William Mackintosh was heading for a promising career in industry when he was offered the chance to ditch it and do something scarily different: step out in front of a class of tough London teenagers intent on making trouble.
He seized it. Turning his back on a job offer from BP and promotion in the oil industry, the Edinburgh-born son of a solicitor signed up to the innovative Teach First programme, a scheme that is rapidly gaining ground in England and Wales but has been resisted, so far, in Scotland.
It was far more difficult than anything he had ever done.
“It was as bad a comprehensive as you can probably imagine are left in Britain,” he recalls. “Looking back it was quite shocking. There were incidents with knives in schools, fights in corridors. I got fairly used to separating spats in the classrooms. Some pupils were heavily involved in gangs outside school, dealing in drugs. They came from enormously deprived backgrounds with a lot of pupils newly arrived to Britain, some of them speaking virtually no English. There was a lot of turbulence.”
For a year, Mr Mackintosh wondered what he had let himself in for. Keeping order was a daily struggle. He would sometimes look back on a day’s work and think that it had been a complete disaster.
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He remembers one boy called Brian coming in with money to pay for a revision guide. “I think I’d been teaching him for about two weeks,” he says. “Brian brought a stack of money out of his pocket. I’ve never seen so much cash in my entire life — it was probably 20 inches thick. He unpeeled the outer one and asked me if I had change.” The money had clearly come from a drug deal.
So why did he stick it? “Because it was the first thing I ever found unbelievably difficult,” he explains. “At school I worked hard, and when you don’t get the grades you just have to work harder. University was the same: I knew what I needed to do to get better. But when you’ve got 30 16-year-olds in front of you, it’s very difficult to work out what on earth you’re meant to do to get them to sit down and shut up. For a lot of them, they’re used to not behaving, and they don’t know about following instructions.”
As his first year wore on, something began to happen: the pupils became interested. Brian, who lost two weeks at school after getting into trouble with the police, came back and demanded to catch up on all the work he had missed.
“It’s amazing when you try something — something different — and it comes off. When you’ve gone through a period of a month with a class and it shows gradual improvement, you realise, ‘this is brilliant, this is what works, this is what helps them make progress’.”
Then, at the end of his first year, his pupils lined up to hear their GCSE science exam results. They had done far better than expected. Brian had earned a distinction.
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“It had been a constant battle,” he says. “But then we got a really decent set of results, and I remember how happy the kids were, and them coming up to me and talking about it and thanking me for it, and I suppose I hadn’t realised that for a lot of them this was one of the very few qualifications they had ever got, and they really did value it. So yes, it was quite an emotional moment.”
It was only then that Mr Mackintosh realised that he had embarked on more than just a career experiment; he had made a lifetime choice. Today, aged 27, he is head of science at a neighbouring school in Enfield, north London, and will be promoted to assistant principal in the autumn. Out of his class of troublesome teenagers, several — including Brian — have gone to college; an Iranian girl with very little English is doing a course in dentistry; others have steady jobs.
He cannot imagine that anything in the oil industry could begin to match the satisfaction he has gained from teaching. “I can’t think of anything now that I would consider doing that would in any way give me that sense of enjoyment, doing something worthwhile. Because it is difficult, emotionally draining, really hard work, when it goes well and goes right, I can’t think of anything else that compares to it.”
Teach First, which recruits people from industry and asks them to commit to a two-year teaching contract, has been considered by Nicola Sturgeon but has yet to be introduced north of the border. It is strongly resisted by teaching unions.
Mr Mackintosh believes that Scotland is missing out on a great opportunity. “I would say that at least ten people I did Teach First with are either Scottish or went to university in Scotland,” he says. “There must be hundreds of teachers who have left Scotland to do Teach First over the years.”
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He points to the way that London schools have turned themselves around, through becoming academies, Teach First, or the London Challenge in which schools supported each other to improve, which Ms Sturgeon has also looked at. He wonders why they have not been tried in Scotland.
“I feel it’s a very backward system in Scotland,” he says. “They seem incredibly resistant to change, to new ideas. You look at London, which was once an embarrassment, and it’s now the only capital city in the developed world where the education is the best in the country. They’ve turned it around.”
Whether Scotland could do the same remains to be seen. If Mr Mackintosh’s experience is anything to go by, the opportunity is out there.
What is Teach First?
Founded by Brett Wigdortz in 2002, Teach First was created to tackle the link between poverty and poor educational outcomes in London.
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The education charity now works with 1,000 schools in low-income communities across England and Wales and counts the Prince of Wales as a patron.
Candidates do not need a teaching qualification: Teach First says that in 2014 about a fifth of its applicants were young professionals looking for a career change. Candidates do need a 2:1 degree or better in a subject that is part of the national curriculum.
Trainees take part in a six-week summer school before being sent to work in a school for two years where they combine their teacher training, leading to a PGCE qualification, with the Teach First leadership development programme of personal and business skills training, mentoring and support.
Trainees are paid by the school in which they are placed.
Teach First says that about half of those who completed the two years have remained in teaching. However, it encourages all its participants to remain involved with the scheme even if they move on to other jobs.
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It estimates that since 2002 the 7,000 teachers that it recruited have taught more than one million pupils.
Teach First is the single largest graduate employer in the UK and was ranked second in The Times Annual Graduate Employers List 2014 and last year.