Former maths teacher, Romesh Ranganathan, tells me about lockdown home-schooling and looks back on his teaching career. He hopes the pandemic will make everyone recognise the value of "one of the most important jobs in society".
In January, Romesh Ranganathan stiffened his nerve to begin home-schooling his three children once more. It was a regression that, for him, goes beyond last July when he thought the nightmare was over, to his nine years as a Maths teacher in the 2000s. Schools have been topping the news agenda, and he hopes lockdown – where people have turned out on doorsteps to applaud healthcare workers, and many have educated their children at home for months – will make us all recognise the work of the teachers we depend on.
“I have to engage three children across a morning during lockdown and it's impossible. Meeting the needs of thirty-plus kids across a day is something that takes a lot out of you,” he says. “The public are very appreciative for what NHS workers do, and rightly so. Weirdly I think it’s taken a global pandemic for us to have an appreciation for what teachers do.”
He feels there is “an incredible lack of value for people who are doing one of the most important jobs in society”, and changing public perception is the first step we must take.
In 2011, Rom added his name to the list of teachers who leave despite having a full and promising career still ahead. In his case, the reasons are clear.
“I thought stand-up was just going to be my hobby, but it started to take off,” he tells me. “There was a time when I was doing both [teaching and stand-up] badly. It ended up that comedy pulled me out.”
Throughout our interview he is passionate and serious. His wit is obvious, but he is not trying to crack jokes or play the celebrity. We are speaking as colleagues, both former teachers, and he has plenty to say on the reality of the profession and why so many like him choose a new path.
“I’d done a number of jobs before I got into teaching and I really thought I'd found what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “I think I would have carried on, but if I'm absolutely honest there were teachers who were, this sounds bad but fantasising about leaving. They loved teaching but something had happened to make them think it wasn't what it used to be.”
One headline captures the imagination of commentators: over 40,000 teachers, or 10% of the workforce, leave each year. Adjectives such as ‘bleak’ recur in recent press that describes the ‘crisis’ that is getting ‘even worse’. Rom was one of around 28,000 mid-career teachers who left when he did.
“At the time I got into teaching they were throwing a lot of money into recruitment, and I would argue they had become obsessed with recruitment and forgotten about retention,” he says.
It is an argument backed up by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and Nuffield Foundation, who found training new teachers costs the government and schools more than £38,000 for every teacher still in post after five years, and that generous tax-free bursaries make no difference. Those who have tried to measure it – the OECD, Learning Policy Institute and others – agree that teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement in exams as well as other measures of success such as school attendance, especially important for the most vulnerable. In other words, this matters.
“When I went into teaching, the advertising and the training, it was amazing, and it felt exciting, and it really made me feel enthused,” he waxes. “But my experiences were so different to others’. I remember seeing teachers who were a bit embittered, or kind of a bit f***ed off for want of a better phrase, and I'm thinking, what's up with these guys man, Jesus?”
He was promoted quickly to Head of Sixth Form, and the feeling of recognition and extra money were welcome. I offer the twin sayings: ‘Cream rises to the top’ and ‘Sh*t floats’. Which was he?
“I think I'm sort of like a creamy sh*t,” he replies. “I would like to think I was good at engaging kids and dealing with parents; in terms of having a long-term overview of where the Sixth Form was going, I really was dreadful. I excelled equally at being good at one thing and sh*t at the other.”
Rom insists that he got lucky with timing as he climbed the ladder, and that this was part of what kept him motivated in the first few years. But eventually he began to see what had jaded some of his colleagues.
“I'd been encouraged the whole way along because I was still in the early stage where they were trying to get me in, and it's all very exciting. But when I actually got into the teaching, the truth is the stresses of it are unbelievable.”
His is a familiar story. The latest DfE surveys show workload is a “serious problem”, and research by the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) found teachers on average work more hours per year than police officers and nurses, and have lower hourly pay. The UK government launched a major school workload reduction effort in 2018, and some progress is being seen.
“I work in television now obviously, and I've never had a day in my entire comedy career that is anything like as stressful as when I was teaching. As a comedian I do an hour and a half in the evening; teachers have to deliver five or six quality different hours every single day of their careers, and then after that they have to assess how well it has all gone. People don't realise the pressure.”
School leaders are trying, but the message is somewhat mixed when the government and Ofsted can add demands almost overnight.
“I think schools do the best they can within the limitations, but there’s the moving of the goalposts,” he says. “As a maths teacher, we'd just about mastered what we were doing then they'd have a change of focus and you’d have to relearn everything. It just felt constant. You never felt on top of it.”
He recognises the need for education to be responsive and up-to-date, and that teachers need to be accountable. But the shifting sands made him resentful of the pressure he was under.
