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Back in the mid-to late noughties I was in my last year of teaching. Having worked at various secondary schools in the north-eastern region for the preceding 6 years I had reached the limits of what I could endure in a profession that was becoming ever more toxic, unenjoyable and increasingly ridiculous with each passing day.

What should have been an environment for shaping individual growth and development was nothing more than an institutionalised body obsessed with internal politics and management hierarchy, league tables/measuring performance and all manner of ‘teaching’ fads which appeared to be nothing more than exercises in shoring up the ego’s of the staff involved in delivering them.

Dealing with the management-minded career teacher was always depressing as they were some of the most anally retentive, unfriendly, hostile-to-independent-thinking and quite frankly obnoxious people I have ever met. Many operated in their own poisonous little cliques happily “climbing over” and/or stabbing other staff members in the back when the occasion suited them. I never ever felt comfortable being around people like that as the foundation for trust, if it even exists at all, is wafer thin at best. When you know someone seeks power, displays a persistently cold & arrogant demeanour and behaves with a lack of empathy towards others you have to watch your back at all times. Every opportunity, no matter how lacking in integrity, to climb the career ladder will be eagerly embraced and used - even, and sometimes especially, if it involves selling others down the river. Always beware the smile that conceals a knife behind the back.

I always half-joked that I preferred dealing with the troublesome students as they were at least honest in their behaviour (and, ironically, many times were much easier to endure than the career minded snakes in suits). How often such humour proved to be true though.

Having been on the inside, as it were, for 6 years it became increasingly clear that the education system simply and unequivocally just does NOT work. Large numbers of students left school with barely functioning levels of literacy and numeracy. Many of them deficient in certain skills and knowledge that would allow them to move within and contribute to society on any meaningful level. Yet those who did leave with good grades were still functioning at a level far below that of previous generations (thanks to the dumbing down of the curriculum).

Was this purely the fault of the education system? No. There were many other contributory factors which fed into that. Factors that were beyond the control and influence of teachers to make any inroads into. Factors that, at many times, made the job of teaching that much more challenging.

It certainly didn’t help that many families (and I use the world loosely to describe just how dysfunctional and incredibly damaged some of these groups truly were) produced offspring that they didn’t particularly care for and invested no time whatsoever in their personal development. Some of the stories that I heard from inside sources within the SEN (Special Educational Needs) department who liaised with the Police, Social Workers and care agencies were truly disturbing and upsetting. Experiences that no child should ever have to go through were confidentially related to me by said sources and these gave me an insight into just how warped, depraved and degenerate some ‘parents’ truly were.

I now understood why certain students were, without exaggeration, simply damaged beyond repair; their eyes permanently hosting a cold and dead void where life would not take root. For such students school would only ever be an (often futile) exercise in limiting their ability to damage themselves, others and their immediate scholastic environment by already overworked and overburdened teachers.

Sadly when the well is poisoned the water can never be fresh and everyone suffers the consequences in the surrounding community. This was a daily reality with many inner-city schools  that I worked at and left me wondering how many students managed to avoid being tainted and negatively affected by the evil in their midst.

The social evils, which were far greater than I had initially realised, created a culture of low aspiration and often strong aversion to learning in many students that was draining to encounter, particularly with the lack of respect and self-control displayed by significant numbers of the student population. There’s only so many times you can deal with extreme verbal abuse (and at times physical attacks) before you lose your passion for wanting to teach and engage with such individuals. After a certain point it becomes an exercise in damage limitation and covering your back at all times - especially from false accusations (of which the more maliciously inclined students were only too happy to engage in).

Thanks to a legal system that places the rights of the child ahead of the adult and institutions that are quick to want to appease their school boards the teacher is often the sacrificial lamb with nobody looking out for their interests. Add to that local communities that were mostly hostile towards education generally - and the media circus that might follow - and it often felt like open season on teaching staff. This was not aided by certain staff members I met who had, through no fault of their own, fallen foul of suspensions because of unfounded allegations and almost seen their careers derailed (not to mention the significant stress that caused to their personal health and wellbeing - and the impact on their families too).

I hated this reality all the way throughout my time in the teaching profession and never felt truly comfortable working in that environment as a result. When your reputation can be destroyed by the allegations of just one single student, without any corroborating evidence to begin with, you realise that something is desperately wrong with the dynamics of power and the checks and balances that should be in place.

