Tidying a teaching cupboard only happens in two circumstances.

Firstly, when a new teacher gets given their own classroom and decides to “pop in” during the holidays to “smarten it up a bit”.

Secondly, when an exasperated middle leader finally cracks and insists that “everybody mucks in” to sort out the resources area, usually during their oxymoronically decreasing gained time.

Either way, nasty surprises await. Invariably, teachers dislike throwing stuff away. The makers of Channel 4’s Britain’s Biggest Hoarders ought to forget hermitic pensioners sardined by bin bags in dilapidated semis and instead focus on easier subjects, like Geography “workrooms”, and classrooms that have been without a loving owner for 15 years.

Because teachers have little time to tidy. So, naturally enough, they take the quicker option of cramming it into the nearest cubbyhole. And this makes sense. After all, you never know when you might need a wordsearch on the early hits of Peter Andre.

If you’ve been tasked with - or god forbid volunteered for - this Sisyphean spruce-up, you will require specialist equipment. You’ll want sturdy gloves to deal with samurai standard paper cuts. You’ll need nose plugs to block out the noxious odours from Mr Patrick’s long-lost coffee cup. You’ll require a hard hat to guard against the collapse of the precipitous stack of textbooks about the origins of the universe, which are nearly as old as the cosmos itself.     

Classroom secrets

And yet, this filthy job serves a deeper purpose. Like an archaeologist digging through layers of soil, the dusty-fingered tidier of the teaching cupboard also unearths important artefacts of the educational past. Once you begin to excavate you’ll find things like:

Obsolete specs from defunct exam boards featuring arcane assessment criteria. Maths coursework or science “can do” tasks anyone?

• Quixotically outdated technology, like the Bromcom electronic registration system, a proto-tablet that not even ET could use to make contact with attendance officers or other life forms

• Exercise books backed in wrapping paper, an obligatory task as first homework of the year

• Bizarre and unnecessary stationery: Tipp-ex mice; glitter pens; electric pencil sharpeners; batteries that fit no device known to mankind; verbal feedback stamps

• OHPs - a much-maligned hybrid of visualiser, interactive whiteboard and projector, accompanied with windable acetates ideally suited to smudgy diagrams, indecipherable writing and obscene puppet shows

The primary benefit of the summer cleaning ritual is the clearing out of skipfuls of crap. Yet it also educates us about the fads and relics of yesteryear, and reminds us of the universal constants of every teaching generation.

Take those acetates for example. The teacher, who scribed, scribbled, and sketched during the lesson was often using techniques that modern cognitive science tells us are highly beneficial to student learning: live modelling, dual coding and other metacognitive strategies.

So, the time is now. The sun is out. It’s a chance to pressgang your team, or a naively optimistic NQT, into an ill-timed spring clean that will shine a light on the darkest, most enlightening recesses of our teaching lives.  

Mark Roberts is an assistant headteacher at a secondary school in the South West of England.