Expectations of a Male Primary School Teacher – Classroom to Headship and back again!

Andrew Rough

Teaching was never the plan.  I wanted to be a writer or a musician.  I wanted to be famous.

It makes me laugh to think of this now, because I have been a primary school teacher for 20 years now and I love my job.  I have taught everything from Y1 to Y6; I have climbed the ladder to headship and I’ve climbed back down again and returned to the classroom.  The last few years in the classroom have been the happiest ones of my career.

I won’t go into the story of how I got onto a 4 year teaching degree course by accident,  but, suffice to say I gradually grew to love teaching.  In my third year at uni a guest speaker was invited to talk to us; he was a revelation to me and a huge influence on my early teaching career.  He was the Deputy Head at a primary school in Richmond and I was really taken by what he had to say; I remember thinking ‘that is what I want to be’.  He talked about leading English and about his passion in reading but he also talked about having the best of both worlds because although he was a leader who had a major influence on the direction and running of his school he also still got to teach.  At that point in my embryonic career this seemed like the ideal aim: be one of the people in charge but still get to teach.  I knew so little about teaching at the time, and it now feels slightly ridiculous that I thought like that then.

So I started teaching with a plan.  I have always loved a challenge and my first school was one of those ones they warned NQT’s not to go near.  It was a tough school in Feltham with high levels of deprivation.  I loved it.  I started teaching in KS1 and I felt, (and still do) that there weren’t enough positive male role models in KS1 and early years and I wanted to be one of them.  I was the only man in KS1 but I felt lucky because there were 3 other male teachers in the school.  I was quite comfortable in a female dominated environment, there had only been 10 men out of 200 students on my teaching course so I was used to it.  One of the men in the school was an Advanced Skills Teacher, and although he was teaching in Y3 that year he had previously been in KS1-he was a brilliant teacher and one of the nicest, most positive people I have ever met; he was the next person to be a major influence on my ambitions.  Now I had two possible paths to travel to high status: climb the leadership ladder or stay in the classroom and try to become an Advanced Skills Teacher.

Part of what drives me is a thirst for challenge, and I’m a bit of a wanderer and as soon as I start to feel comfortable I start thinking ‘what next?’, which is probably why I have worked in 5 schools in the last 20 years and have taken on lots of different roles.  About 6 years into my career I finally got what I thought I had always wanted:I became a Deputy Head.  The previous Deputy at my school retired and I went for the job-I was in the right place at the right time and I got it.  I would like to think that as well as being an ambitious ladder climber I was also a pretty good teacher.  I loved teaching, and the craft of teaching fascinated me then as much as it does now but I also had this image of what I wanted to be.  I think I also felt the expectation from people around me; a number of my colleagues asked me if I was going to apply for the Deputy post before I even applied for it.

I loved being a Deputy Head, I loved the status of it, I loved the challenge of it but I found trying to juggle a class commitment alongside deputy head responsibilities really hard.  I have immense respect for anyone who is a teaching deputy-to me it felt like trying to do two full time jobs in the time allocated for one.  Eventually, I stepped out of the classroom altogether, which made the Deputy job a lot more manageable but I missed teaching and spent a lot of time covering other people’s classes (I was responsible for the cover rota).

And then after a couple of years, that little voice in my head, that part of me that loves a new challenge, said ‘what next?’ and I found myself thinking about headship.  I took the NPQH course and after I qualified I looked for a headship.  I was prepared to wait for the right job-we had moved to Suffolk about 8 years previous and I had a young family. I had no intention of uprooting them.  Eventually, Head Teacher roles came up that met my specification-schools that weren’t massive and no more than an hour drive from home, and I got my new dream job.

Except, for me, it wasn’t the dream job.  I hated it, not at first, but eventually.  I have full admiration for any Head Teacher, they do an amazing job, it is the most challenging thing I have ever done.  The trouble is, being a school leader is a completely different job to being a teacher, and there is nothing that you do as a teacher that really prepares you for being a Head Teacher.  I didn’t think the step up from Deputy to Head would be that hard, but for me at least, the step up felt massive.  I had lost my safety net.  As a Deputy there was always someone else to fall back on, I could always speak to the Head.  Being a head can feel very isolating, even though other Heads can always empathise, they are also busy running their own schools.

