The start of a new academic year and, with that, all of the feelings and emotions that we associate with starting back at school.
For our intake of Year 7s, it is a new world and whilst they have outgrown their primary school and leave as the oldest pupils in the school, they enter the world of secondary where they are the youngest and the scale of their environment is considerably larger.
Experienced teachers and support staff are only too aware of this and will soon build strong and sustaining relationships and bonds with pupils as, slowly over the first half term, they settle in to school routines and their learning.
Headteachers will be proud of how their school quickly gets up and running, and how their pupils from a range of local feeder primary schools soon reach out and form friendships with children from other schools.
In time, children will embrace the change and thrive in their new, supportive and stimulating environment. Staff will soon identify those children who perhaps don’t make the transition as well as their peers, and supportive and pastoral interventions will seamlessly slip into place alongside the support provided by teaching staff.
It doesn’t take long before the school and its routines are running smoothly and most pupils are settled.
Spare a thought at the start of the year for the new staff – new to the school or new to education. Recognise the anxieties and fears and the spikes of excitement alongside the foreboding that lessens when the weight, demands and pressure of working in education also lessens.
Our children rely on these super-humans who themselves have feelings and emotions and physical limits. They don’t feel like super-humans and, like our pupils, they need understanding, support, care and space.
The startling figures that show that over half of those trained as teachers leave within 10 years of starting teacher training means that half of those who trained in 2009 no longer work in education. This is a loss to the sector and to our schools but, more importantly, to our children.
Let’s do all we can to help our new colleagues to build their confidence and resilience in what is undoubtedly a challenging (but hugely rewarding) profession in the knowledge that without more of them remaining to work alongside us, our work will be more difficult in the future.
To all our new colleagues, welcome to the world of education, hold on tight and make sure that your inevitable days to forget are hugely exceeded and overwritten with the undoubtedly exciting, fun and exhilarating days, weeks and terms that exist ahead of you in your career.