At the start of March Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, called for a “transformative” reform of the schools system in the wake of the pandemic, involving the introduction of a five-term year and longer days to ensure children catch up with their studies. Williamson compared the scope of his “radical” reform to RA Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which had the ambitious aim of abolishing childhood inequality by providing free secondary education for all. Butler’s introduction of the 11-plus exam and tripartite system of secondary schools – grammar, secondary modern and technical – proved controversial. Williamson’s proposals are equally problematic; head teachers have labelled them “chaotic and confusing”.
Of the 49 individuals in government who have had control over the English schools system since 1900, only four previously taught in schools themselves. As Andria Zafirakou, the winner of the 2018 Global Teacher prize, expresses it: “The people who sit in 10 Downing Street are like gods to us teachers.” That’s to say, they seem so remote, their actions so unintelligible to those who actually work within schools that they might as well be gazing down from Mount Olympus, arbitrarily firing lightning bolts on to asphalt playgrounds.
In many ways Those Who Can, Teach, Zafirakou’s first book, is a response to the government’s scattergun approach to education, a plea for them to take notice of the pressures teachers are increasingly placed under, and how education policy is damaging young people. Her simple, direct style often feels close to a manifesto: “We are the ones who go above and beyond the duties we were employed for,” she writes.
Zafirakou drives her students home from school when there are gangs lying in wait for them outside the playground, washes and mends their school clothes when others mock them for smelling, and runs weekend and holiday art clubs so pupils who find it hard being at home have somewhere to go. It is no wonder that the profession has a burnout problem. She watches many teachers around her give up; 15.3% who started working in 2017 were no longer in teaching by the following year.
“We are the ones alerting social services to child-protection issues, severe poverty, or the fallout of police intervention,” Zafirakou writes. It is this kind of granular information, she believes, that cannot be “captured by the facts and figures” the government focuses on, and which makes the idea of solving the issues faced by today’s students by way of more rigorous exams (as Michael Gove did in 2010) or ensuring children remain silent in corridors (another Williamson proposal) appear laughable.
Zafirakou has worked for more than 15 years as an arts and textiles teacher at Alperton community school in Brent, one of the most deprived London boroughs. As the daughter of Greek migrants, “it is written into my blood and bones how isolating it can feel to arrive in a different country”. To ensure those at Alperton understand that their diverse backgrounds are recognised and respected, she has learned to greet parents and pupils in dozens of languages. Those Who Can, Teach is a record of the forces of empathy and energy that drive her as a teacher.
As Kate Clanchy’s celebrated memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me does so well, Those Who Can, Teach relies on case studies of students to illustrate, for instance, the impact of social media, of poverty, of mental health or learning difficulties on young people today. Both books demonstrate how leading lessons is but a small portion of what it means to be a teacher in 21st-century Britain. At times, perhaps, Zafirakou’s narrative tends to remain on the surface, rushing over the various hardships faced by her students; her book would have benefited from the depth Clanchy achieves – the bringing alive of both pupils and the lessons she taught them through evocative descriptions and a distinctive, discursive style.
Those Who Can, Teach is bookended by Zafirakou’s experience of winning the Global Teacher prize, which provided her with both a platform and the funds ($1m prize money) to enact lasting change in teaching. She has since set up a successful charity, Artists in Residence, which arranges for professional artists to spend time in schools across the UK. Clanchy in her book includes a conversation with another teacher who wishes she had kept a record of the ways she supported excluded pupils at her school. “But she was too busy with the actual good she was doing,” Clanchy explains, “so I have written this down instead.” Such a distinction is useful when it comes to assessing Zafirakou’s legacy: though her book is clear and informative, it is her wonderful achievements as a teacher, made evident in this account, that remain the more impressive feat.
• Lamorna Ash’s Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town is published by Bloomsbury. Those Who Can, Teach: What It Takes to Make the Next Generation is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