“You're constantly told you’re going to be judged on this or that, we’re analysing the value you're adding to your classes, and all that's great, but you've got to accept that it’s human beings you're dealing with.
“Most of the teachers that I encountered were working at their full capacity, and you say to them, ‘You know you're absolutely pushing it, you're absolutely at the top level of what you can do and what you can handle? Well you’ve got to do this thing as well, and there's absolutely f*ck all we're going to do to compensate you.’ I found that unreasonable.”
There is the obvious refrain so often used to counter a teacher’s claim that they work hard: ‘What about the holidays?’. Coupled with a prod that the school day finishes at 3 o’clock, the implication is that teachers are part-time and should stop complaining. The reality is different.
“When I was teaching I would get to work at 7:30 and leave at about 5:30, then go home and work into the evening, and I basically started to accept that as normal,” says Rom. “So many people go into teaching because they’re dedicated, not trying just to do the bare minimum to get away with it. Over a number of years you look at your quality of life and I can understand thinking f*ck this man I just want out.”
The battle for recognition is one he still wages with friends who drop in the argument about the long holidays.
“In the summer you do get a break, but the idea of you get six weeks off is b*llocks, it's a fallacy, and you just don't have the evenings and weekends,” he says. “It’s just bullsh*t and it upsets me that people have that perception.”
The distaste Rom feels for those who bash teachers as idle and spoilt comes through clearly, and it turns out he was as fierce an advocate back when he was leading Hazelwick Sixth Form, when saw the pressure and stress of the job as damaging to the long-term health of the education system.
“I ended up being the union rep at my school because I felt so strongly,” he recounts. “I would talk to my mates, and their perception of teachers was they got into this for the holidays, why are they moaning about their conditions. And I had other teachers who said if you go on strike you're damaging children's futures and stuff like that.
“My argument was we want our children to have the best possible education, and in the long term that is achieved is by retaining your very best members of staff. I just felt like the quality of the labour force was going to decline to a point where you were going to see a very real negative pressure on the quality of education that we deliver to children.”
Pay is something to which we return repeatedly. He acknowledges he is an outlier with the earning power he enjoys in his new career, but he feels holding pay down only adds to a sense that dedicated teachers are being squeezed.
“Nobody gets into teaching for the money, you get into it because you have a sense of vocation and those reasons are what contribute to the stress. There's no physics teacher, for example, who couldn't be making more money doing something else, so you’re relying on teachers’ goodwill to keep them.”
I come back to the NFER research that had some curious findings. On average, teachers who leave the profession take, if anything, a slight pay cut. But there is also a reduction in weekly working hours, and teachers are significantly more likely than nurses and police officers to favour a pay cut if it meant reducing their hours.
“I did jobs [previously] where literally the moment I switched off my computer I stopped thinking about it and would just go and have an evening. But teaching just wasn't like that. There wasn't a moment when I wasn't thinking about teaching, so I can understand why you might say, you know I'll take a little bit less money in order to have a social life.”
And he comes back round to the issue of recognition, and the hope that lockdown might change public perception long-term, and so there might be support for increasing teachers’ pay and looking after their mental wellbeing.
“One of the things I found most frustrating as a teacher was my private sector friends’ lack of appreciation for just how difficult the job is,” he says. “This sounds stupid but I’d just like a little bit of f***ing appreciation for how hard it is, you know what I mean?”
After all the talk of stress, workload, and rage at his friends’ lack of understanding, I remind him of how we began the interview; about how much he said he liked teaching, liked the kids, and would probably still be doing it if comedy had not taken over.
He tells me about the best lessons he ever had. Inspired by training where the teachers were encouraged to get the class to set their own questions to study, he experimented with year 8 and a project on quadrilaterals.
“I guess they started asking questions they thought I wanted to hear, like what do the angles add up to, and I was thinking sh*t this is great!” he remembers. “Then one kid said, ‘Which one would make the best parachute?’. Obviously as soon as he asked that none of the kids gave a sh*t about any other question.”
Feeling he had completely lost control, he persevered, and they spent three lessons dropping Blu Tack paratroopers out of the classroom window attached to different quadrilaterals.
“I kind of panicked, thinking f***ing hell this doesn't sound like what I should be doing, but at the same time I didn't want to undermine their faith in the process. I'll be honest with you, I thought I was going to get some sort of warning because it didn't look like we were learning anything, and it was the most out of control I felt, but it was the most exciting. The kids were properly engaged.
“That was the best runs of lessons I had, but I'm also really lucky that we ended up actually learning something because I think it really could have gone more tits up than it did.”
This is what keeps teachers going back for more: the vocation, the perfectionism, and the opportunity to do good for good people. Maybe lockdown will make more people realise. Sadly, only his own kids will get to learn from Rom.
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An edited version was published in Teach Secondary Magazine in February 2021. Read here.
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