The night before the general election on Thursday 8 June, Labour candidate and primary teacher Martin Whitfield was hastily pulling together a lesson plan “just in case”.

He need not have bothered, because in the early hours of Friday 9 June he won his bid to become MP for East Lothian. By Monday, instead of talking politics with P4 as planned, he was heading down to London to the Houses of Parliament.

The day after the election was “absolute chaos”, he recalls. One of his first tasks that Friday was to break it to his headteacher that he would not be returning to school. But the head of Prestonpans Primary, Jonathan Revell, already knew - the result had been declared at 3am - and, anyway, leading up to the poll Revell had an inkling that Whitfield would triumph.

Revell says: “We actually knew early Friday morning, but in reality I had been keeping my ear to the ground and the feeling was - speaking to parents and others - that he was on for a victory.

“We all feel immensely proud,” he adds.

However, because it was a snap general election, the school was not able to capitalise as much as it would have liked on having its very own parliamentary candidate.

There was less than two weeks between Whitfield notifying the school that he had put his name forward to be the Labour candidate and him leaving to start his campaign. Scottish teachers running in an election are entitled to up to five unpaid days of leave for campaigning.

Whitfield laughs: “I said, ‘I don’t think I can do it in five days’, so we came to an arrangement that I would have unpaid leave for four weeks so there was no financial implication for the council.”

After his candidacy was confirmed, he had some interesting discussions with his class, who asked questions ranging from whether he was going to be prime minister, to what would happen if he did not win.

And, according to Revell, Whitfield’s campaign politicised his colleagues, sparking some interesting staffroom debates - and the head is now hoping that the children might get the chance to travel to London to see their old teacher’s new workplace for themselves.

‘Manic and exciting’

“It has been a genuinely fascinating, interesting and exciting time in a completely manic way,” Revell continues. “When he said he had put his name forward my brain cogs were whirring. The main thing was: how am I going to cover the class? That was my main thought, to be honest. But we managed to get cover and because Martin leaving coincided with the recruitment cycle we have managed to secure staff for next year.”

This is not Whitfield’s first foray into politics and public speaking. He trained to become a teacher in 2001 at Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education after working as a lawyer, and was Prestonpans community council chair before running as an MP.

He was challenged to stand for East Lothian by the area’s MSP, Iain Gray, after “sounding off” to him about the importance of not parachuting in an unknown to be the Labour candidate.

Whitfield explains: “He said, ‘Well, are you going to put up, or shut up?’ So I filled the form in and then had a challenging discussion with my wife.”

On the campaign trail, he found himself on the doorsteps of some of his pupils’ homes. It took them a few minutes to realise that he wasn’t there to chase up their homework.

His campaigning worked. Labour had held the East Lothian seat for decades before the SNP’s George Kerevan claimed it from them in 2015. The Nationalists were unable to defend their majority of nearly 7,000, with Whitfield claiming 20,158 votes to Kerevan’s 17,075.

Whitfield has now swapped a commute of a few minutes’ walk - with his son, Felix, who was in P7 - for a schedule that will see him spend most of the week in London.

But he is looking forward to helping issues like child poverty get the attention they deserve - he says the statistics on child poverty are “hurtling back to the figures of 20 years ago” (see pages 6-7). He still plans to comment on education, even though it is devolved.

It was awful leaving his pupils behind, he says. But he does not view teaching as “a past-tense job,” he adds. “I still talk about ‘When I go back to teaching’.”

@Emma_Seith