When I came into teaching 20 years ago I was asked in interview what I could bring to the life of the school beyond teaching my lessons. There was an expectation I would want to be involved in doing something. As a slightly nervous candidate I remember sweating over what to say.
I had played a little rugby at school, messed around on a surfboard or two, and worked in many hotels. In the end I mumbled something about helping with the Duke of Edinburgh or starting a debating club.
To an extent I need not have worried. Within a year I was doing all manner of things. I had organised trips, brought visitors in to school, came in during the holidays to paint my classroom with some of my more notorious students, and even stepped onto the rugby field. In those days it was just what you did.
Everyone did something, and everyone respected you for it.
Flash-forward to today and it is often a different picture. When I look around at the schools I have been fortunate enough to visit in the last 12 months, I see a very mixed picture. In some there are clubs and activities to rival the best private schools. In others there are great sports teams or a thriving senior band, and in others a vigorous debating society or STEM club. Seldom do you find a school with everything.
Clearly there are reasons for this. Teaching hasn’t changed a lot in 20 years, but what we teach and how we are assessed has. I’m pretty sure we’ve always had to account for what we do, writing plans and schemes, reflecting on our week. Now, however, we feel the pressure of greater scrutiny. Frankly many of us have priorities in the classroom that outstrip anything we can do at lunch or after school. And by this stage in the year we are knackered as well.
A colleague offered me a few words of wisdom as I sat down to write this. He said he’d been told that we are all just visitors passing through our schools and that, although it was hard to hear, life would continue whether we were there or not.
He said he’d heard it a few weeks ago and was still trying to get his head around it – and I think I know why. Yes it makes sense that others can fill the gap we leave when we move on or retire. But: each of us shapes things while we are here.
He is a hugely successful PE teacher who lives for the school and the community. He went to the school and knows everyone. I know PE teachers are still likely to be asked to run teams, but he lives them. When he eventually leaves, hopefully many years from now, it is unlikely he will be seen as a visitor.
The same can be said of any of us who step beyond the expected. Yes we are no longer routinely asked to run things, but many of us do. When we do we enrich everyone. The teacher leading Warhammer is involving a group of students in developing team-work and negotiation skills; the teacher who leads junior band equips their charges with the chance to grow confidence and neighbourliness; the teacher who supervises a quiet area offers the space for a student to reflect. Each time one student is helped in this way the school becomes more than it was before.
I doubt many people reading this will dispute the efficacy of running clubs and activities, but a lot will say there is no time, or there is not enough left in the tank to make it happen. Certainly there can be no question that this is the case. Our various professional associations call loudly for improvements in staff wellbeing, and do so with a seemingly ever-expanding evidence base.
Any school insisting on staff running additional things in their own time can surely only be adding to the problem. But is this really the case? It might seem counter-intuitive to say it, but running a club or activity might actually ease workload stress. The sociologist Stanley Parker once wrote that we need meaningful work rather than working for a wage (which is possibly just as well in education).
His book The Future of Work and Leisure (1971) shows that enjoyable work can really help us to form positive identities for ourselves. I take from this that choosing to run a club related to our subject can reinvigorate our sense of value as teachers, and value for the subject we teach. In the same way, setting up or contributing to something totally different from what we deliver in our lessons can help us see a different side of school life, see our students in a new light. Behaviour can even improve.
School ought to be about human flourishing. Every opportunity to help students and staff to be more than they were should be available to us. But we do not live in a perfect world. I imagine, speaking slightly cynically, that we will always be tilting at windmills whether over workload or curriculum, buildings or budgets. Yet we can be so much more than visitors just passing through.
- Matt Bawden is an assistant headteacher at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Ashbourne and editor of the Association for Character Education eJournal Character Matters. Follow @ourschoolday. To read his best practice articles relating to character, visit http://bit.ly/1OvQtqv