Understanding the Impact of Everyday Stressors on One Secondary School Teacher in the UK: A Small Descriptive Case Study

Introduction

It is logical to begin this chapter with a sense of the space and place our teacher, whom we name Mr. Worrall, inhabits during his working week. Mr. Worrall works in a medium-sized secondary school serving a community which has undergone significant restructuring since the 1980s following large scale decline and the ‘crumbling’ (Strangleman, Rhodes and Linkon 2014) away of traditional UK industry. In part, the character of the surrounding locality physically and psychically communicates the powerful political cliché of the ‘left behind town’. Peripheral to the “somewhat forgotten cities” (Mr. Worrall, interview data) in the north of England, this town lies in a geographically liminal “third space” (Bhabha, 2004, p.55). In many ways, for Mr. Worrall who is a “centre left” supporter, and someone from a traditional working-class background, the wider school community’s working-class identity and outlook must symbolise some of the UK’s curious ambiguities and ambivalences of social class identities; as well as with education as a social, cultural, and economic process. This research takes place six years after Brexit when the majority of this community’s residents voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Three years later, this town constituted part of the “fall of the red wall”, when most residents voted Conservative in the 2019 UK general election. Now the town might be conceptualised as existing, “…in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion” (ibid, p.1).  The wastelands where the once-colossal infrastructure borne out of the Victorian age, have begun to be cleared for new, large housing developments of executive detached houses, townhouses and bungalows and business parks. Although government data indicates rates of unemployment has dropped in this town, it masks the fact that most employed residents hold insecure low-paid work and uncertain prospects. Parts of the school’s catchment area feature in the top ten per cent of neighbourhoods nationally according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD).  

Raising aspirations of the local community feeds into the everyday life of this school and in turn filters down into this teacher’s work. Our teacher is currently employed as a head of department where he leads a team of teachers for his subject area. He trained as a secondary school teacher nearly two decades ago, and has now reached a stage of professional maturity and, as he admits, “cynicism”; although cynicism which is delivered with a dry and subversive sense of humour which we glimpse in the data. Over the years, he has acquired rich levels of subject and pedagogical knowledge which enables him to prepare pupils for and getting them successfully through GCSEs and A-Levels. He has spent his career working against long-established social inequalities which play out in new ways through neoliberal schooling but has achieved success for his classes against the odds. In his own time, he has invested in extra professional learning.  He “knows” the local community but a sense of being connected to a global society and economy influences his own identity and outlook.  

Mr. Worrall is robust, stoic, responsible and honest. He has held different responsibilities within schools including on the senior management team (SLT). He has a work ethic, a high level of organisational commitment, and believes he “should work hard given the role, the renumeration and the responsibilities he has chosen to take on” (Mr. Worrall’s emphasis). He recognises and to a large extent accepts the stressors of the job, does “feel pissed off” but carries on regardless. Part of the coping mechanisms this teacher uses are the temporal, physical and psychic boundaries he has set up to compartmentalise work from his personal life. At home, he is “off”. He can, for the most part, shut out the thoughts of daily stressors when he is not at work, although admits there have been periods when the burdens of work have resulted in deep feelings of stress emanating from “the impossibility of being able to carry out the impossible”.