I have just come out of the clouds,” says Andrew Penney. “It is an other-worldly place where I work, a unique place.” Last year, the 44-year-old maths and information technology teacher quit his job as a head of department in a large Middlesex comprehensive and took a pound;4,000 pay cut to become a classroom teacher on Portland Bill, the defiant spit of rock hanging off the bottom of Dorset. It was once described by Thomas Hardy as the “Gibraltar of Wessex”.
“As I drive in every day, I have sea on both sides. There is the wide sweep of Chesil beach and there are windsurfers flying back and forth beside me. I get into the classroom and look up and there is the sea, waiting,” he says.”
“I have days like today when the cloud comes down and you cannot see in front of you or the wind whips up and you actually feel like you are in the middle of the sea. It is not at all like Twickenham.”
In the jargon, Penney is known as a “downshifter”, someone who has slipped down the careerladder to a less pressured and less highly paid position in exchange for anticipatedimprovements in lifestyle.
According to a report to the General Teaching Council last year, he is part of an increasingly significant group of teachers opting out of the fast lane. Many more probably play with the idea of “downshifting”. But are you suited to such a move?
Dr Lea Brindle, an occupational psychologist, “downshifted” from a high-pressure career as a training manager with a large accountancy firm. He now lives on an island in the middle of the Thames and mixes consultancy with teaching yoga part-time. He says he would not return to his former life but warns teachers not to approach such a change without due care.
“You have to analyse what you are doing with the move. You might be seriously overworked, feel you are not doing what you want to do or not being given the support you need. But that doesn’t necessarily mean any move will be right for you. You have to think about the things pushing you away from yourcurrent job but also the reality of the job you are proposing to go into. Are you really going to be less stressed there?”
In other words, you could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Brindle says he advises clients to analyse exactly what motivates them before considering any change. Downshifting will probably mean a loss of power, autonomy, status and money. If a geographic change is envisaged, downshifting will also involve uprooting of families.
“There is a real possibility that a feeling of being overstretched in your present job might actually cause you to throw away a lot of the things that motivate you in your work. Not all people are really motivated by a quiet life,” he says.
Half a year into his move, Andrew Penney admits that not everything has gone smoothly. He says he had “several years of hell” at his old school before he made the move to Portland’s Royal Manor comprehensive.
Trying to run an under-resourced ICT department, he found much of his time taken up by covering maths lessons. When the money finally came for ICT work, it came in a rush and was accompanied by huge pressure to show immediate improvements in results.
“I don’t regret anything about the job change, although there have been things to get used to.It would be silly to say that I expected everything thathappened with the move. My wife is a Richmond girl and I think that moving away had a big impact. It has also taken some time to get the children settled at school. It was a big decision. On balance, though, I think my wife would agree that we wouldn’t go back.”
Chris Bunting
