Like Jennifer Lopez, I have an entourage: my mum, my best friend and my dad I have been asked to speak on a panel. Some group is organising a conference about education, and they want me to sit on the “questions and answers panel”. I’m excited. I have never been asked to sit on a panel before and it appeals to my vanity. I get carried away. I think of Newsnight. I have never watched it because I’m always asleep before the 10 o’clock news has finished, but it’s acquired this mythical status in my mind as the forum for clever people who know about things such as Education, who have Views and Opinions that Count.

My mum is also getting carried away. She’s now thinking Newsnight crossed with those phone-ins that Richard and Judy used to do. She has visions of me doling out inspirational advice to people in a state of educational crisis. My best friend is getting carried away. Even my dad thinks I’m going to be sitting up there with Estelle Morris. I try to prepare myself. I remind myself of my educational acronyms. I read The Times Ed properly that Friday, not just Friday for Ted’s Big Picture and the book reviews, but the actual paper with the Opinions.

I like to think of myself as well informed about education. I am a teacher for Christ’s sake. I’ve even read the odd educational book since I finished my PGCE. And I love talking about school. I love sitting in the staffroom talking about kids. I love boring my friends in the pub. I love going out with members of my department and saying “we really mustn’t talk about school all nightI ”, knowing that we will because we love competing with each other over who’s got the worst class and knowing that we love the little buggers anyway.

I reckon I’d be pretty good on a panel. I buy myself a new polo-neck, and with that final preparation I turn up. Like Jennifer Lopez, I have an entourage: my mum, my best friend and my dad, who’s graduated from visions of Estelle Morris and has now convinced himself that I’m going to be sitting with Tony Blair, and that he’s going to corner Tony and give him a piece of his mind over the tea and Danish.

We’re supposed to be discussing education. I’m on a panel with two brilliant people who seem to know a lot about education, and quote a lot of facts and figures and use long words. The room is filled with equally brilliant, totally terrifying people who ask loads of questions about things that sound vaguely familiar from news broadcasts - but they are things I don’t remember talking about with my colleagues. I start to get worried.

The first question is about new legislation. I don’t know much about that. The rest of the questions do bear some relation to my experience in the classroom, but I feel that without the facts and figures that the other two have at their fingertips, my views seem a bit wishy-washy. It’s like everyone’s speaking a language that I vaguely know, but can’t quite access. I try to talk about my experiences in the classroom. I try to talk about some of the children I teach and some of the things that we’ve shared. I try to talk about some of the issues that I discuss with my colleagues, but I don’t feel anyone’s really interested. Someone asks how many “actual” teachers there are in the room. Counting me, there are three.

My mum says I was brilliant. I feel depressed. I don’t understand how all these people can be so interested in education but talk about things that aren’t really affecting teachers, every day. I don’t understand, if they’re all so interested, why they don’t become teachers and do something about it. Actually, I do understand now - they want to sound concerned, but they also want to be able to pay the mortgage.

There seem to be two very different sides to “education”. There’s the side that the advisers, the lobbyists, the researchers, the academics and the politicians know about. And there’s my side - the person who’s actually teaching. They don’t bear any relation to each other. I came off the panel feeling that my experience wasn’t worth much, and I should have known some facts and figures instead. I realised that, like a lot of teachers, I have opinions and views - but do they really count, and do the people who count really listen?

Gemma Warren is an assistant special needs co-ordinator at a London comprehensiveEmail: gemmawarren@freenet.co.uk