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You know those dreams when you’re back at school? And you’re sitting at a desk reading a GCSE exam paper? Only you don’t recognise anyone around you? Well, I am living that dream. Because, at the age of 41, I have gone back to school. And not just any school. I have gone back to my own secondary school. Only this time, I am allowed in the staffroom.
That’s right: a short 25 years after walking out of those concrete and carpeted halls, the smell of polyester jumpers and canteen chips heady on the early summer air, I am back. But now I’m training to be a teacher.
To some extent, this was inevitable due to the logistics of my life. Despite a few lessons, I have never learned to drive (my instructor asked my mum out on a date and things got so awkward so quickly I have never really been behind a steering wheel since). I also have small children at nursery and primary school nearby, which meant that I had to beg my training scheme to place me at a school I could easily cycle to.
But as I sit beneath the very ceiling tiles I once knew as intimately as the freckles on my own arm, I also wonder if this was somehow destined. If I, as someone who loved school, was raised by a teacher, and married a teacher who was himself raised by a teacher, was always going to join the family business. Or if, like one of those eels that swims all the way from the silty bed of some Essex river out to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, only for its larvae to wriggle all 10,000 salty kilometres back home, I have been slowly making my way back to school since I left.
It is undeniably odd to find myself walking across the playground on which I first tasted Um Bongo, and heard the name the Strokes, and hid my first love bite under a sticky layer of foundation. As I hustle to a safeguarding meeting, or am escorted by my mentor to pick up my new printing code, I can’t help but remember treading that same route at 15, wearing a skirt I’d sewn myself out of wetsuit material (I stretched the definition of our school uniform back then until the seams screamed), or with the initials of the boy I fancied written in ballpoint pen on the inside of my thumb, or on the way to my last ever chemistry lesson.
I’m also far from the only person I know hole-punching their way into a new career after decades in the arts, media or what we used to laughingly call “the creative industries”. I can count at least four former journalists from my contingent retraining as English teachers, another who is well on their way to qualifying as a plumber, a DJ working as a midwife, and a fair crop of writers, poets and journalists working towards jobs as therapists.
The old story used to be that ambitious people worked as teachers for a few years and then went into creative fields – Romesh Ranganathan, Philip Pullman, Joanne Harris, Greg Davies and so on. But it seems to me that publishing, music, broadcasting and all the rest are now losing scores of mid-career artists to the world of education and other public services. Or rather, if you’re lucky, the ambition to press your thumb on to the surface of the world, through writing or performing, one day gives way to a far greater urge: to unfurl the thousands of brilliant minds coming up behind you.
I am genuinely as excited about reading Macbeth with a group of teenagers on plastic moulded chairs, as I ever was about speaking to a bookshop full of paying attenders. I am thrilled at the prospect of being able to dissect a novel over weeks in a classroom, rather than in minutes on the radio. I am delighted to be back in my old assembly hall, taking notes on a lined page, only this time with grey hairs, and two children down the road, and two decades of life in my rucksack.
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And this time I don’t even need to bring in my PE kit.
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Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author
