Twenty-five per cent of all new teachers throw in the towel within three years of qualifying. We were told that statistic on our first day of training, which made me feel like Richard Gere’s character in An Officer and a Gentleman on his first day in the navy. I laughed nervously and looked around, perhaps trying to decide who — anyone but me — would one day cement that statistic. But now, with the end of my third year approaching, I can see why so many just can’t go on.

I took a strange route into teaching after a previous career in celebrity journalism ended in 2021. I went from awards ceremonies, hotel junkets and cover shoots to an apprenticeship at a London primary school within a matter of days, with my salary dropping accordingly to a round £20,000. I was in class from day one, working with a teacher while taking Thursdays off to attend university. The idea was that I would watch and learn, and start to teach here and there as the weeks went by. By Christmas, I was told, I might be teaching half the week.

By the end of the year, the plan stated, I would be ready for a class of my own. But in schools, spare adults are a short-lived luxury. Within weeks I was teaching the class alone for much of the week.

I went from awards ceremonies to a salary of £20,000 within days

I had always assumed that I would be a natural teacher: I have a lot of energy, a head packed with pub quiz trivia and I have always got on with kids. But I often felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.

A colleague told me that I had chosen the worst possible time to become a teacher. My training year was spent with children who had just experienced two years of alarming uncertainty. Some had spent months watching online lessons on school-supplied iPads. Some, despite the best efforts of staff, checked out of education altogether. Warning them that behaving rudely gave the whole class a bad name was not relevant to them, because they didn’t care about the class. They were a room of individuals rather than a team. They feared closeness and saw intimacy as disgusting. During a trip to the theatre, when the leads shared a peck on the cheek at the show’s conclusion, the auditorium erupted as the children pretended to vomit at the sight. In the playground, they recreated Squid Game episodes instead of playing tag.

The kids bickered and bullied, made up rumours and passed notes, just like when I was their age. But the insults thrown back and forth were unknown to me. “Don’t talk to me with that hairline,” they shouted at their classroom nemeses. “Get my name out of your mouth,” they yelled when I called them back from running in the corridor.

Occasionally there were glimmers of compassion that felt like miracles. Once, during a PSHE lesson on grief, a boy began to cry while talking about losing his grandfather. Soon the room was drowning in tears as children chose to share their stories about dead mums, uncles and cousins. One girl, never to be left out, managed to push out some tears over her late hamster. Suddenly, these cold children were vulnerable and compassionate and sweet. I went home buoyed at this glimpse of empathy.

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And then, as I was beginning to find my feet, it was on to another nearby school for the rest of my training. I was given a class of my own. The children were heavenly. We laughed and smiled and learnt all day. At university I was aceing my essays, research projects and presentations. I spent spare moments marvelling at how difficult I had found the previous class before I hit my rhythm. By the end of the year I was qualified, and come September it was time to spend my first, complete year with 30 children.

It became the most mentally strenuous year of my life. The six months with the class of dreams had made me feel like an excellent teacher, so I felt ill-equipped to handle the needs of the children in my new class. Within days the room seemed beyond my control. Colleagues tried to help. They suggested new seating plans, more specific manners of instruction, a reiteration of the class rules. I was devastated, worried that I might suddenly be seen as a failure by them.

Rather than admit that I was struggling to manage behaviour, I went to greater lengths to win everyone over with my enthusiasm. I performed my lessons like a CBeebies presenter on three espressos. I spent evenings meticulously creating lesson plans. Parent assemblies became self-penned musical extravaganzas. I typed up children’s creative writing and turned it into bound books to be shared with family. Ahead of school trips I spent Saturday mornings at venues, plotting tour guide-worthy scripts and tasks. I made influencer-style videos of myself on location at parks and palaces to play during lessons, including a series filmed on location at the Acropolis during a solo holiday to Athens. A history lesson on the Silk Road became an opportunity for an augmented reality scavenger hunt through the playground that took half a Sunday to build.

These efforts did pay off. Praise from a parent, a kind word from a colleague or, best of all, being told that I should be a YouTuber by a nine-year-old would lift my mood for the rest of the day. But I couldn’t carry on like that. During observations I was complimented on the care I had given my plans, but there were always questions: where are you finding the time to do all this? Is that sustainable? But I worried that if I paused to breathe, the result would be disengagement, distraction and chaos.

I took it personally. After spending my weekends making a resource or using my own money to buy something that would make a lesson memorable, the children’s shouts, hums, whistles, throws, laughs and eyerolls made me feel that it was all for nothing. I would find myself crying in the staffroom over a nine-year-old who told me they hated me.

