREMIUM: Teaching in the 2000s

What I experienced in my first 4 years as a teacher haunts me to this day.

A dumpster fire at a school

The first school I worked in

More than twenty years later, this is what I remember from the school¹ where I was an NQT.²

There was no centralised detention system. If we wanted to enforce sanctions, we had to give up our own breaks and lunchtimes for detentions. As a result, low-level disruption usually went unpunished. For a serious incident, there was a form that had to be filled in. The forms went to the Head of Department, then to the Head of Year, then to a member of the Senior Management Team (SMT), and then back to the teacher. At one point, I tried to monitor how many forms ever completed the circuit. It was about 5%. Most of the time, serious incidents went unpunished.

There were a lot of serious incidents. In my first week, I had a calculator thrown at my head by an unidentified pupil in a crowd while I was on my way to gate duty at the end of the day. From then on, I avoided being alone with large crowds of pupils. In my first cover lesson, I was assaulted by a pupil who I asked to stay behind for a detention. In my second year of teaching, I remember a teacher, who was new to the school, was mystified that a member of my form group had spat on him and yet it had resulted in no serious consequences. By then, I considered that normal. There were never any serious consequences.

Very few teachers lasted long in my department. Before the end of my NQT year, I noticed I had been at the school as long as, or longer, than half the teachers in my department. Verbal abuse and outright defiance were common. This was not a failing school. Ofsted³ found it satisfactory. You could even say that tolerating the worst behaviour was policy. A bigwig from the Local Authority came in and told us that there would be no more permanent exclusions in the LA. The policy was “inclusion” and that meant keeping the worst kids in school. Managers interpreted this to mean we should keep the worst kids in lessons, and any teacher who experienced bad behaviour was to be blamed for it. If they needed support, that was the responsibility of their department; SMT were not responsible for behaviour.

The second school I worked in