During her second year as a teacher in an inner London secondary school,
Oenone Crossley-Holland sat next to a man at a dinner party who had quit as
a teacher after less than a year to join the Army. He was sent to Iraq, an
experience that he described as “easier than teaching.” An easier war to
win? she asked, tongue in cheek. “Yes.”
The man was exaggerating, she says now, but adds that in Iraq “maybe you don’t
have that demoralisation and the personal attack that you have in the
classroom”.
Crossley-Holland signed up to Teach First, the scheme that gives
high-achieving graduates six weeks of basic training and then parachutes
them into schools in deprived areas to teach for a minimum of two years.
She says that Teach First warned her and other recruits that they would
experience extreme highs and lows in school, but that nonetheless: “I hadn’t
really got a clue. I thought it was going to be hard, but I had never
experienced the hard where you feel just kind of utterly destroyed, and the
hard where as soon as the kids get out of the classroom you cry.”
For her, teaching has been a constant struggle to maintain order in the
classroom over recalcitrant students who drag down the few who are eager to
learn. She describes an environment where even those who behave find the
odds stacked against them in their often chaotic home lives. This was
brought home to her in the most sobering fashion when one of her school’s
students was stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend (see extract, left).
Crossley-Holland, 26, was educated at Gresham’s, a boarding school, and then
read English at Oxford. After a year teaching in India she was determined
not to become a teacher, but several months of temping left her at a loss,
so she opted for Teach First. It would at least provide her with witty
dinner party anecdotes.
She also thinks that there is “huge glamour attached to inner-city school
teaching, in a way that glamour is attached to anything that people perceive
as very hard”.
She certainly found the “grittiness” she was looking for. She was sent to an
all-girls City Academy in South London where 80 per cent of the pupils were
not white British, many born abroad, and more than 60 per cent qualified for
free school meals.
The difference between CrossleyHolland’s privileged background and that of her
students was stark. Her father is Kevin Crossley-Holland, a poet, children’s
author and an honorary fellow of his daughter’s Oxford college, St Edmund
Hall. Her mother is an artist.
In Hands Up, the book she has written about her experiences, she
recounts parties where she rubbed shoulders with Mick Jagger, and holidays
in the South of France and The Gambia. The contrast between her social and
professional lives couldn’t have been more stark.
“It wasn’t a cultural chasm, I was an alien [to my pupils],” she says. “My
life didn’t register on their radar and that was a huge source of
frustration for me because I [wanted to say]: ‘you guys don’t even know what
you are missing out on. If you let me give you this education you have no
idea what opportunities you have’.”
This tall, freckly, red(ish)head, was such an exotic figure to her students
that it took two terms for a student to ask “Miss, are you posh?”, a
question that most of us would be able to answer as soon as she opened her
mouth. “Quite often I was asked if I was Australian,” she says, laughing.
When she writes about her own middle-class dilemmas, such as whether buying a
mattress big enough to comfortably accommodate her and her boyfriend is a
sign of too much commitment, you want to tell her to stop being so silly and
get on with it. She acknowledges that many of the students have slightly
more acute accommodation issues, such as “not being able to revise for exams
because they share a tiny flat with four siblings.”
Did she find it hard to make a connection with students because she was white?
“I felt it with Muslim girls most, because the paths set out for them by
their families were so different from paths set out for my contemporaries.
It was hard to see how I could be a role model for someone who came from a
totally different place, who was a part of a different culture and religion.
I found it quite frustrating because I thought I had all these freedoms and
choices and I found it hard sometimes teaching girls who didn’t have those
choices. I felt mad on their behalf.”
She has now left the school, so we are talking in a classroom at the cosy prep
school in Notting Hill where Will, who she married this summer, is a
teacher. I ask how the classroom compares with her old one. “My classroom
was way better; three times the size, better technology, bigger windows,
better view.” It was only the behaviour of the pupils inside the classroom
that was worse.
Although she did have good experiences with pupils, Crossley-Holland was
shocked by the surliness, rudeness and aggression of the children in her
classes. On one occasion she fled the classroom in tears, an episode that
did at least conclude with some of the girls apologising, in tears
themselves.
