Why Susie Lau has total admiration for striking teachers

Last week I wasn’t in London to witness the ‘big walkout’, but from afar I was cheering on. Having the luxury of flouncing around faffing with words, clothes and my own workflow, living within half an hour of my parents (and their cooked food) as well as benefiting from the co-parenting set-up for my daughter meant that I wasn’t scrambling. Through parents’ WhatsApp groups from nursery to primary, it was clear that surprise school closures can stoke up childcare stresses that I’m fortunate not to have. I am that dunce parent who turns up to school on inset day only to find playground tumbleweed and then decides to just take my daughter to work with me — making her sit and watch me try and thesaurus my way out of a piece for instance.

We were sent National Education Union leaflets about why the Government should pay up, as in fully funded above-inflation wage increases. Why the strike is about more than squeezed living standards for teachers, but also the future of our kids’ education. But sis, I FEEL you! (not meaning to exclude male and non-binary by the way — my daughter’s teachers just happen to mostly identify as she/her). I truly have nothing but genuine high-five admiration for what they do, day in, day out. I deal with one sassy six-year-old sprog who now smirks at me when I gingerly suggest she might eat one piece of broccoli. They deal with 30 of them, all with wildly different personalities and idiosyncrasies to tame. At a lunch where parents were invited to indulge in school-dins spag bol and gelatinous custard, watching the teacher monitor rows and rows of varyingly full to half-empty plates was awe-inspiring. A raise of a hand and a firm but kind Mary Poppins look and the kids all fell in line and ate up. A cleared, scraped clean plate in front of my daughter in our house is a rare occurrence indeed.

A few attempted sessions of phonics teaching tells me that scripted instruction is not my vocation. My brain isn’t wired to relate curly cats to the letter C. Or mountains to Ms. Actually I don’t speak phonics period, given it wasn’t really around when I learnt to read in the Eighties when we just ‘got on’ with things by having information drummed into us. God knows how we became literate.

I especially admire their voices of measured cheerful patience at meet-theteachers encounters, when parents express concerns that either their precious child is alarmed by the concept of a spelling test or, at the other extreme, is not being pushed enough and why aren’t they already trotting out multiplication tables, aged seven. In the setting of an Ofsted-rated outstanding school in inner London, which parents have likely upgraded their postcodes and mortgage to get into, teachers are on the front line of this spectrum of expectations.

No wonder many teachers — and again, I’m only going by my personal experience of female-centric teaching staff at primary level — sport the Frazzled English Woman look that went TikTok viral last year. Multiple thin scarves. Thick tights. Mussed-up, rained-on hair. They wear it well. They own that vibe. Because frazzled is an understatement for those who work tirelessly in state education. Should they need to strike again to make their demands heard, then so be it. Even if it means my daughter has to stay at home while I attempt to explain ‘why’ 3 times 3 is 9. (There’s no ‘why’! It just is!)