In recent years, however, I do not know of any teacher training provider that has not experienced an exponential rise in incidents of trainee mental ill-health. Almost always these derive from trouble trainees experience in adapting to unforeseen circumstances presented by their placement schools. It is as mystifying as it is concerning that these incidents appear to be on the rise. I outline one story which for me offers some explanation.
In 2019-20, I knew an extremely talented and highly motivated young teacher called Euphemia, Effie for short. She was everything one wanted from a young practitioner; considerate; respectful; knowledgeable; discreet; energetic and determined. She was also idealistic and not well-prepared for what she encountered from her mentor, a classroom teacher in her 12th year of teaching called Sam.
Six weeks after starting the placement Effie was signed off with heart arrhythmia borne from extreme stress. She had been psychologically and systematically dismantled in that time. The transformation could not have been more astonishing for someone so mature, sensible and energetic. It took Effie nearly two months to recover. The thought of ever going into another school again triggered a recurrence of symptoms. It was only after several years and the COVID-19 hiatus alongside some heart-rending conversations with her, that she decided to go back into another school and resume her training course in 2023. Thankfully she recovered her confidence and previous energy and passed the placement with flying colours. She has now completed her first year employed as a qualified teacher and her headteacher wrote in April this year to say how pleased she was with her and how proud her tutors should be with her and her progress. The headteacher’s words contained the following phrase: ‘rarely have I come across a young teacher with such passion. She energises the whole school and some of my other more seasoned colleagues’.
Effie’s kindness and forgiving nature led her to not wish to make any waves with her former school and Sam, whom she said was to blame for what happened. So despite all the encouragement we could give to her she refused to make a complaint against Sam and trigger an investigation. However, there had to be some enquiry, otherwise there was no way for the placement school where Sam was teaching and those involved in her training to learn from what had happened. So we managed to get Effie to agree to her telling us everything as long as we did not pursue a ‘formal’ complaint and get her into trouble somehow. This naivety is something to which I will return later in this post.
It was very difficult for Effie to tell us everything. Difficult not only because some of the precise dates and chronology were hard to recall but because reliving the incidents triggered a mild recurrence of the symptoms she had experienced nearly three years before. Nevertheless we managed to piece together her account of what had happened.
Effie painted as balanced and charitable a profile of Sam as she could muster. Sam was, according to Effie, clearly a competent teacher, good with subject knowledge and high standards for the children in her class. However, according to Effie’s account, Sam was unhappy in her role as a teacher and felt under-appreciated professionally. Sam needed mentoring support herself about this but it was not available and so she harboured her unhappiness privately taking it out on others, particularly vulnerable others, like trainees. She took pleasure in wielding the power she had to inflict cruelty on Effie through multiple acts of passive aggression. This involved nurturing an atmosphere of implicit continuous disappointment with Effie, while explicitly exaggerating criticism over trivialities, paying too much attention to Effie’s shortcomings, making inappropriate comments on her personal characteristics and traits, making regular expressions of displeasure, and loud sighing and shaking of head during Effie’s actual teaching. A single occasion of an incident like this could be forgiven as unfortunate, and maybe embarrassingly inappropriate. However, such a multitude of happenings clearly takes the issue over the line and into realms of bullying and harassment.
Effie reported sleepless nights; a feeling of utter dread entering the school and meeting Sam; an inability to say anything in conversation with Sam; hyper-anxiety; exhaustion-riddled relief and joy on a Friday afternoon; the need to regularly disappear into the toilets and break down in tears; brooding preoccupation over the week-ends rising to helpless terror on Sunday evenings. Gradually physical symptoms began to avail themselves, including anhedonia; heart palpitations and suicidal ideation. This eventually led to a breakdown and her being signed off. It took 6 weeks. For many others it would not have taken as long.
Why had Effie not said anything before it came to this? Sam was by no means the only professional colleague and mentor that Effie was working closely with and so there were plenty of colleagues she could have said something to. Sam’s behaviour to Effie was, however, much more encouraging and supportive when in the gaze of another colleague. Even when Effie’s university-based mentor visited to quality assure the placement and check all was in order, Sam’s remarks about Effie were encouraging and warm and there was nothing visibly wrong. Effie was reluctant to say anything for fear that it could be taken as a betrayal of Sam and lead to an intensification of Sam’s behaviour. This is an example of a classic abusive relationship replete with coercive control.
Sam’s headteacher on being given this information gave a look of horrified realisation. She had given two other trainees from other providers to Sam over the last two years and they had also both withdrawn. She had not made the connection and no trainees had said anything adverse about Sam until now. However, she knew of another incident with a colleague of Sam’s, a classroom assistant, who had complained about passive aggression and insensitive communication from Sam. The pattern of behaviour had emerged and the headteacher was horrified. Rightly so. Sam would no longer mentor trainees.
