It’s 7am on a Friday morning just after Christmas, and I’m returning to school following three days of sick leave off work.

I’d been to see the GP before the holidays, who confirmed I was suffering from stress. I was reluctant to go to the doctor, but my family and colleagues had commented that I wasn’t myself. My GP suggested I rest over the break and return for another appointment after Christmas to see if things had improved. Unfortunately, that was unlikely to happen.

My GCSE students had recently sat their mock exams, leaving me with more than 170 papers to mark. Each paper takes around an hour, meaning I didn’t have much of a Christmas break. Instead of spending time with my family, I was trapped in my office, correcting the same spelling mistakes and spliced commas on each and every paper, the pain in my back building as I sat hunched over the desk for five, six, seven hours at a time. It seemed as though the end would never come.

I felt ill, overworked, and powerless to change my situation. I stopped doing the things I loved: watching my local football team at the weekends, seeing my close friends in the evenings, and doing regular exercise to keep myself fit. It was clear that I’d been consumed. The deadline came, and I still hadn’t completed the papers. I had to make my apologies to the school leadership. “I won’t be able to get these done,” I confessed, ashamed. I knew my colleagues from other departments had completed theirs on time.

But I was also angry. The volume of work I had, due to my subject, was much larger. Even within my department, I’d been allocated more work than other staff because I teach more kids. And despite raising my concerns about getting everything done in time before the holidays, I’d simply been told, unsympathetically, to do my best. The response to my tardiness was similar, even weeks later: “Well, you need to get them done. I’ll give you an extra week.”

It was something that looked like compromise, albeit still undoable. The week passed. Despite putting in 20 hours of work over the weekend, on top of all of the usual jobs teachers are expected to do, I was still nowhere near reaching the revised deadline.

In the end, in desperation, I called in sick to give me time to finish the marking. The kids wouldn’t have their teacher in their lessons, but I believed a cover teacher could do just as good a job as I would do in my current state. I felt lethargic and couldn’t sleep. I spent three days, working 10 hours a day, to clear the backlog.

I went to see my GP again and they offered to sign me off for a couple of weeks to get my head back together. I said no. I would feel too guilty – I know more absence would put extra pressure on my colleagues and disrupt my students. And I didn’t want to become another one of the 3,750 teachers on long-term sick leave.

But something had to give. Determined to deal with my stress better, I made several visits to the school’s HR manager. They were shocked I regularly work more than 15 hours over the weekend – they’d never been a teacher – and said they’d see what could be done, but nothing transpired. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about my problems.

My pile of exam papers are marked now, but the celebration and freedom that I should have experienced once they were finished was absent. I know there are more reports to write around the corner, more marking to do, more emails to reply to, more parents’ evenings to attend. The part of the job I enjoy – spending time in the classroom, educating young people – is at the bottom of my list of priorities.

The constant assessment cycle has only made this worse. Everything is swept up into spreadsheets of meaningless data – the detail into which we have to go when marking would sound fictional to those outside the profession. Teachers are doing the work of three or four people; it’s no wonder we find ourselves at breaking point.

My students will do well. It’s a good school and I will always do my best to ensure they reach their potential. But those close to me argue that the consideration of my own health should come before my students and I’m wondering whether it’s too late to change careers. I don’t know what else I would – or could – do. Yet I don’t know how long I can sustain this. Teaching is something I’ve wanted to do since I was 11 years old, but I can’t ignore the anxiety in the pit of my stomach as I pull into the car park at 7am.



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