Catriona Davies is just settling her tutor group of 12-year-olds when a boy
dashes in, storms to the back of the room and bursts into tears.
It’s a dramatic start to the school day for the Oxford English graduate, who
rose at 5.30am to commute to the job she has grown to love in a run-down
school in Enfield, on the northeast fringes of London.
It turns out that the youngster is upset because, in a breach of school
uniform rules, he turned up wearing his beloved baseball cap. Now the cap
has been confiscated, and Davies has to spend a few minutes explaining why
the school bans caps, mobile phones, MP3 players and any other distracting
object pupils could fiddle with in lessons.
Fast-forward a few hours and she’s still in the emotional thick of things:
dealing with an altercation in an English class. A volley of insults has
flared between two teenagers – a mini-crisis interrupted by the arrival of
the head teacher, Lynne Dawes, who sweeps one offending boy away.
Albany school, where only 19% of children scored five good GCSEs including
maths and English last year and half the pupils are on free school meals, is
a world away from Davies’s own comfortable upbringing, at a private girls’
school, where she notched up 10 A*s at GCSE and five A-level A grades.
Electronic swipe cards can block off the comprehensive’s corridors, teachers
were last week debating whether to introduce weapon detectors, and the head
says that a teenager killed last month in a nearby district was a former
pupil.
“Some children here come from difficult backgrounds,” says Davies. “I never
thought about respecting my elders. I had parents who were role models. Not
all these children do. It is still sometimes a shock to me.”
Davies is one of about 10 highflying twentysomethings recruited to Albany by
Teach First, a charity backed by dozens of leading companies, which sends
top graduates to teach in struggling schools on two-year contracts.
With just six weeks of initial training under their belts, coupled with what
Dawes describes as their “can-do attitude”, the 10 Teach Firsters, who train
largely on the job, now comprise 10% of the school’s staff. In the English
department they number nearly half its 13 teachers.
Last week inspectors found that Teach First, loosely based on the US model
Teach for America, was “helping transform schools”. Four of the 210 trainees
the inspectors met were judged “the most exceptional” they had seen.
It’s expanding, too: already in operation in London, Manches-ter and Midlands
schools, it’s to launch on Merseyside. And ministers have announced that
trainees are to help in the government’s push to boost state school pupil
numbers at Oxbridge, by coaching them for the universities’ entrance tests
and interviews.
It’s the latest fanfare for a project that already numbers children of the
great and good among its recruits, with Nicky Blair, Tony Blair’s second
son, now in his second term of teaching at a Midlands school.
Weaving her way through a crowded corridor, Davies, in her 15th month at
Albany, admits that when she signed up, her friends thought she was “mad”.
“They gave me six weeks,” she recalls. And they were nearly proved right.
Davies found the first term so tough she burst into tears at the end of a
lesson. She’d just had a relaxing holiday back home in Shropshire and the
contrast on her return was too great.
“I thought, what on earth am I doing here?” she says, remembering how the
children’s throw-away remarks would sting her.
They would say, “X is a better teacher than you, Miss” or, “Why are you so
posh, Miss?”
“I did just cry and say, ‘I’m going to leave’,” says Davies.
But she got through the bad patch to become one of the 46% of Teach Firsters
who decide to make a career in teaching – despite days that often don’t
finish until 11pm, once all the marking and planning are done, and a
starting salary of just £17,100, rising to around £25,000 in the second year.
“I love it now. I am so fond of the children,” she explains.
How have some of our best graduates been persuaded to postpone careers as
bankers, lawyers or accountants to teach?
The answer is partly pragmatic. The scheme holds out, in what is still a
competitive jobs market, the hope of internships and sometimes jobs with
leading firms both during the holidays and at the end of the teaching
contract. Companies such as the bank HSBC, consultants McKinsey, and lawyers
Clifford Chance are all sponsors.
After Davies started with Teach First she spent part of a holiday on an
internship with the legal firm Freshfields, another sponsor, in their
corporate social responsibility department. She admits that she was
attracted to CSR, but it’s teaching that has now become her long-term career
choice.
“I never feel I’m wasting my time here,” she says. “One boy last year used to
come in and curl up in the corner. He’s just got a C in his mock English
GCSE. and his coursework is some of the best writing I’ve seen.” And even
though she says “no one goes into teaching for the money”, salaries at the
top of the profession, if not quite as eyewatering as City packages, can
reach six figures for a head teacher of a large school.
But when you watch Davies at work, it’s plain that the real reason she’s opted
for a career in the classroom is, quite simply, that she is a natural. After
a morning around chatty, noisy children I’m talked out; Davies by contrast
is still making eye contact, engaging, entertaining her pupils. “They can
tell if you haven’t prepared a lesson,” she says. “They can tell if you
care.”
Dawes says Davies is one of the best teachers she has. “It’s tricky to get
good teachers in a school like this,” she admits. She deliberately recruits
Teach Firsters for certain roles. “They are fresh, not cynical and have a
belief you can succeed in life which rubs off on the children.”
In a year 7 class Davies oodles out praise. Nearly every child is called up to
the whiteboard, or has their name written there for effort. “Excellent,” she
says repeatedly, intermingled with “Ssh,” finger to lips when the hubbub
becomes too loud.
Who can give me a simile? she asks the class. “Miss Davies’s lips are as red
as a rose,” says one girl. “Great,” she enthuses, “I obviously chose the
right lipstick today.”
At lunchtime she’s still hard at it, standing in a freezing playground and
keeping an eye on a group of boys laughing at a classmate whose shirt has
been stained by a bird that let fly.
Two of her tutor group wander over to chat. “She’s my favourite teacher,”
confides Amy, 12.
Davies tells the pair an anecdote about how one pupil had inquired whether she
had a boyfriend. When she said yes, he asked, “‘Does he beat you up, Miss?
It looks like it – you have big bags under your eyes’.” She laughs – it must
be all that late-night marking.
