Why I Left Teaching

DISCLAIMER: This is my personal experience and absolutely not intended to put anyone off teaching. Many aspects of the job I absolutely loved and still continue to tutor and work with vulnerable young people. If you are considering teaching as a career please do not assume it’s all bad just because of this post! Many of my reasons are personal to my experiences and may not apply to you. It is a very rewarding career, it just isn’t for me!

Peer on Peer sexual abuse is still a raging pandemic – And yet it still isn’t taken seriously within schools. In light of Everyone’s Invited releasing the names of all the schools, even OFSTED have recommended that all schools investigate this whether they were named or not. I was working in a school that was named on this list at the time of its release and there wasn’t a word said about it. From my perspective, as someone who was a victim of this type of abuse in school, it is a serious safeguarding breach if this is happening and victims either don’t feel comfortable coming forward or are coming forward and it not being dealt with. I expected that schools would make statements with clear action plans of how they plan to tackle this, and yet there was radio silence from most schools. I was incredibly disappointed with the lack of response to this and felt that schools don’t deliver good enough relationships and sex education (RSE) that teaches young people about things like consent and safe sex. This is a problem that has been around probably for decades and shows no sign of slowing down or going away, and yet schools don’t seem to want to discuss it. After trying to raise the campaign to other staff I was ignored and told to keep quiet. I wasn’t allowed to discuss it with my students, even though it directly affects and is happening to them! I would have loved to work on this and have a career in safeguarding but with my history and still suffering from complex PTSD it had a detrimental effect on my mental health. Perhaps one day in the future when my mental health is more stable this is something I can explore again.

Teacher training is very “evidence based” but schools do not follow this. For example, we were told about how there is a lot of evidence to say that streaming children (putting them in ability based sets) is not effective and that mixed ability groups are more effective. We had to write a whole essay about this but schools are very resistant to change and do not follow much of the research and evidence. It felt almost futile to sit and write a 5000 word piece plus a literature review on things like streaming when in practice schools are reluctant to make any changes. “Money” is always cited as the reason for this but there are changes that can be made without spending millions and I almost feel like this is just a quick way to shut people up. For example just being a bit nicer to the kids instead of treating them like a burden doesn’t cost anything!

You’re only allowed an opinion once you are SLT (senior leadership) or higher. I found that as a trainee and newly qualified teacher no-one cared what I had to say and I was told “you have no idea what you’re talking about” when discussing mental health and autism in kids, two things that I have lived experience of and caused me difficulty in education. Many teachers still see ADHD kids as “lazy” or “not trying hard enough” and see autistic kids as “attention seeking”. Mentally ill children are “attention seeking” too, or are treated with impatience if they don’t recover from serious mental illness overnight. One student of mine who is autistic really struggled in the school environment. It is loud and overwhelming and as soon as she walked in she would have a meltdown. Teachers would say she was “bringing bullying on herself” and “she just cries to get her own way”, and when I tried to explain (as an autistic person) that she was having a meltdown because she is overwhelmed and experiencing sensory overload, I was told I’m not a teacher yet so I have no idea what I’m talking about. Eventually this girl’s parents decided to homeschool her instead and the teachers all stood around talking about how she had pretended to have breakdowns and would cry until she got her own way. This is incredibly harmful and at no point were teachers willing to consider this was a damaging stereotype. Same with mental health – I had a 14 year old student with very deep fresh self harm marks appearing every day, and yet all teachers would do was stand around and say “she isn’t helping herself!”. I was constantly told to be quiet and stop “making problems” for calling out unfair treatment of our children. The environment in schools felt very fake to me and felt more about appearances than actually ensuring better outcomes for students and opinions were only seen as valid if they were in agreement with what schools were already doing. It felt defensive and almost like schools would take feedback as personal criticism and I’m not sure how we are supposed to ever improve in that environment.

Teachers generally don’t like children. I became a teacher because I love children and wanted to help them get through education, especially those considered vulnerable that need a little bit more understanding. I was really shocked that in all the schools I worked in the atmosphere was generally quite hostile towards them. Most teachers would complain all day about how annoying the children were and how they wish they could be harsher on them! A child could have a mental health breakdown, or have been bullied, or something similar and instead of dealing with the perpetrators the teachers would usually stand around saying the child had brought it on themselves. I noticed this especially with children who were disabled or struggling with their mental health – they were seen as “weird” kids and if they were bullied they were treated like they had asked for it. I rarely heard anything positive about the kids and whenever I would say anything positive, I was called “too soft” or “too nice” and told that one day Ill realise the kids aren’t nice. Teachers often wonder why children are so disengaged and disruptive at times and I think this is why – right from the start you are treated like an inconvenience. Why signup to a career that involves working with children every single day if you are just going to stand around complaining about them? Teaching is hard, yes, but many of the “problems” some kids have come down to external factors – kids that bully often learn that behaviour elsewhere, kids that are very disruptive may be attempting to hide ailing mental health.. I believe we should be looking more at the underlying causes rather than branding children as “naughty” or “problematic”. It might not be in our control or remit to fix that as teachers, but we have to understand that children are still people with thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Sanctioning children for things out of their control. My main reason for leaving teaching was the behaviour management systems. Having to sanction a children (usually a detention) for things like lack of equipment or improper uniform always sat weirdly with me – is that the child’s responsibility? Even if older children have a job, it almost always comes to the parents or carers to purchase school uniform and equipment. I saw several students in several schools who clearly had parents who were struggling to afford their uniform, but the child was just given a detention for “repeatedly wearing incorrect uniform”. Some children were in a constant cycle of detentions because they never had the right uniform. Is it a 12, 13 year old’s responsibility to buy the correct uniform? I don’t think so. What is that child supposed to do if mum says they can’t afford it or they can’t get the right uniform? Especially with how expensive uniforms can be and with many schools requiring expensive uniforms from a specific retailer, it prevents lower income families from accessing the correct uniform and disadvantages these children from the start. In addition to this, I found it frustrating when I was expected to hand out sanctions to students for symptoms or traits of their disability. I had an ADHD student who often shouted out, and instead of trying to work with him in an understanding, empathetic way, I was expected to immediately sanction him and tell him off. He would grow more frustrated and felt a lot of shame as he was being punished for a disability he cannot control and this would only make the problem worse, but teachers refused to listen to why this wasn’t working and instead told me I hadn’t sanctioned him hard enough. I thought being a teacher would be about growing and developing young people (which is literally in the job description!) but instead the focus is on punishment and no one can see that this just sends you in circles. Punishing students without tackling the root cause of the problem only results in worse behaviour. It doesn’t fix the bad behaviour, it just makes the children feel shame which often spirals the behaviour.

I could talk about this for hours (more like days) but these are the main reasons I no longer plan to stay in teaching. For some these reasons might seem like a reason to stay, to push and lobby for change, but they mirror my own experiences in school so much and I felt so disheartened that nothing had changed. The impact that teaching had on my mental health was incredibly detrimental and given that getting time off for therapy is almost impossible, I felt that I had to look after my health. I’m not saying I’ll never teach again, but it isn’t likely. I will never stop engaging in activism and supporting motion for change in the education industry though and I hope one day we begin to see those changes so that future generations can engage and be better supported through their education.