In defence of teachers

Enough! Does no one have anything nice to say about our schools? If it’s not headlines about monstrous behaviour driving teachers out of the profession, or apparently rampant wokism colonising our classrooms, then it’s Bear Grylls opining that modern education is ‘boring’.

The respective merits of these claims aside, if you listened only to these and many others similar, you’d soon succumb to the insidious narrative that there’s nothing good about our schools. And you’d be wrong.

I’m no Pollyanna. I’m a full-time teacher in the state sector, and I’m all too aware of the long hours, the pressures of Ofsted, and the serious need for sustained investment in our schools. I’m not the first to point out just how wide the chasm has grown between the funding of healthcare and the funding of education. I’m aware, too, that there are significant disparities between individual schools, and that it’s getting ludicrously difficult for schools in many regions to recruit teachers for subjects like physics and maths.