And yet, I felt affection for these children. My aim was to send them up to their next class smarter, happier and more secure than when they arrived, and that trumped my tears and feelings of desolation. I celebrated every minor success, every sign of improvement in scores, every piece of evidence that they were happy to be in the room with me.

I spent one Saturday morning with them, running a mile as part of the borough’s fitness initiative. Some of them raced ahead, but I darted back and serpentined like The Lion King’s Mufasa in the stampede to keep an eye on the ones who I knew would struggle. I would find them, huffing and puffing somewhere on the track, and convince them that they could do it, that I was there to get them through it and that I would get them to the end even if I had to put them on my back. By the time we crossed the finish line together and they could bite into their medals like they’d seen on TV, it didn’t matter that they didn’t always respect me. Their achievement felt like mine.

I’d cry in the staffroom over a nine-year-old who said they hated me

The parents provided an interesting spectrum of attitudes. Some wouldn’t answer the phone for weeks to discuss their child’s difficulties, while others would send regular late-night emails expressing their concerns. Some tried to join my locked social media accounts, while one well-meaning parent once slipped a mini bottle of Scotch into my coat pocket at pick-up with a wink. “For later,” they said.

I was struck by how some parents treated me like I was the sole person responsible for their child’s welfare. They would chuckle when I told them their daughter could not spell their surname, as if to say that’s your job, not mine. But for others, ensuring their child got the help they needed seemed like a military operation. As part of many parents’ efforts to get their child a diagnosis for dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism or above all ADHD, I was given forms that took hours to fill in. I would do so, dutifully and willingly, but always wondered about the end goal. Did they imagine that a diagnosis would signal the end of their problems? Because the combination of waiting times and lack of funding meant, and still means, that they had countless obstacles ahead. Staff meetings were packed with briefings on how to spot if our students are becoming radicalised online, joining local gangs or are at risk of FGM (female genital mutilation). I was two years into teaching when I decided that I no longer wanted children.

School parent groups are often strikingly efficient and powerful. One school had a small but formidable team of women who raised five-figure sums to send the whole school to the theatre or to cover the cost of new playground equipment. This was done through the usual fêtes, fairs and Christmas markets, but also via a raffle of luxury handbags, games consoles and spa treatments donated by those on the more affluent end of the spectrum. One colleague drew a massage treatment.

It was only when she had removed her clothes and was lying on the table that she realised that she recognised the masseur from the daily parent drop-off.

London state school pupils are mixing with others from all sorts of backgrounds, but class barriers prevail. Teachers try not to ask what children got up to on their half-term break, because the answers are alarmingly wide-ranging. The child who didn’t leave their flat does not need to hear about their peer’s trip to their godfather’s house in Mauritius. But, largely, they are ignorant of the vast unfairness of things, and even now I continue to be struck by how engaged and socially conscious the more affluent children are. One particularly active group of girls would form petitions to ban palm oil from school lunches, or propose bringing placards calling for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to our British Museum trip. Meanwhile, some of their classmates were coming to school hungry and in flip-flops because they had outgrown their shoes.

‘We’ve had our ups and downs, haven’t we, Mr Pewsey?’

Sometimes the best moments come from our efforts to redress this balance. One hot summer, we loaded the children onto coaches and headed to the beach. They ran across the sand and into the water, jumping over and through the waves fully clothed, cackling and whooping, unable to contain their glee because they had never seen the sea before. Teaching is hard sometimes. But sometimes it’s beautiful.

Things have improved with time and experience. I’ve found a standard for myself that I can stick to. I can manage behaviour with more confidence and authority. I don’t take the bad days quite so personally. I’m more confident knowing when a lesson needs a little flair and when I can rest on the classics. Soon I’ll be adding a fourth class photo to my collection, a fourth snapshot of 30 children for whom I managed to be constant and present, just for a little while. Last year, on his final day at school, a child I had always struggled to teach came to say goodbye.

“We’ve had our ups and downs, haven’t we, Mr Pewsey?” I laughed in spite of myself and told him, for better or worse, that I’d never forget him.

On my last day with any class, the gifts come out. Once, among the odd blend of Best Teacher Ever mugs, flowers, wine, pricey macarons and Poundland teddy bears, I received a John Lewis voucher with enough money to buy a new computer. It’s all appreciated, of course. But I give more care to reading the cards, holding on to the sense that it was worth it in the end. “We will never forget your kindness,” one mum writes. “Thank you for seeing my son,” writes another. Sometimes I take them out of my drawer and read them. I revisit these kindnesses that are proof of my legacy, and I decide that it must be worth it. On Monday, I start again.