I’m a teacher. I only work from 8.30-2.50 on the days I’m at school. I don’t prepare anything outside of school hours. I don’t do any work at the weekend. My CPD also always happens at school on site and within school hours. I don’t pay for my CPD; they pay for it. I have 13 weeks of holidays a year and I don’t do nothing at school during that time. I have an amazing social life. I see my family all the time. I have angelic kiddos at school who always come fully equipped and are DESPERATE to know how to solve quadratic equations and do trigonometry, just for the beauty of the knowledge.
I am just going to nip outside to park up my pet Unicorn and come back to typing…
Wouldn’t it be lovely if all of these misconceptions were real? Or if even just one of them was always true, all the time, for every teacher. But they’re not. We’re busy. We are BONKERS busy. And we are stressed. We are working hard, harder than ever. We’re leaving, faster, sooner than ever.
And we are broken. The system is broken.
The Queen’s speech today used a lot of words and said nothing about education. Money may or may not find its way to schools but there is no concrete in the speech. Just more empty words about ‘world class something,’ and ‘potential and preparation for something else’.
It’s just empty words. Nothing more.
I am lucky. I do work in a lovely school with good kids and great colleagues. But pennies are tight and resources scant. There are funding model changes across England that will throw spanners in works and cut off provision for young people that need it, that cause teachers, teaching assistants and other support staff to lose their jobs and then they wonder why teachers leave.
The system is broken. And we are breaking.
