Being inspected. It’s a concept guaranteed to bring a unifying fear to teachers across the land. We join together as we share our empathetic understanding of just how crazy life is during that week of intense scrutiny between The Call and peace being restored. Or so you would think.
After a week of very little sleep and a very lot of caffeine, a conversation the following weekend with friends – both teachers – took me by surprise. Naturally, talk turned to work and I filled them in on the inspection: “It was mentally busy, one of those things, but I survived.”
Rather than solidarity, I was met with a less comforting response: “Well, you work in an independent school so it doesn’t really count, does it?”
I was slightly lost for words (which doesn’t happen often). How a fellow teacher could genuinely use the phrase “it doesn’t really count” about being inspected was beyond my comprehension.
That was until I remembered – I work in a private school, I am the enemy. The lowest of the low. The slacker who flops on the sofa at 4pm. Parents have paid for their children’s GCSEs, so why do we even bother conducting lessons? I am the person who doesn’t understand what hard work is. The one who doesn’t care about the children.
Except, that’s not actually me. I am an English teacher. I teach the same exam boards as thousands of other English teachers across the country. I teach the same novels, on the same GCSE specification. I teach lots of different children every day.
I teach, because that is my job. Yes, it is currently my job in an independent school, but it’s no different to when it was my job in either of my previous schools. It is no different to what the rest of my PGCE cohorts do every day. No matter where we teach, our lives are made difficult by bureaucracy and paperwork. No matter where we teach, we face challenging pupils and challenging parents. No matter where we teach, we all do it for the same reason – because of our pupils.
Inspection is inspection. Regardless of which organisation has sent its inspectors into your school, they are all looking for the same thing – teaching and learning that enables pupils to make progress. It was that that kept me in work late and awake in the night until the inspection was over.
I am lucky enough to work for an incredible senior leadership team (SLT) and headteacher, who were nothing but supportive of the whole staff from start to finish. Even so, the pressure I felt during the experience was immense. It was the overwhelming feeling of not wanting to let anyone down – SLT, colleagues, pupils or myself.
What makes a teacher a teacher is the pupils. Take them away and we are administrators, filers, fillers in of (many, many) forms, writers of reports and data crunchers, but we are not teachers. Our pupils are what make us who we are.
Because I am neither smug nor stupid, I do not imagine for one second that life for many teachers at the moment is anything other than difficult (at best). Working in an independent school hasn’t removed from me my empathy and understanding that this is a hard job which is made all the harder by people who don’t know what they are talking about, making decisions that make our lives more difficult still.
What makes me really sad – on a good day, angry on a bad one – is the way that teachers are not protecting each other. Teachers take pot-shots at each other face-to-face, on social media and in comment sections on blogs. They pull one another down because of decisions they have made about their employment, make judgements about what they must believe because of where they work and imply that because of where they have chosen to work, they are morally superior and care about children more than their colleagues who work elsewhere.
I am aware that teachers in the independent sector are often just as guilty of this as anyone. I am sure that people will read this and roll their eyes, because what do I understand, what do I know? I am just another independent school teacher on a soapbox. But just stop. We are teachers because we have pupils. And they are what matters. Where or what we teach – full-time or part-time, primary, secondary or tertiary – doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t be us and them, private v state v academies, teachers sniping at each other in 140 characters. We should be advocating for children regardless of anything and everything else. We are not teachers without our pupils – just think how much more noise we could make if we all spoke together.
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