Then there was the reality of the educational content and structure provided by the system itself -  restricting and starving many students of real opportunities for learning and self-development. With the constant emphasis on testing and measuring student performance (as if the symbolic value of a grade was any measure of a student’s real development), lack of adequate (and quite often dated) learning resources, restrictions on being able to permanently remove students who had zero interest in being in the lesson other than to create maximum disruption and having a prescribed curriculum which was designed to measure performance as opposed to actual enrichment and learning was it really surprising that most students felt bored and unfulfilled by what they were being ‘taught’?

The lack of creativity and overwhelming sterility of the curriculum was only intensified by the lack of vitality and character of many teaching staff that I met - many of whom were so institutionalised themselves that I felt like the life force was being sucked out of me just by being in their immediate vicinity.

More than anything it was the obsession with tests that burnt me out. How can you truly measure a student’s performance? If you teach them how to answer a question then it can be argued, quite strongly, that all you are doing is showing the student how to answer in a way that the system prefers. Does that indicate real learning though? Does that demonstrate how the student has internalised that knowledge in a way that allows them to use it in a truly useful manner? More important though does the ‘learning’ that is being tested have any meaningful currency in a wider context? Could that ‘learning’ actually provide skill sets and resources for the student to expand into the wider world?

Quite often the answer is a clear and resounding ‘NO’.

And here’s the rub. Most teacher’s instill a terror in their student’s of not failing their GCSE’s - not because they necessarily care for their students but because they themselves are judged on their student pass/fail rate.

I can’t tell you the number of times I stood there in resigned disbelief as my HoD (head of department) adjusted grades that I had awarded on certain students paper’s so they could hit their departmental targets. Then there were occasions of coursework being manipulated by HoD’s and cobbled together, with a few rewrites here and there, from various other student’s work and passed on to weaker students to help pull up their grades.

It was all slightly surreal, not to mention incredibly corrupt, as the notion of students actually learning something of real value became replaced with the appearance of them having learnt as indicated by grades that were expected/awarded.

It was little more than an exercise in HoD’s looking to keep their jobs/departments resourced (and justifying next year’s budget requests) by avoiding having to explain to senior management why certain targets weren’t reached.  By extension the school can then advertise itself to the wider community as a centre for learning and achievement when the reality may be - and in some cases is - somewhat more muddied.

So even the value of a grade (as symbolic as it actually is) was little more than subject to the whims of internal politics. And if that’s your foundation for measuring student learning then it exposes the whole system for exactly what it is: nothing more than a needlessly stressful exercise in hitting - sometimes manipulated - targets.

Sadly when that’s your foundation then actual learning becomes secondary to scoring points, particularly when institutional politics come into play.

Then there’s the continual reality - no matter how many try to explain away the ‘phenomenon’ - of students grades improving with each passing year of GCSE and A-Level exams. And why is this happening (as if you didn’t already know?)

The exams are getting easier.

Having invigilated for various exams and reading through some of the papers that students were sitting I was shocked at the level of intelligence the questions were being pitched at. No wonder the grades were going up each year and schools were posting record results for their exams. The papers were being dumbed down - it was all a fiddle, all of it.

Want to dispute that?

Try sitting an exam paper from the early to mid 1900’s and let’s see how those grades change. That’s the acid test right there. The level of education is so much lower now than it was then that the entire system would be instantly shown up for the dumbed-down charade that it so clearly is.

Even though I tried my best to be a good teacher; to impart my passion for learning and enquiry to students that I worked with there were many times when I failed. I failed students when I was seconded to subject areas that were not my specialism which meant that I wasn’t able to provide the depth and range to feed and inspire within that particular discipline. I failed students through lack of adequate resources or not having time to fully prepare lesson materials. I failed students who wanted to learn and had every aspiration to do well by not being able to remove those who were destructive from my classes. I failed students when I became jaded and burnt out by the profession and its various layers of politics.

I’d like to think there were many students who I did get through to. Who I did inspire (and I know from some schools I worked at that their response towards me was very positive). Students who were able to take something of use away from my time with them. Students who were hopefully inspired and went on to bigger and brighter things as a result. That said I also know there were many who I failed, for a number of reasons. Some of which were in my control and, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have made more effort to rectify. Then there were those factors that were completely out of my control which I could do very little with other than do my best to offset in my own little way.

After all is said and done though I tried and I don’t, for one second, miss teaching or the profession as a whole. There were some great and talented teachers who I had the good fortune to work with who I will always hold in the highest esteem. There were some fantastic students who, even if they weren’t all academically inclined, leave me with many positive memories and I am thankful for being able to work with them. As for the education system itself - what a toxic and slowly imploding edifice of lies filled with too many career chasing snakes in suits and institutionalised robots in human shells.

Very little of value can prosper let alone flower in such an environment and my advice to you is simple: if you have children and the opportunity to home school - take it.

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