“Don’t start on me — I’m not in the mood,” a student snaps at her in the book.
She tells another to sit down and is told “F****** shit. F*** you.” Although
there are moments of optimism, for every student “who had turned a corner,
there seemed to be a handful more on a downward slope”.
One of her most depressing observations is that students couldn’t understand
why she was a teacher. “They thought I was capable of a better job — a
better job, in their opinion, being almost everything bar emptying dustbins.
They see teachers being battered by students day in, day out and not
receiving any respect from them.”
She became “very demoralised by the lack of respect from the students.” It is
a weird paradox that these teenagers are obsessed by the idea of being shown
respect, but fail to show any to teachers. “Even when you earn it, that
doesn’t mean that you get it every day. I think there is often an
overwhelming sense of self that stops some students from having a wider
picture of life and thinking about their place in the wider scheme of
things.”
During her second year, struggling with exhaustion and stress,
Crossley-Holland started to see a therapist. “She’d question me about why my
students behaved in the ways they did — and for the more troubled ones it
would always come down to the same thing: home life. Parents who were drug
addicts, single parents who couldn’t cope; parents who didn’t know how to
keep control of their daughters; parents who were abusive.”
She was tempted to leave at the end of the second year, but stayed on for
another year only to conclude in her third year that she had to quit. “I
felt I couldn’t keep going and I couldn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve:
to really teach and to properly make 90 per cent of the minutes in the
classroom count. I was in a losing battle.”
She looked around at the other teachers and saw some who were “visibly
frazzled”. Others “had found a way of working within the system so that they
could function. I realised I didn’t want to do it. I could do it and flog
myself. But I didn’t want to continue in those circumstances.”
Will encouraged her to leave. “He thought that no job was worth sometimes
being so unhappy and frustrated.” She has not left teaching, however. Nor
has she fled to her husband’s private school as her former flatmate, another
Teach First recruit, has done. “I am still attracted to that kind of
grittier, more real [experience].”
She has taken a job at another South London City Academy, but is “pinning a
lot of hopes” on the fact that it is a new school. “They are approaching the
education of these kids from the standpoint that they have to achieve the
highest levels possible.”
Although she is full of praise for the other teachers in her old English
department, one of the criticisms of her previous school is that the
boundaries were not consistent when it came to behaviour and there were few
effective sanctions for unruliness. A lot of forms were filled in, but there
were not enough detentions or other follow-up actions once students were
removed from classes.
She believes that parents, schools and the wider community all need to do more
to instil better behaviour in students (she’s an advocate of members of the
public picking children up on antisocial behaviour). Schools can work if
there is “a really, really strict and clear behaviour code with real
consequences for failing.”
She would put the Army in charge of failing schools, “because if you have the
discipline anything is possible. You can then begin to change a student’s
culture and a student’s expectations.” The new academy that she will work in
next, which has been open for a year, makes students move around in single
file and in silence.
“One of the biggest problems is that you can’t teach 30 kids. The moment two
start falling by the wayside and you try to tackle them it’s like a class
full of dominoes.” After a revision session with five girls, she concluded
that she had got through more work in an hour than in a month with the whole
class.
Her new school is trying to combat this by giving the teachers more hours with
the students. “If you only have students for three hours a week, sometimes
there’s a recurring problem with a student, but it is not the most serious
problem in the class, so you don’t give it your attention. But if you are
seeing students for nine hours a week you will get round to sorting out
those smaller problems.”
The idea is to find a middle way between primary school, where teachers get to
know a class very well, and traditional secondary schools, where they may
get a pupil for two or three hours a week. In order to spend more time with
the students, Crossley-Holland will teach humanities as well as English.
Surprisingly, when I suggest that making a school work is very hard, she
disagrees earnestly. “I don’t actually think it’s that hard. It’s not
impossible to give any student a good education. You just have to get the
conditions right.”
I wish her luck. Her determination is admirable. But as I say goodbye to her
and Will, I know which of their two jobs I would rather have. “I’m not done
with teaching yet, I want to keep trying,” she says. “I don’t know why, I
must be crazy.”
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