How Are Your Exam Classes Getting On?

There is an old complaint in teaching that, once people move into leadership, they forget what it is like to be a teacher. Like most staffroom wisdom, this is slightly unfair and occasionally completely true.

A few years ago, my line manager, let’s call him John, mainly because I haven’t asked his permission to write about him, was also a good mate. This meant our weekly meetings could be reasonably frank.

One February afternoon, he was working his way through a list.

“Have you done this?”

Not quite.

“What about that?”

Nearly.

“And have you remembered to…?”

No.

I’ll be honest: it was bloody annoying.

This was February, that point in the school year when the optimism of September has long since disappeared and everyone is essentially trying to reach the next holiday without losing a child, a laptop or their remaining enthusiasm for assessment.

John then started telling me about the terrific work he was doing with his Year 8 class. Irritatingly, it genuinely was excellent: lovely project-based learning, carefully designed activities and students taking ownership. It was the sort of teaching you might enthusiastically describe at a conference while everyone wrote student agency in their notebooks.

There was, however, one tiny detail. John had a teaching allocation of two lessons a week.

I was teaching considerably more than two. In fact, I was Head of Year 9 with additional responsibility for Enrichment, teaching two A-level subjects and carrying close to a full teaching load.

Eventually, somewhere around the fourth “Have you…?”, I cracked.

“John,” I said, “how are your exam classes getting on?”

There was a pause.

John was smart. More importantly, he was smart enough to know exactly what I meant.

“Point taken.”

To his enormous credit, that was the end of it.

I had not always handled these situations quite so elegantly. At my first international school, I had yet to develop the useful professional skill of recognising when being right was less important than shutting up.

Before an inspection visit, we were instructed to have our corridor displays completed by 4pm. I didn’t, so the head was entirely correct when, a couple of days later, he emailed to tell me that I had missed the deadline.

What he didn’t know was that I had made an executive decision. Admittedly, I wasn’t an executive, which may have been part of the problem.

I knew the visitors weren’t arriving until 8am and that I would be at school by 6.30, so I prioritised other work, arrived ridiculously early the following morning and finished the display. By 8am, my corridor was magnificent. Or at least acceptable from a reasonable distance.

Unfortunately, the head had apparently walked around at about 5.10 the previous evening and noticed that it wasn’t finished. Fair enough: I had missed the deadline. But then his email added that this had been “very embarrassing” and that the visitors had mentioned it.

Ah. The visitors who arrived after I had finished it.

Twenty-one years later, I would probably have read that sentence, rolled my eyes and got on with my day. Early-career me wrote back. Strongly.

There are moments from your professional life that you look back upon with pride. This isn’t necessarily one of mine.

Underneath both stories, though, is something I still think matters. Teachers constantly prioritise. The lesson starting in seven minutes beats the form due on Friday. The Year 11 essays beat the corridor display. The distressed student beats almost everything. Sometimes something isn’t done by 4pm because the person responsible has calculated, rightly or wrongly, that it can survive until 6.30 the following morning.

Leadership has its own version of this. I know that now because I’ve spent plenty of time doing it. Managers aren’t sitting in offices drinking coffee and inventing deadlines for recreational purposes. They are juggling their own competing priorities alongside approximately a thousand emails, while teachers occasionally wonder why they haven’t replied to the one sent seventeen minutes ago.

So perhaps leaders don’t forget what teaching is like. Perhaps distance simply changes their sense of how long things take.

The danger comes when someone with two lessons looks at what they can achieve in those lessons and unconsciously assumes that everyone else could do the same.

They probably could. Just ask them how their exam classes are getting on.