Being a good colleague is not about big things. It’s about making a cup of tea for a mate who has a cold; it’s about funny cards on birthdays or off-days; it’s about praise in the staffroom for a lesson or wall display that may otherwise go unnoticed. In these times of teacher shortages, fostering a sense of belonging might do more to retain teachers than any amount of performance-related pay or ambitious career targets.

Today, after a quarter century of teaching, I have no colleagues. I haven’t had a breakdown or won the lottery. I have simply decided to do something else for a while. I cheerfully shared the long holiday with my old teacher pals, but now it feels just a little lonely watching from outside all those familiar rites of the academic year: the irritating “Back to School” signs; the controversies about exam results; the pre-September knotty stomach and those bright piles of new-term stationery.

None of these involve me now. I do not regret my decision but I guess it would be sad indeed if I did not feel a certain mild melancholy. Yes, I’ll miss the kids and the poetry and all the rest. However, my colleagues are what I will miss most.

Colleagues need not be friends. I taught English and my close mates were mostly English teachers. At extreme ends of the school, far along the dreary corridors, things such as science and technology were taught. I have only the haziest notion of what happens in such places. Some of these teachers have been working from these same rooms, as I have in mine, for longer than any child at the school has been alive. During these years we could sometimes go months without exchanging words and yet, always, I knew that we were working together.

Few of these colleagues knew me well in any conventional, social sense. We never visited each other’s homes, for example. In many cases it is quite likely that, following the fulsome exchanges at the end of last term, we shall never speak again and this suits us all fine. We did not choose one another and, apart from the chance appointments which threw us together, we have, in many cases, little in common.

Even so, I have shared an intimacy with these people. No tittering: what we had was special. My colleagues knew how I felt about my job in a way which no one who has not done real teaching can appreciate - not a best friend, a brother or a lover. Good colleagues respect each other partly because they know from experience exactly how hard the job is. Because colleagues know what the job is like on a “nothing special” November Tuesday. They know that, with one another, they have a place in which they can be real. In these days when the every move of teachers is assessed and criticised from outside, it is vital that somewhere, there is such a place.

I wonder how many teachers I have worked with. Hundreds, certainly. A few will remain friends. I am under no illusions that other colleagues will spare me more than the remotest occasional thought. Maybe, one day years from now, I shall meet one of the colleagues in an old folks’ home. As we clash Zimmer frames, there may be a glimmering of recognition. One of us will say, “Whatever happened to TVEI?” or “Remember Darren Spragg?” And a secret memory will be exchanged as rich, in its way, as any this life can offer.

Until then, I want to say to my colleagues that I will miss you. I, for one, know what it is like. Look out for each other.

MIKE HAWTHORNE

Mike Hawthorne was head of English at Ludlow school in Shropshire until recently