Matt’s Story

I was born and brought up in a depressed northern town in the shadow of dark satanic mills and disappointment. My family and I lived in a row of terraced houses which stuck out from the valley side like needles on a hedgehog’s back. And life was just as spiky. 

My childhood, although happy, was one of hand-me-downs and making do. And my primary school – in the days before ‘serious weaknesses’ and ‘special measures’ had become the de facto vocabulary of educational failure – was what we used to call ‘shit’. 

When I wasn’t pretending to paint while surreptitiously sneaking a peak at the page 3 model on the newsprint laid out to protect the tables, I sat cross-legged on a threadbare carpet while the teacher strummed his guitar and sang 1960s songs. (And yes, dear reader, he closed his eyes when he hit the chorus.)

As a result, when I transferred schools aged 9, I was unable to construct a sentence. It was only thanks to a determined and dedicated Year 5 teacher who inspired a love of reading that I caught up with my peers. 

This story, like all good stories, I suppose, was repeated years later when my Year 9 teacher – an inspirational writer and poet who had lived in Peru and taught me how to bet on horses – recognised and nurtured my talent for writing. 

This tale was told once more when my A level English literature teacher – a fierce and frightening man, hump-backed like Richard III, but one of extraordinary talent who ignited my love of Shakespeare – set me on a path to university. 

You know how the story goes: I was the first in my family to get to university and lucky enough to be awarded a full grant at a time when the state recognised its duty to educate all, not just those born to privilege. But my grant didn’t go far, barely covering course fees and accommodation, so I worked round the clock – stuffing envelopes for a bank and being sworn at on a complaints line – to pay for books and stationery and food and drink. Mainly drink. 

On the last day of my first year, I was badly injured playing football and had my right foot set in plaster. I was instructed by A&E to keep my leg elevated and rest for three weeks. Had I followed these instructions, I would be able to walk without pain today, nearly thirty years later. But I had no option: I simply had to work if I was going to afford to return to my studies. Consequently, I walked on crutches to and from the bus stop every day that summer. I took as much overtime as I could get, working seven days a week. And I have lived with the consequences every day since; my foot never healed and it causes constant pain, which is slowly getting worse as arthritis sets in. 

Poverty removes agency

You see, poverty forces people to make tough choices. Actually, that isn’t true: poverty removes choice; it denies people agency and opportunity. 

Writing in The Guardian in June 2022, the food writer and poverty campaigner, Jack Monroe, powerfully describes the consequences of poverty: 

“Poverty is exhausting. It requires time, effort, energy, organisation, impetus, an internal calculator, and steely mental fortitude. And should it not kill you, in the end, from starvation or cold or mental ill health, should you scrabble somehow to the sunlit uplands of ‘just about managing’, I’m sorry to tell you that although your bank balance may be in the black one day, so too will your head.” ^[1]

Monroe goes on to explain how ‘years of therapy has alleviated some of [the worst effects of living in poverty, such as panic attacks], some of the time, but [their] physical and mental health will probably never make a full recovery’. 

Monroe now suffers from ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder, arthritis exacerbated by living in cold homes, respiratory difficulties from the damp, complex trauma, an array of mental health issues, a hoarding problem, and a slow burning addiction brought to an almost fatal head last year’. However, they argue that their story is by no means unique or exceptional because ‘short-term exposure to and experience of poverty – whether fuel poverty, food poverty, period poverty, or the root cause of all of them, the insufficient resources with which to meet your most fundamental human needs – has long-term and disproportionate effects for years to come’. 

Childhood exposure to poverty falls under the umbrella of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which, according to Monroe, are ‘on a par with domestic abuse, childhood sexual assault, [the] loss of a parent, parental incarceration, violence and neglect’ and increase the risk of trauma later in life, both mentally and physically. 

In fact, exposure to ACEs leads to less favourable health outcomes, a negative impact on general well-being, increased likelihood of risky or criminal behaviours, poor educational and academic outcomes and financial difficulties. We know that children who experience food insecurity, even short term, are more likely to fall ill and need hospital admission and have a slower recovery rate. 

Access denied

Poverty led to me making tough choices that I live with even now. But I know I was lucky; as well as state-funded support that enabled me to go to university, I had good teachers and loving, supportive parents who provided me with a safe and happy home. But it could easily have been so different. As I mentioned, I was the first in my family to go to university – and that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s because access to higher education had begun to widen. I was, as I say, lucky. 

Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, says the fact the majority of additional places at universities were taken up by children living in the poorer half of British neighbourhoods ‘may well be seen … as the greatest positive social achievement of the 1997–2010 government’ and that it was achieved ‘not at the expense of upper- and middle-class children [but because] the education system as a whole expanded [and] massive increases in funding per child in state secondary schools’.^[2]

Dorling says the lessons of the pre-2010 era are clear: ‘Spend more per child and they will gain better GCSE results, they will then go on to attend university in greater numbers.’ There are two other factors: firstly, the introduction of Education Maintenance Allowances (EMAs) ‘which enabled many young people from poorer areas to be able to afford to stay on at school’ and, secondly, government funding of university places which is ‘the ultimate determinant of what young people’s chances are’. ^[3]

Sadly, these improvements in access to higher education for working-class children have not been sustained. Writing in 2012, Dorling said progress would likely be ‘reversed following the Comprehensive Spending Review of October 2010’. He was right: EMAs were scrapped in 2010 and the spending review cut up to 75% of government funding in higher education. Even before these cuts – made under the auspices of ‘austerity’ – ‘access to good schools, universities and jobs remained far more socially determined by class and place of birth in Britain, than in almost any other affluent nation’. ^[4]

The fear of being different

When I went to university, for the first time in my life, I found myself living and socialising with people from vastly different social circles. And – despite the fact that my fellow freshers’ higher social status, wealth and expensive education had led them to the same university and that I went on to gain a better degree than many of them – they looked down on and ridiculed my hometown, my accent and my lack of what we might now call ‘cultural capital’. They travelled to lectures in cars bought for them by their parents; I walked or cycled on a second-hand bike I had repaired and repainted. They never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from and never had to say no to a night out or stay in halls while those around them partied, because to go out would have meant being unable to afford the books that were essential reading for their courses. 

