Lucy Kellaway became a teacher in 2017, one year after co-founding the charity Now Teach to encourage people to join the profession in later life. She spent three decades working as a journalist at the Financial Times before making the switch to the classroom.

Speaking to Tes, she reflects on how her teacher mum and daughter opened her eyes to the difference the profession makes, and why her ideal staffroom needs people who are “very young and a complete laugh”.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

Am I allowed two? The first one was Miss Burn. She was a very clear teacher. She made me feel I was brilliant at maths. I think why I single her out was that, at parents’ evening, she said to my dad, “Lucy is a natural mathematician”. I was so thrilled by it that I loved her forever. I think it shows that, as teachers, we can’t flatter and compliment our pupils enough.

There’s also my mum, who taught me very briefly for Oxbridge [Kellaway’s mother, a teacher at Camden School for Girls, taught her preparation classes for the Oxford entrance exam while she was a student there]. Her sheer enthusiasm is something that I’m now really trying to emulate because her students absolutely adored her.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

Looking back on it now, I think if I hadn’t gone into education myself, I would have thought, “Oh, Camden’s so marvellous, everyone should go to schools like that”. I now don’t see it like that at all. I feel a bit sad in thinking that sort of education was very much a luxury for the educated middle classes.

I taught in one of the strictest schools in the country. I was absolutely horrified on my first day - “What do you mean they walk around in silence? What are they, prisoners?” It’s only very slowly that the penny is dropping. It’s still not a system I completely love but it’s a system I have huge respect for.

If you think the point of education is to get the best GCSE results and the highest possible value-added score, this is how you do it.

3. Why do you work in education?

I went into journalism in my twenties because the coolest people I knew from university were journalists, so I did that for 30 years.

But as you get older, you want to do something socially worthwhile. So there was that, and there was also an age thing: I didn’t want to write frivolous columns any more.

My daughter’s experiences from being a Teach Firster had a profound effect on me, of the sort of difference that teachers can make. And then there was the shining model of my mum, so what else was I going to do other than become a teacher?

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what do you regret?

I don’t have any regrets. I think I’ve been really, really lucky to have had such an interesting working life.

I’m most proud of how, after four years, I can just about do it [teaching]. I still think it’s even harder to be a brilliant teacher than it is to be a brilliant journalist. There’s that confidence curve where, at the beginning, when you’ve just about staggered through a couple of lessons, you think, “Ah! This is a breeze, I’ve cracked it!” But then, as time goes on, you get a deeper realisation of just how hard this is to do well. I think, after four years, I am doing at least an adequate job for my students and, in some ways, I think I’m doing an excellent job for them, in terms of the breadth that I bring to them, which they really don’t have otherwise.

There’s a charming student who is on pupil premium. She’s got none of the so-called social capital, but I force them to engage with the news. She came to me the other day, saying that she was interested in a Bank of England apprenticeship and [asking] how she could go about doing that. And why wouldn’t I feel profoundly proud? She wouldn’t have heard of the Bank of England otherwise.

I am also so proud of Now Teach, the organisation that I co-founded to get other older people like me into teaching. By September, we will have recruited over 500 people, and OK, it’s been a catastrophe for some of them, but teaching’s a catastrophe for some 22-year-olds as well. But at the end of that period, we had some amazing people in schools who wouldn’t be there otherwise.

5. If you could choose your perfect staffroom, who would be in it?

I had my perfect staffroom in my first year in my current school.

First of all, I have to have some people who are very young and a complete laugh. [In my first year] there were a couple of wild young women in their twenties, who were always going out getting unbelievably drunk, coming in the next morning saying that they’d thrown up in the shower but, then, because they were young and fit, just getting it together to teach a full day.

Then I had the nicest mentor ever, who had also come into teaching much later, who was very laid back, who protected me from the disciplinary regime, and was hilarious. There was one day when he was dancing around in our office singing “I’m too sexy for my shirt”. It’s absolutely vital for me, especially in a very strict school, that you have your safe area where everyone can just have a massive laugh and then go out of the door and be “hands in pockets, good morning!” to the students.

I have worked with people who are really competitive with each other and that is awful. School is so difficult that you’ve got to support each other. You’ve got to be able to say, “Oh my god, that lesson was a car crash,” and for everyone else to laugh supportively.

My ideal office would have an age range from 22 to 62, and be massively diverse in background. I’ve learned so much from my colleagues about their lives. When I started at the FT (it’s much less true now), everybody was very Oxbridgey, mostly white. This is a completely different environment.

6. What do you think are the best and worst aspects of our schools’ system?

I think we had let the liberal thing - which Camden did really well - spread out too much so, to some extent, I would be a Govian. But only to some extent - it’s gone way too far. But I think that, as a whole educational system, our expectations of what students, on average, can achieve is much higher than it was, and that has been a huge improvement.

I think exams are absolutely vital as a way of testing students, and exams are important because they’re a slightly fairer system for disadvantaged kids than anything else we can think of. But, at the same time, what saddens me is the deadening effect they have on education and how I spend so much of my time teaching exam technique.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you the most?

The person who I think is brilliant and wise is Daisy Christodoulou. I love the No More Marking website, I love how she is looking at the sort of thing I’m trying to do (hopelessly and informally) on what is the most worthwhile thing that we do as teachers, and really trying to do that scientifically, so she would be my number one pin-up.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would you change?

I would like to see schools being judged a little bit more broadly than on purely a Progress 8 measure. I don’t know how you’d do it, but I would like schools to be judged more on the breadth of what they teach.

Ofsted doesn’t like it when schools are teaching bloody GCSEs from Year 7. But I would like to see that more in practice.

Also, I really do believe in the longevity of teachers. The burnout is not just a headache because it’s a waste of money and it means finding new people; I think it creates a worse experience for our children. I would like to see schools being judged a bit more on how well they retain teachers.

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years?

Going back to my parents’ generation, let alone mine, school was the same structure - it was a physical place, children were grouped together by age, and they were taught by teachers organised by subject. Some were streamed, others weren’t, but there they were for the working day.

Everything else in our lives has been disrupted and that model hasn’t been (well, it was disrupted by Covid, and we needed it back). I suspect that, in that big way, schools will be the same in 30 years’ time, and that’s something to celebrate. I think it works. Having children physically out of homes, physically with each other, physically learning something, that will be the same, and that’s huge.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools over the past year?

I don’t think there is one person who has had an absolutely enormous effect. If it doesn’t sound too drippy, it’s the collective effect of hundreds of thousands of teachers who have stuck through it through the most bloody awful year of their teaching career, are still there and still doing the best they can for their students. If that doesn’t sound too wet and hopeless, that’s what education is: it’s individual efforts, it’s not one heroic person.

It’s not about heroes or role models - it’s about all of us being on time for period one and teaching our children the best we can. And that’s what teachers do every day.

Lucy Kellaway was speaking to Catherine Lough, a reporter at Tes. Her new book, Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair by Lucy Kellaway is published by Ebury (£16.99), details how she embraced a new career in her fifties

This article originally appeared in the 16 July 2021 issue