 There were parts of the job I enjoyed, particularly working with the staff to develop the curriculum and teaching and learning but as any Head knows, the job also comes with a lot of extra things to deal with that no one really tells you about.  Meeting the demands of the local authority, the dfe, the parents who seemed to think I had any influence over the road system outside the school amongst countless other things wore me down.  You need incredible levels of resilience to be a head and I discovered that although I have the passion for education and a clear vision for what makes a good school I didn’t have the resilience to be able to fight through all the other stuff and hold onto the things that matter.  Also, more importantly, I really missed teaching!  I didn’t get as many opportunities to cover classes as a head other than doing the occasional model lesson for an NQT (an opportunity that I always jumped at), it was on the rare occasion that I got to teach that I was happiest. 

So I sat back and reflected on that eternal question that had haunted me throughout my career, ‘what next?’  I had a young family, I was doing a job that I mostly found stressful or boring and I was beginning to have anxiety attacks because I found most days extremely stressful and I realised that if this continued then I would stop being able to do my job well.  What had I always loved throughout my career?  Teaching.  The day to day with the kids, the building up of relationships and sense of pride when you see the children you teach grow and develop.  The opportunity to develop the craft of teaching myself, rather than just help other people to develop their own craft.

I decided being happy is more important than status or money.  I had been a bit obsessed with status up to that point in my career, and that had led me to climb high up the leadership ladder, but it hadn’t made me happy.  So I resigned, and took a teaching job as a Y6 teacher and it was the best decision I have ever made.  I have been back in the classroom for 7 years now after spending 6 years in SLT; this is the happiest I have ever been in my career.  It was a scary thing to do, and I found that a few years away from teaching had deskilled me a bit.  My new boss knew me from our time years previous working together as year 1 teachers in another school and I am lucky that I went to work for her.  She knew I was a good teacher, from our past together, although for the first 6 months back in teaching I felt inadequate.  I felt like I did when I was an NQT again, permanently exhausted, and feeling like I was doing a bad job most of the time.  Thankfully my Head didn’t see it like that and I gradually got my confidence back.  As I began to feel more comfortable teaching full time again I began to really reflect on the craft of teaching and vowed to focus on being the best teacher I could be.

I must admit there have been times over the last few years when I have considered returning to SLT roles; that little voice in my head was saying ‘the longer you are away from senior management the less likely you will be able to go back to it’ and that is possibly true but whenever I hear that voice I just remind myself that I love my job, it makes me happy and happiness is more important than status and money.  My current school is great, the staff are a brilliant team and I can honestly say it is the best school I have ever worked in, but I have sometimes felt the expectation from other staff of ‘why aren’t you in senior management?’

My views and ambitions for my career have changed over time.  I am not particularly ambitious and obsessed with status any more, I have absolutely no desire to be famous.  I feel that in a lot of places there is too much emphasis on developing teachers as leaders and not enough emphasis on developing teaching.  Progressing through the leadership ladder is prestigious and brings status and money-good leaders are invaluable and make a huge difference to children’s lives but ‘just teaching’ and becoming an experienced teacher who is continually honing their craft does not seem to be valued in the same way-it doesn’t come with the same status or the same money.  I think our society still puts pressure on men to seek value through high status roles, I’m sure plenty of women probably feel that same pressure.  In my early career I found that I would compare myself to other people based on status and I was ridiculously proud of being one of the youngest Head Teachers in Suffolk (I’m slightly ashamed to think of that now).

I’ve been lucky in my career, I have never felt the stigma or faced the prejudice that some male primary school teachers experience.  But I have often been asked, when I have told people I am a teacher, ‘what do you teach?’ because they assume I am a secondary teacher-I answer ‘I teach everything, I’m a primary school teacher.’  There still aren’t enough men in primary education in my opinion, which is a shame because it is a hugely rewarding job.  My current school has male teachers in every key stage which I think is brilliant. 

The biggest lesson I have learnt in my life so far is ‘do what makes you happy’.  Most people stay in teaching because they like kids and like helping people, the job is hard and has lots of frustrating parts but it is also incredibly rewarding.  Nowadays I don’t care what people think about me, or what status they put on me and when that little voice says ‘what next?’ I remind myself again that I love my job and I’m the happiest I have been.