When I left university, having worked on the student newspaper as a sports and features writer – a post I had to fight hard to get because I didn’t have the right school tie – I pursued my chosen career in journalism on my hometown paper. Or, rather, I tried to. Internships were awarded to those whose father knew the editor or proprietor. Although, through sheer tenacity and – more crucially – offering my services for free, I was able to get freelance gigs, there was no hope of a salaried job without a postgraduate qualification in journalism – a requirement of joining the National Union of Journalists.

With student debts from my undergraduate course and no possibility of working for free forever, I had no choice but to find paid alternative employment. For months, I tried to balance the two: working nine to five for a telecoms company and then walking to the newsroom to work evenings for free. But, eventually, paid work had to take precedence and the prospect of overtime and paying off my debts won the day. And, thus, my dreams of a career in journalism slowly died. Not because I lacked the talent, but because I didn’t have the money and ‘secret knowledge’ needed to get a foot in the door. 

Telecoms wasn’t so class driven, thankfully, and I was lucky to get in at the time that mobile phones were becoming mainstream. I quickly proved my worth and climbed the corporate ladder to senior management. The pay was good, as was the lifestyle; I was in my mid-twenties, working hard and playing harder. All seemed right with the world. But it wasn’t. Cue existential crisis … 

One day, at the dawn of the millennium, I woke up and realised I needed a greater purpose in life. So, it was a brand-new millennium and a new-brand me – I was going to be a teacher and help build the future. Sadly, my epiphany was short-lived. Soon after starting my self-funded PGCE, my dreams of ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ fell apart at the seams.

It didn’t help that I went from earning a decent salary to paying for the privilege of teaching. I had saved enough money in the years prior to scrape through the course, but it was tough living like a student again. Nor did it help that I was several years older than most of my fellow trainees. But the worst of it was my first school placement, and therefore my first foray into the classroom. To be fair, I was warned. My course tutor told me the university had considered taking the school off its books because it was in special measures and they’d had complaints, but because I was older and had leadership experience, they thought I would be able to cope. 

The school had been in special measures for a while by the time I arrived, and staff turnover was high. As a result, many post-16 classes were cancelled and other classes were combined, with students often left to watch television in the canteen. Hence, at the end of my first week, my school-based mentor and head of department (who also quit before the end of my placement), said she thought I was ready to go solo rather than waste my time observing her or team-teaching with more seasoned colleagues. And so I found myself, two weeks into my ‘training’ and after just one week in a school, teaching a full timetable without any help or support. 

Student behaviour was ‘challenging’. The canteen was like a scene from Fight Club. Staff cars were routinely vandalised, and the fire alarm sounded fifteen times a day – not because some cheeky young scamp had smashed the glass to get out of class but because some cheeky young arsonist had set fire to the building. You might say my early teaching experience was a baptism of fire. 

It didn’t help my mood when winter set in and the nights grew long and dark. Snow fell early and deep that year, meaning weeks of indoor play. All of which made me think of quitting teaching every single day. Pathetic fallacy or just pathetic, I am still not sure. 

I remember struggling out of bed at the call of my bedside alarm feeling sick to my stomach, and the lonely commutes home, feeling lost and alone, out of my depth, utterly exhausted. Although I told no one, I deeply regretted my risky change of career and yearned for a return to my cushy corner office and generous expenses account. But I was scared to admit to anyone else that I had got it wrong. And I was still driven by a desire to do what my teachers had done for me: to give disadvantaged students a fair start in life, to reverse society’s ills, to mitigate – albeit in some small way – the consequences of poverty and of living in an unequal, unfair society that privileges the privileged and rewards wealth with wealth. 

Against all odds, I persevered and survived to the end of my placement and then to the end of my course. My university tutor wrote a glowing report based not, I suspect, on my teaching ability but on the simple fact that I was not dead. The school even offered me a job. Unsurprisingly, I turned them down.

Having passed my initial teacher training year, I got a job in a school in a deprived area of a northern town, and I stayed there for eight happy years, rising from newly qualified teacher to assistant head teacher. I saw in those ‘sink estate kids’ (not my phrase but one used liberally and insultingly to describe the students I taught) an earlier me reflected back; I saw students set on a path to failure in need of a teacher who could turn disadvantage into advantage. I had found my vocation – and I have never looked back. 

I have never considered leaving the profession. Yes, I have changed course – I have moved from teaching to leadership and from leadership to consultancy – but each move I made has been an attempt to do more for disadvantaged children, to increase the size of my classroom and thus the impact of my actions. 

This commitment has driven me for over two decades, as a teacher, middle leader, senior leader, head teacher, multi-academy trust director and now school improvement advisor. And this commitment has brought me here to write The Working Classroom. I have authored several other books of which I am proud but, to quote the movies, this time it’s personal.