Vickie Johnson was a deputy headteacher at a small primary school in Greater Manchester working exhausting 60-hour weeks when she became pregnant with her son. “I had been leaving the house so early and getting back late, as well as working weekends and evenings at home,” she says. “I realised I wouldn’t ever see my baby and that wasn’t OK.”
Negotiating her return to school after maternity leave when her son was four months old, Johnson tried asking for a switch to two-and-a-half days a week. Instead, she hit the brick wall that is still standard in many schools. “I was offered the option to come back full-time, which would have meant doing the same long hours I was before – or nothing.” With great regret, she felt she had to choose the latter, leaving what she describes as “an amazing 15-year teaching career” and a job she loved and was good at.
As a 35-year-old new mother, her story is sadly familiar. Last year more than 9,000 women between the ages of 30 and 39 left teaching – many of them feeling unable to juggle parenting with the demands of looking after everyone else’s children in school. The National Education Union offered to help Johnson fight for more flexibility, assuring her that they had had a lot of success when they had taken on similar cases. But she said: “I felt worthless and tired. I had a new baby and the thought of a battle or of pushing for something they didn’t want to give me, and going back when I might not be welcome, was just too much.”
Johnson is pleased that the government is moving to encourage more flexible working for teachers. “I now feel sure this is a big part of the picture if they are going to turn around the crisis in keeping and recruiting teachers,” she said.
When she was a deputy headteacher she introduced a policy that meant teachers in her school could work from home for half a day a week to do their lesson planning and marking. But after six months the school phased it out, worried that teachers might be wasting time. “I always felt you just have to trust people,” she said. “It works in other sectors, so why not teaching? And if something isn’t working, then you address it.” After a stint lecturing adults in higher education on a “huge pay cut” after she first left teaching, Johnson now works part-time in a senior role in education for Manchester City Council. “It works well. How can it be possible for me to do a flexible role here but for there to be so much inflexibility in schools?” she said.
She has also been researching a doctorate on flexible working on leadership in primary schools, speaking to leaders working “condensed hours”, teachers who job-share, and others who, like her, couldn’t make it work and left. She believes headteachers, governors and academy trusts aren’t feeling the pressure to adapt because teaching has always been an inflexible job and few others are doing it. She remains frustrated that even a nationwide recruitment and retention crisis doesn’t seem to be driving wholesale change.
“My worry is that even if the government makes different sorts of flexible working a policy, employers still have the right to reject it. What we need isn’t just new policy, it’s a total culture change,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s like we are saying that we don’t care if thousands of experienced and talented mothers in their 30s won’t stay in teaching.”
