I am currently enjoying my happiest period as a teacher in almost a decade. My lesson plans are detailed and differentiated, my resources are in order, and my marking is a technicolour dream. You can see the difference in the classroom; my students are engaged, focused and appreciative of my feedback. I even have a sneaking feeling that I may get an outstanding lesson observation soon. All this and I enjoy my lunch every day, even venturing to chat with colleagues in the staffroom. I have, of course, gone part-time. And I have my children to thank for it.
Before becoming a dad, I coped with full-time teaching. Despite the frantic plate-spinning – the reports, observations, inspections and marking – I dealt with everything that was thrown at me because outside school I was my own master. 90 books to mark? Sunday afternoon. A set of controlled assessments? Two days of half term.
Being married to another teacher helped; when one of us was busy, the other picked up the domestic slack. We even synchronised work days in the holidays to make the most of our time together.
Fast forward to 2008 – my fifth year in the job – and the arrival of our eldest child. Our misshapen but manageable world suddenly imploded. My normal arrival time at school (7.40am) was thwarted by nursery opening hours and later-morning traffic. I would screech into the car park at 8.33am if I was lucky, and trot to my tutor room, sweating and irritable, trying not to be spotted by my superiors.
Arriving home in the evening with a freshly collected baby, relaxation was replaced by playing, feeding, bathing and putting to bed. The flexibility that was the cornerstone of our former harmony became a distant memory. I now had to stick to a two-hour window every night for school work, regardless of the kind of day I’d had or how well we’d slept. These slots were often ineffective and punctuated by yawns. Some of my comments in books were illegible as a result of me nodding off mid-sentence. Work that wasn’t done in those two hours wasn’t done at all.
A second child followed the first, and the constraints became tighter. Weekends and holidays were simply a switch from one full-time job to another – in loco parentis to just in parentis. Try as I might, I could not do what I felt was a good job within the allocated hours. My wife felt the same, and we made the decision for her to take some time off to be with the children. Although it felt counterintuitive, I applied for a post with more responsibility in a new school to balance the books.
Despite being relieved of most duties at home, things were no better in my new job. I still wanted to be a dad outside school, but found myself unable to do this and cope with increased professional accountability. I barely tried anything new in the classroom, constantly reverting to what had worked in the past. I was distracted and curt with my family, and I shied away from meeting people because I felt I had nothing to say. Feeling stressed and trapped crept up on me gradually, but the real shock was suddenly feeling boring.
As I grew desperate to work better and faster, I began going to bed without doing any prep and getting up at 4am, forcing myself into a race against the clock before the school day began, relying on adrenaline to keep me focused. I soon found myself on medication for anxiety.
I finally threw in the towel in July. Rather than going long-term sick, part-time seemed the best option and luckily the right vacancy presented itself. I wish this were a permanent solution, but a 50% pay drop suggests otherwise. My wife is now the main breadwinner, but even with our combined wage I may have no choice but to step unto the breach once more.
I realise that all working parents have to tackle the baby/toddler/infant phase, regardless of occupation, and that we must all accept that this period is a challenging and exhausting one. But for teachers – male and female – it is when the precariousness of our profession is most exposed.
Expectations are such that teachers can only manage their duties by backloading work, smoothing out the peaks and troughs by working through weekends and holidays. Setting aside the pedagogical truth that this isn’t the way to deliver a good education, what are the implications for our own children? We can do what a lot of working parents do and pack them off to clubs and expensive activity days, but this feels ridiculous. Family time was a key factor in this career choice for many of us and a trade-off against earning more money. And if we can’t take the time to bring our own kids up properly, pity the poor sods that have to deal with them during the school week.
In a few short years, our offspring will be old enough for house keys, mobiles and lie-ins. Perhaps when they no longer need us around or want to spend time with us, I’ll re-establish my (admittedly imperfect) practices of old and enjoy the job full-time once more. But a word of advice to those considering a career in education: if you can’t do this job between Sunday night and Friday afternoon, 39 weeks a year, then maybe working with children – and having them – isn’t for you.
