At about 7am on Monday, 46 middle-aged bankers, lawyers and other miscellaneous professionals will turn up at the school gates for the first day of their new working lives. In their old jobs they variously had status, power or money. Now they are starting again at the bottom, training to be teachers in what are politely known as “challenging” London secondary schools.
They will be earning less than £25,000, have mentors who may be less than half their age, and be so shattered at the end of each day that they will have to crawl home to lie down. Chris Forsyth, who used to be a partner at Freshfields working in intellectual property law, is viewing Monday with terror. “My son says, ‘You’ll be useless. The kids will walk all over you.’ ” But he’s not as anxious as I am. I’m worried about my own transformation from pampered columnist to maths teacher — how will I remember 200 names when I can’t remember my own children’s? — but also worried about the other 45 trainees. As this whole mad caper was my idea, I feel responsible for everyone else. Most of all, I am anxious that this experiment works so that more people like us will do it too. It all started last autumn when Katie Waldegrave, a social entrepreneur, and I set up Now Teach. We were sure there were lots of fiftysomethings who wanted to teach, but no one was seeking them out. Of the 35,000 who started teacher training in the UK last year, almost none of them — a mere 100 — were over 55. Given that teachers, on average, last barely five years in the profession, and given that many driven 50-year-olds will work into their seventies, this makes no sense at all. What is madder still is that the subjects where the teacher shortage is worst — maths, science and languages — are things many of these people are good at.
We raised some money and decided to give it a go. We hoped to find at least eight guinea pigs of a certain age to train in London in the first year, with a view to making Now Teach national in about five years’ time. As I write this, I am looking at the group photo of the first cohort. There are more of them than we thought possible — and between them they fought off 1,000 others for a place.
They aren’t all in their fifties — the youngest is 42 and the oldest 67 — and they aren’t all bankers and lawyers. I sit in the middle and to my left is Simon Harkin, a former diplomat who won an Ebola medal for his work in Liberia. At the back is Lucy Moore, who was chief executive of a large NHS hospital trust. Next to her in the horn-rimmed glasses is Richard Silverstein, who used to work at Nasa. Basil Comely, former head of Arts at the BBC, is sitting at the front. And somewhere at the back by the window is Kitty Ussher, who was a Labour MP.
Looking at their faces, staring at the camera with the steady assurance that comes to middle-aged professionals, I wonder why on earth are they doing this. And will they be any good at it? Will they — will we — become formidable teachers who will educate children about our subjects — and about the world, too? Or will we be useless at controlling the kids and alienate experienced teachers, only to quit at the first sign of difficulty?
Some observers expect the worst. Since we launched last autumn, 29 documentary film-makers have tried to persuade us to turn Now Teach into television. As reality-TV producers are not generally drawn to things that go smoothly, they are anticipating the tears of former lawyers/derivatives traders and want to capture them for the nation’s enjoyment. In November I got an email from a woman who left journalism at 50 to train to teach. Within two years she had quit, and has not worked since. She was broken by rioting pupils, shoddy management and rampant box-ticking. She concluded: “Think hard before you play Pied Piper for others to leave jobs to enter a world you presently know nothing of.” I emailed back to reassure her that we weren’t leading bankers to their death in the classroom — we were only working with excellent schools (mostly run by Ark), where there was no rioting and where the training and management were strong.
Either way, it was too late. My pipe was out, and people were following in great numbers. Within a couple of hours of publishing an article in the FT announcing that I was retraining as a maths teacher and urging bored bankers to come with me, 100 applications had poured in. They all wanted a change from what they were doing. They wanted to be more useful. Among the first was from someone who was ex-Bain (consultancy) and had spent 21 years in investment banking. He wrote: “I’d like to leave something better behind me than richer shareholders and richer partners.” Disaffected bankers, lawyers and management consultants came in force. But so did doctors, academics, a clergyman, film-makers, police officers, soldiers and athletes. Neither did they all hate the corporate world. Gareth Stephens, who did 30 years in the City, said, “I always loved my work. But I thought, how much time do I have left on the planet? Do I want to go on and on doing the same thing?” Most of the cohort had something that drew them to teaching — apart from a love of simultaneous equations or the plays of Molière. For some, it was in the blood. They had (like me) a parent, or (again like me) a child who was a teacher. Some had been shocked into it by a bereavement, others had had their own lives changed by education. PhongDinh, whose family fled to the US from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, was set on a path to law school by the wonderful people who taught him. For a few, the decision was more political than personal. Richard Silverstein was so despairing of the way Britain was going post-Brexit that he decided that the only way of making anything better was through education. The person who came closest to how I felt was Lara Agnew, a documentary film-maker. “I’ve spent my life commenting on the fabric of society,” she said. “I want to be in the fabric of society, not outside looking on.” All of them have given up a good deal to do this. One of the bankers told me in a matter-of-fact kind of way that his teaching salary would be 99 per cent less than what he used to make in a good year as a trader. But this isn’t the case for most of them. One man is borrowing money from an ancient father and others are busying themselves with spreadsheets to work out how to reduce expenditure to their relatively straitened circumstances. Some of the sacrifices are more idiosyncratic. Every June for a decade, Howard Smith, a former derivatives trader, went on a pilgrimage to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. This year he came second and left with winnings of about £100,000; next year he won’t be able to go at all — he’ll be teaching probability to 14-year-olds instead.
Lucy Kellaway, FT
