A large proportion of the smart new academy schools that have sprung up in the past few years have adopted names designed to confer an image of thrusting entrepreneurialism and diligent scholarship. Hence academies named Invictus, Endeavour, Aspire, Ignite, Lighthouse and so forth.
It’s a fact little known to the public at large but discussed openly among battle-hardened supply teachers that the more the name of a school appears to suggest order and harmony the more of a zoo it will be.
And so it’s with some trepidation that I accepted a day’s general supply at the Halcyon Academy (not it’s real name but you get the idea) in North London.
It was a distinctly modern building, the classrooms built around an oval hub, creating a vast open space with galleried walkways on each level rising up six floors. At 8.45am with the students still in registration, the space was bathed in light and the promise of learning. The whole thing was doubtless designed with something like the Library of Alexandria in mind. It was clearly not designed by anyone who has ever spent much time in a school. Any architecture that creates unfettered access for throwing textbooks/Coke cans/Year 7 kids into an inviting void, at increasingly higher altitudes, would surely never have left the drawing board had there been a teacher on the design team.
For the first time ever, I was given a laptop on arrival rather than the standard plastic folder containing school procedures and safeguarding protocols. The head’s PA talked me through how to use it to find the cover work and class registers and how at the click of one button I could summon the on-call member of the senior team to my assistance. This last part, she ran through twice.
I was covering history, one of my specialisms, but from early on I had the feeling that I would be drawing more on my classroom management skills than my in-depth knowledge of how mechanisation in the cotton industry heralded a decline of the slave trade in 19th-century America.
As I walked to my classroom on the third floor, I couldn’t help but notice the frequent signs around the atrium gallery reminding students not to throw anything over the edge. So that, I thought, should be fine. If there’s one thing we know that kids do well it’s paying attention to written instructions...
On the battlefield
What followed was the kind of day where, as a supply teacher, you feel as though you’ve really earned your money. It would be fair to say the day was probably unproductive for the majority of students, at least in the strictest of educational terms. On the plus side, I’m sure some of them had a lot of fun.
The TA in the first lesson clearly had some ‘history’ with the class, and it was quickly apparent that I was only ever going to be a spectator to an ongoing battle more complex in its dynamics and scarcely less bloody that Ypres or Passchendaele.
The second lesson involved a Year 10 class who had only the very loosest understanding of the conventional geographic boundaries of a classroom, wandering in and out of the lesson with a blithe indifference to my presence that frankly, I had to admire. Lest you think I did nothing to prevent this insurrectionist free-for-all, after the usual tricks had failed, stern vocal reprimands, assertive body language, pleas to reason and good sense, I decided I had no choice but to hit the emergency button. One click would send a member of the senior team rushing to my assistance. I clicked. I waited. Ten minutes later I grabbed another teacher passing in the corridor and told them I’d activated the on-call system, but no-one had arrived. “Yeah, that thing never works,” she replied, “I’ll see if there’s anyone in the office when I’m next down there if you like?” I never heard from her again.
Once I’d made it through to lunchtime I felt sure the worst was over; in the afternoon I was scheduled to accompany my class to a careers fair in the hall. What could be easier? I led the class to the hall and assumed a supervisory role as they made their way around the different stalls representing different career choices.
That would have been fine except firstly, there only appeared to be other supply teachers in charge, and secondly, a virtually unsupervised hall was clearly the ideal arena to settle a number of internecine rivalries between groups of Year 11 boys that had obviously been simmering for some time. In maximum security facilities, releasing inmates into gen pop is a procedure usually policed by only the most experienced prison guards armed with batons and CS gas, not by a bunch of know-nothing supply teachers. There was a lot of what, if I was being kind, I would call ‘jostling’, and the whole afternoon felt like it was only moments away from descending into a full-scale riot.
Still, things could have been worse; at least we were all on the ground floor of the building...
The writer has recently taken up supply teaching after 20 years in a full-time teaching job
