Life at the chalkface – the PR man who found himself at the head of the class

"THOSE who can, teach," said the email. It was not the first I had been sent by the Government agency responsible for reeling in new teachers, but this one caught me in a moment of weakness.

I'd had a bad day in the office. For 10 long years I had been working a freelance PR consultant from my converted attic and was beginning to wonder if there was more to life. The economy was in trouble, being self-employed was looking increasingly precarious, so I clicked to find out more.

"Earn up to 50k," it promised. "Work with young enthusiastic minds and receive a grant of up to 10k while you train."

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I'd had no idea how desperate the country was to recruit new teachers and decided that maybe now I should step in to the breach.

Teaching riotous, hormonal teenagers did not really appeal, so I set my sights on becoming a primary school teacher. I assumed securing a place would be easy, but competition was intense and conversations such as the following became depressingly commonplace.

Me: "Why haven't I been accepted?"

Admission Tutor: "You haven't got any teaching experience."

Me: "No, but if you let me on the course I would get some!"

AT: "Sorry, but we've got so many people with teaching experience applying that you haven't got a chance."

The fact there was little scope for talent, originality or real-world experience should perhaps have set alarm bells ringing. It didn't.

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Becoming a teacher had turned into a mission. I began helping out a couple of days a week at my local primary school, reapplied and was duly accepted on to a PGCE course at a college in Yorkshire.

Raring to go, I was looking forward to brushing up on my Three Rs and excited at the prospect of revisiting subjects such as geography, history and science. However, I soon discovered the majority of the training involved tedious lectures and writing long essays about child development, child observations and – two words that haunt the lives of every teacher in the country – monitoring and assessment.

My first essays only scraped a pass, usually scoring between 40 and 50 per cent while many of my peers scaled the extraordinary heights of the

80s. Through curiosity, and desperation, I once stole a glance at the work of one of my colleagues.

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Her folder was twice the size of mine and in that moment I gained my first invaluable lesson in teaching – size matters. From then on I shoved whatever pieces of paper I could find – photocopied pages from text books, copies of children's work, meaningless scribblings and charts – as appendices to my essays. Lo and behold my grades started to climb.

Another thing that became clear was that good grammar was by no means a prerequisite for good marks. Handing back a fresh batch of marked essays, one lecturer slightly disappointedly announced: "Many of you scored in the high 70s, but could have reached the 80s if you hadn't made so many spelling and grammatical errors. Please remember to use your spellchecker." I burst out laughing, but was apparently the only person in the room to see the irony. In a few months we would be responsible for teaching children how to read and write, yet some didn't seem to know a comma from an apostrophe.

Every other week, the monotony of teacher training was broken for an hour or two by science lectures. Delivered by a gloriously politically-incorrect lecturer with the distinct air of the mad scientist, he was a true relic from a bygone era of teaching where substance triumphed over style. Everyone attending his lectures left knowing a lot more than when they had arrived. He also gave me the first glimmer of hope that perhaps there could be a future in teaching after all.

It was a glimmer that was soon snuffed out. By the end of the training, I started to have serious concerns about the calibre of recruit passing through the doors of one of Yorkshire's busiest teacher training establishments. Never was this more evident than one lunchtime when a rather red-faced student, clutching a pencil and sheet of paper, approached the table I was sharing in the college canteen.

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She had managed to escape from an exam she was retaking on English grammar. If she failed again she feared she would be booted off the course. As far as I could gather, the only person ever to be ejected from this particular PGCE course had physically assaulted a six-year old. Illiteracy was far from grounds for dismissal, but my colleagues were more sympathetic and spent the next 10 minutes providing the correct answers. She duly returned to the exam room and,

unsurprisingly, she passed with flying colours.

The final element of our training involved school placements. It was, we were told, an opportunity to put what we had (or hadn't) learned into practice. Once again we were assured that it would be virtually impossible to fail and any problems would be "smoothed over" by the college's liaison officer. Apparently, there had only ever been one occasion when a student had failed the placement element and had been unable to have a second attempt.

Being in a real classroom was like a breath of fresh air. Like anything in life, there is no substitute for hands-on experience and the placement reignited the flame of enthusiasm that had been well and truly doused by months of mind-numbing college work.

Early on I was reminded of the simple brilliance of childhood. Having been asked to calculate how many 15-seater minibuses would be required to transport a group of 50 children on a day out, one bright young six -year-old opined that it would take three. "Well," I replied. "Three times 15 is 45, so what would happen to the other five children?" As quick as a flash, he replied: "They could get a taxi!"

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Eventually, 12 long months after starting, I and 32 other Newly Qualified Teachers graduated and began our long-awaited search for gainful employment. Some were a bit shaky on English, some weren't entirely sure about the maths and some struggled with both, but by God we could all write a good essay – as long as the spellchecker was on.

I secured a one-year post teaching Year 6 (almost teenagers but still blissfully a few hormones short) in a quiet village school.

"Take a firm hand with them from day one," my new headmaster advised as I sat in his office at 8.30 on my first day of term. We'd been chatting for five minutes and already he was on his third cup of coffee. The caffeine fix is one of the most crucial coping mechanisms among the teaching profession.

"Forget all that stuff you learnt at college," he went on. "This is real life." Of the many conversations and counselling sessions that followed I think those were perhaps the truest words he ever spoke.

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And so the most tumultuous 12 months of my life followed. Day after day, standing in front of a group of 30 children I gradually started to learn my craft and the more I learned, the more I realised how little I knew.

Just like adults, children are sometimes funny, sometimes moody, sometimes inspired and sometimes fed-up, but one thing they always are is unpredictable. At the coalface of teaching, you are faced every day with dozens of complex situations forcing you to make split-second decisions, right or wrong, and then be accountable for them.

There were lots of high points – like when the mother of a nine-year-old girl in my class approached me after school and said how much her daughter enjoyed my lessons – and lots of low ones, too – like the precociously talented 11-year old fixing me with a disappointed gaze while he pointed out that the maths calculation I had just spent 10 minutes sweating over was "deeply flawed".

Above all else though, it was the training I had hoped for that could never be provided within the four walls of a lecture theatre.

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Even now, with over a year's experience under my belt, I still find it hard to believe that I'm a proper teacher and I'm sure that one day the children will see through my fragile veil of assured confidence. In the meantime, I'll carry on working to the best of my ability in a far-from-perfect system hoping that I turn out to be one of the few who, when it comes to teaching, really can.

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