Unfortunately in my many years of working with new teachers and mentors, occurrences of this kind of situation although still very much in the minority seem to be on the rise. Not all of them end in the trainee withdrawing from teaching but most of them do, like Sam’s other victims or so it seems. Those trainees who recognise what is happening and push back are the ones who are most likely not to leave teaching and who secure institutional-level learning to ensure this happens to no-one else. However, trainees in my experience who are in similar situations more usually internalise the problem and blame themselves, leading to their departure from teaching, often with an adverse health symptom. Schools which promote a ‘put up and shut up’ relationship with trainees only make this more likely when situations like Effie’s arise. This is indefensible at any time but especially so in the current climate of teacher shortage.
I am not echoing a Chris Woodhead-esque assertion about the number of incompetent mentors that need to be rooted out. The issue here is not one of competence but one of ethics and values. I am sure Sam could have been a wonderful mentor to Effie. However, the power she had, small as it may have been, her unhappiness with her job, and an inexplicable antipathy to Effie, and trainees generally, led her to inflict cruelty of the most wicked kind. This is not incompetence. It is a calculating and furtive form of evil. Teachers who have no sense of the human values and ethical obligations of their position can do incalculable damage to trainees and their profession as a whole, particularly at this time of recruitment crisis. The way to deal with this is to enhance teachers’ understanding of ethics, values and safeguarding (see the next post) and challenge colleagues like Sam through normal professional and institutional processes, which include disciplinaries where necessary. For these processes to work, however, requires individual victims to recognise the situations they are in and to take action. And this was what Effie did not do and turned out to be her most serious weakness as a new trainee. Although Effie’s naivety is entirely forgivable and her treatment completely unforgivable, at the heart of this situation was a misconception about teaching that she would be working mostly with children (rather than adults) and that the teachers she would be working with would be as nice as her. Furthermore, she had not recognised the signs that another colleague was behaving unprofessionally towards her and so she did not respond effectively. This was a brutal correction for her. Had it not been for her training provider’s duty of care, she would never have reentered teaching and would not be having the clearly positive impact she is now having.
A simple analysis of reasons for trainee withdrawals from ITE programmes reveal the following looming very large: ‘anxiety and stress’; ‘workload’; ‘personal reasons’; ‘cannot cope with endless criticism’; ‘toxic culture in placement.’ Scratch beneath the surface of many of these complicated individual stories and there is an uncanny frequency with which these stated reasons belie difficulties dealing with other colleagues and a lack of preparation on the part of the trainee for this. Anybody who works in a role which is ‘public-facing’ will know that interacting with adult professionals and members of the public, while mostly pleasant and unproblematic, will often entail interactions which are eccentric, prickly, misunderstood, and occasionally, as with Sam, downright abusive. It takes wisdom and great courage to recognise this when it is happening to you and to call it out. As a basic tenet of safeguarding, all teaching professionals have an obligation to do so. And in the current recruitment crisis this is only more essential.
We should seriously consider restoring the requirement for trainees to have completed a period of work experience in a school before their training programme begins. While this will not eliminate trainees’ misconceptions about teaching, it will certainly help to reduce them. It seems hardly coincidental that examples of trainees’ coming to grief as a result of misconceived prior impressions of teaching appear to have risen since this requirement was withdrawn in 2017.
There is also a wider lesson that should be learnt from this which centres on Sam. I do not believe that she was an inherently evil individual determined to do harm. Her headteacher agreed and offered an astute explanation; Sam was a victim as well as Effie. Sam did what she did because she was herself badly in need of ‘professional development’ in the full sense of the phrase. This does not mean she needed to be put on a training course for a day. There was something more profoundly wrong than that. She had stopped professionally learning and was in a mid-career flat-line in which her practice and attitude to her own job (and profession) was atrophying. This led to a vicious circle of negative reflection, demotivation, resentment at the enormity of her responsibilities, increasing likelihood of being overlooked for promotions, leading once again to negative reflection. Being forced by her headteacher to take a trainee was only likely to exacerbate her situation and so her bitterness made her vindictive. In this way we can see how unhappiness spreads like a virus.
The teacher attrition rate, strike action, and union campaigns of one form or another are clear signs that there is a rising unhappiness within teaching. The very tangible effects of this are probably being felt by hundreds of people, practitioners old and new, who are going through a similar experience to Sam or Effie. There is a big job to do in rekindling some mid-career teachers’ joy in the challenges of their work and helping them to seek and engage in career refreshment. The benefits of doing so will make a decisive impact on the prospects of new trainees eager to follow the trajectories and examples of their more experienced colleagues. This is, after all, what a profession is supposed to do.