I’ve quit teaching.

Done.

It’s over.

It shouldn’t be such a big deal. If I’d quit being an office administrator or data analyst, I imagine it wouldn’t feel as significant. I’ve quit jobs before, of course. I quit being a baker, even when it was my ultimate dream to open a bakery of my own, and that did not feel as momentous as this. There are many reasons why quitting teaching is such a big step, all of which I will explore in this post, but they all lead to one reason:

Teaching takes over your life.

It really does.

Even after 4 years working in education, I found my NQT and subsequent years incredibly tough.

Let me start from the beginning.

I graduated with a degree in Medical Sciences but decided against undertaking further scientific studies or going into some form of clinical job. Instead, I took up a post as a learning support assistant at a local boys’ school after graduating. Soon enough I was promoted a few times and took up various support staff roles. At the same time, my school funded my Master’s degree in Education, which I completed before deciding to take the plunge and train to be a teacher at the same school.

I wasn’t too bothered about being a teacher. I’m not going to spew that same old “I was always that little girl playing “school” with my toys” nonsense! I enjoyed working with teenagers, I was good at relating to different people, and I certainly relished any opportunities I had to cover a lesson in a teacher’s absence. I was always hesitant about going into the profession but I decided to give it a go, and I promised myself I’d leave if I wasn’t enjoying it.

As per the typical significantly reduced timetable that you receive in a training year, I started on 12 hours. However, by January I was on 21 teaching hours out of 25 – a qualified teacher’s full timetable – due to the sudden departure of a teacher in my department.  Nevertheless, my training year was a walk in the park compared to the subsequent years, solely because I knew the school inside out by this point. Behaviour was a non-issue as I had already established myself among the pupils, and most importantly, the school did not make unnecessary demands on their staff’s precious time.

It may have taken me up to 2 hours to plan an hour lesson during the first term, but the marking policy was very fair: mark a piece of work once a week with only brief feedback needed as it was common practice to discuss the common errors or misconceptions in the following lesson. Staff meetings were limited to INSET days and a 1-hour twilight session once every half term, books were reviewed at random, and the behaviour system was centralised so detentions were supervised by a different member of SLT every day. This freed up more time for teachers to just get on with their jobs.

Had I been able to stay at that school, I’m sure you would find me plodding through those halls for the next 30+ years. Unfortunately, I was covering a maternity vacancy so in July, I packed up my things and went to set up my new gleaming classroom in the stunning new school where I completed my 6 week second placement.

My first year was tough, to say the least. The school was a giant glass box with no hiding places. There are 20 pairs of eyes on you at any one time – pupils and staff watching from various rooms while you roam around the school in a confused, disorientated state. The £10 a month printing budget took some getting used to, especially with weekly tests to print out for 3 large GCSE and A level classes. Support staff were either rude, inadequate or both, and the senior leadership team were so institutionalised, they resembled a cult. And don’t get me started on the pupils.

Granted, I was much quicker at planning lessons by this point, I had a lot of lessons prepared from my training year, and I was a lot more confident at asserting myself as the figure of authority in my classroom. However, I believe the pupils at this school were placed on such a high pedestal that they believed they were actually superior to the teachers. Pupils spoke down to us en masse, their word was taken over ours, and the overall sense of entitlement sickened me to my core. We were not their teachers. We were not providing them with the most important gift of all – an education. No. We were there to serve them.

I will be touching upon all of these key points in future blog posts, so I will conclude this one by saying:

Don’t forget that teaching is just a job. As teachers, we do not get paid anywhere near enough to work 60+ hours a week. If the job is making you deeply/constantly unhappy (which I am assuming it is, otherwise you would not have found my page) leave the job. You would not accept this level of unhappiness from any other job, so do not accept it from this one.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. I handed in my notice at the start of October to leave for Christmas, as is protocol, but I asked for early release from my contract for personal reasons. I did not have a job to go to when I asked for immediate release, but I knew that I would rather do anything else than continue in this draining, demanding, defeating profession, and wake up with an overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety.

After handing in my notice, I secured a job as a cover teacher in a really lovely school. The pay is almost the same as a teacher on the M2 pay scale point which I was on, but seeing as I will be working half the number of hours I put in as a teacher, I am getting paid far more per hour. I get my weekends, evenings and holidays back, so I am able to supplement my income with private tuition. Most importantly, I am able to switch off. 

No planning, marking, report writing, detentions, etc…BLISS!