TEACHER OF 30Y
WHEN Kate Clanchy was a child, she would line up her teddy bears and teach them everything she knew.
She wanted to make the world a better place, and since then she’s embarked on a 30-year career as an English and poetry teacher.
“At least if I’ve done a decent day’s work in a school, I’ve made the world better and I still feel that,” the 53-year-old says.
Over the years, what’s affected her most are not the lessons in the classroom but what she’s learnt of the troubles her children have suffered away from school, such as deprivation, depression and addiction.
Now she has written a book about former pupils who have inspired her, such as Elsa, a keen poet who is so poor and neglected she has to wear school uniform from lost property.
Kate, who now teaches at Oxford Spires Academy, says: “We see more extreme poverty coming into schools and schools are having to do more than they used to.”
It is a sentiment which has been echoed repeatedly this week at teaching unions’ conferences.
Here, in exclusive extracts from Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, Kate gives a first-hand view of what teachers are really up against and the amazing things they do for our children...
Elsa is small and freckled and mostly silent.
She comes to Poetry Group very regularly, and writes small, sad poems. She is particularly keen on having her work typed out; when she was absent once she brought me an extra sad poem on a sheet of A4.
Another teacher, Miss B, is very taken by this progress, and when we are offered a day trip to London by a charity, we agree: a place for Elsa.
But we can’t get her mum to sign the form. Forms are an endless nuisance; we expect delay. We anticipate it, in fact; we photocopy extra forms, we dole them out several times, we nag, we write notes in planners, we phone home.
Two days before the trip, this has worked for everyone but Elsa, and on my way home at nearly six at night, I spot Elsa walking away from the Co-op, holding a loaf of bread. I catch her up, and she is so alarmed, she walks faster, pulling her hood up over her heavy wings of dark, greasy hair.
“Don’t you want to come on the trip?” I ask her. “Yeah,” she says, outraged. “What about the form then?” “I got it,” she says.
“Well then, could we have it?” “I lost it,” she says, with equal conviction.
We have stopped at the gated
It’s extreme poverty and schools are having to do more than they used to