The Greener Grass Of Everywhere Else

We’ve all been there once or twice over the course of our careers, I guess. Disaffection or disillusion begins to creep into our professional outlooks and we start to search for other potential places to work. Once you start to look, however, it often seems like everywhere but where you currently ply your trade is a model of perfection; the glossy PDFs attached to other organisations’ job ads show of smiling colleagues who you know you’ll enjoy working alongside and facilities worth dying for set amongst lush natural landscapes. Quite literally, the greener grass of everywhere else.

In education, of course, it’s fairly normal for teachers to move schools a few times during their careers, so the process outlined above may seem quite familiar to some. It’s not always disaffection which is the deciding factor for teachers when seeking to move on, to be clear, and there are also many occasions when seeking promotion or simply new challenges are reasons to leave somewhere you’ll always be fond of to try something different in another setting. If you are looking to leave because you’re fed up with certain aspects of either the role you’ve currently got or the place where you currently work, however, it really does pay to be mindful of the greener grass mirage looming over the jobseekers’ horizon.

If your current school is less than perfect and you’re looking for a different school which is perfect, then you’re probably going to be disappointed in the longer term, in my experience. The very simple reason for this is that perfect schools don’t exist. Some schools, clearly, are great places to work for lots of reasons (more of which in a moment) and some are a little more challenging in terms of daily experiences, but opinions of workplaces are mostly subjective and can certainly vary over time. Challenge of one sort or another exists everywhere, and if your intention when looking for a school to work in is one which is pretty much absent of any difficult moments, then you’re not only slightly askew in terms of your own expectations but probably also in the wrong profession altogether. Some schools can feel like great places to work because of a clear focus upon things such as wellbeing (for students and staff), CPD or community engagement whereas others can present as dour, miserable places to go to each day, but every single perspective is utterly personal and what works for one teacher is no guarantee that it works for another. Sometimes, the best approach when looking for a school is not trying to find the perfect one, but rather looking for a place which appears to be a good fit for you as a professional.

I’ve worked in four different schools over the course of my twenty-six year career in education so far, and all four were very distinct places, not only in size and location but also in how they felt and how they made me feel in return. There were great people in all four schools, but there were also some people whose company I would never choose to keep ever again. And, if I’m honest, I probably fit into the latter bracket for many of the colleagues I’ve worked alongside as well. This, I would suggest, is both quite normal and likely to be the case again whenever the time comes for me to move to another school. All schools have some very clear positives and some glaringly obvious negatives, and nowhere is perfect.

Comparing one school to another based upon the prospectuses they produce or the glossy PR of their social media presences is a really bad idea, obviously. What you are doing here, to be clear, is comparing the output of their marketing teams, and not the schools themselves. In order to know what a place is really like, you need to either visit and spend some time there or to talk to people who work there every day. Even inspection reports or exam results will only give you so much. Just like how people in reality tend to differ a great deal from the personas they present online, so too are schools often vastly different places to that which is projected into the homes of their communities.

We also need to be really clear that the things which are often presented by marketing teams as huge positives do not in any way guarantee that this is a brilliant school at all. Schools can have the most amazing facilities and be located in beautiful settings, but neither are essentially what makes for a great experience for either students or teachers. What really makes a difference are outstanding teaching & learning and excellent student behaviour, as well as other factors such as the collective spirit of the staff and relationships with the local community. If you’ve got amazingly kitted-out classrooms, sports facilities which would make professional athletes blush and STEAM labs straight out of Star Trek, but teachers who aren’t that motivated and student behaviour which creates some daily concerns then the overall experience is still going to be generally negative. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, basically. You can have all the fancy stuff in the world but if you haven’t got the basic building blocks in place, it’s not a great school.

A hugely important lesson that I’ve had to learn out of necessity over the course of my career is that if you do end up working in a school without great resources or facilities then you simply need to avoid griping about it and make the most of what you’ve got. Complaining about what you feel – quite rightly, in many cases – you should have is utterly pointless and not only does nothing to improve your daily experience but actually distracts you from the key business of teaching and learning as well as you can. Instead, you make the most of your imperfect situation and upskill so that you yourself as a professional become the most important resource for the young people in your care. Anyone can teach in a brilliantly resourced school with amazing facilities, but not everyone can do it superbly in a place where you’ve got at best only really old and mostly tatty stuff and at worst literally nothing to help you. Learning to teach in challenging circumstances definitely makes you a better practitioner, in my experience. In some ways, it actually pays for teachers to seek to work in difficult settings for a while just so that they can secure significant improvements to both their professional skillsets and their personal attributes, particularly characteristics such as resilience and flexibility.

In all the best schools I’ve either worked in or visited in some form or another, it’s the culture of the place which makes the biggest difference to both ongoing success and positive daily experiences. Facilities are important, but without the right collective attitude in a school they can honestly make a place feel like just another school. This, more than anything, makes me really wary about teachers looking to leave for other schools because they feel the pull of the greener grass in another setting, especially if this attraction is based mainly upon the lure of an expensively assembled collection of buildings. What we’re essentially arguing here is that substance matters a little more than style in education; any rich person can build a great-looking school, but without the right leaders and teachers to work in it and to make it work, it would remain little more than an impressive-looking building.

As much as teachers move around a bit during their careers, it always pays to focus more upon the present than any potential future positions. The best way to secure a promotion or a role in a school which you feel would be a better fit for you is to continue to do an excellent job today in the place where you currently work. The very best teachers, in my experience, are those who give a clear impression to the students in their care that there is nowhere they would rather be than right here right now in the classroom teaching them whatever it is that they’re learning. In many ways, the future will take care of itself and all that teachers need to do anyway is to simply take care of the present.

There is no such thing as the perfect school and when teachers do move, they can sometimes quickly find out that the greener grass of another setting wasn’t quite so verdant after all. Every single school has its challenges and wherever you work it will be up to you as an individual to make the most of your situation.