One Year On. Externalising Problems, Instead of Internalising Them!

One year on. Externalising problems instead of internalising them...

This week saw my first anniversary of leaving education as a Principal Teacher of Wellbeing in a Scottish secondary school. Fourteen years in education. Eight of them as a Principal Teacher. And I still haven't finished processing it. Not because leaving was hard. Because leaving made me realise what I'd actually been grieving the whole time I was still there.

I feel I need to go back further than my career to explain this properly. At fifteen, I was removed from Biology. Not suspended for anything dramatic, just quietly and then not-so-quietly eased out of a subject I couldn't cope with. I didn't know I was Autistic then. What I knew was that I couldn't say "I don't understand this" out loud, because not understanding meant looking stupid, and looking stupid was the thing I feared most. So instead of asking, I disconnected. Instead of disconnecting quietly, I misbehaved. And instead of anyone asking why a fifteen year old was suddenly acting up in one specific subject, I was shouted at and publicly escorted out. So the ‘fuck you’ got bigger, while the real me got smaller.

I ended up in a career supporting young people going through exactly what I went through. That's not coincidence, and I stopped pretending it was a long time ago. Every time I met an adolescent version of myself in a classroom or a support base, I got to do something differently for them than what had been done to me. Being seen, being met where they actually were, having one consistent adult who wasn't going anywhere, that was the job, and it healed something in me every single time it worked for them. I loved it. I want to be honest about that before I say anything critical, because what follows isn't a story about hating my job. What I didn’t realise was that there are two educations happening in every school, at the same time, and they are not the same thing.

There's the innate (mandatory, the ‘have to’) experience of growing up inside the system, day after day, year after year, pupils and staff figuring out who they are while the bell keeps ringing. And then there's the acquired (what the specific school culture and ethos is/governmental policies) experience, the layer of expectation sitting on top of it: projections, results, targets, inspections, the language of a business bolted onto the work of raising human beings. Pupils became margins to consider. Commodities to fix. Values got printed on posters and repeated in meetings and, more often than anyone wanted to admit, quietly abandoned the moment reports were due or ‘visits’ were happening. I came into teaching with five years of study behind me and prior experience in HR at a global organisation where the average employee age was eighteen, so I recognised the shape of what I was looking at. It was corporate. It just wore a school jumper.

That second layer, the acquired expectations of the system, hasn't meaningfully shifted in fifty years. And it's that layer, not the kids, not the classroom, not the actual work of teaching, that broke me. It's still breaking people. Before I left I worried that my want to exit was a personal failure. A stamina problem. Something wrong with me for not lasting to retirement. It wasn't. The data backs that up more starkly than I expected.

New figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request show that 408 teachers left the profession within five years of qualifying in 2025 alone, the highest number since comparable records began in 2018, when the figure stood at 183. That's more than double in seven years. Over 2,000 early career teachers have walked away within five years of starting since 2018. Meanwhile, the General Teaching Council for Scotland's most recent annual data shows that among registrants who left for reasons other than retirement, the most commonly cited factors were, workload and unnecessary bureaucracy, lack of support around pupil behaviour and additional support needs, and bullying from colleagues or leadership. Not ‘the kids’, not ‘the job itself’, the scaffolding around the job. I recognise every single one of those reasons. I lived almost all of them… which I’ve learned, repeatedly on an inspection scale, is 91-99%.

None of this is unique to Scotland. UK-wide, roughly a third of newly qualified teachers leave within five years, and the ratio of pupils to teachers has been climbing steadily as pupil numbers outpace teacher numbers. This is a system-wide pattern, not a run of bad luck or a few people who ‘couldn't hack it’. There's a live irony sitting underneath all of this. Scotland has known its exam system is a problem for years. The OECD said plainly, back in 2021, that an exam syllabus tends to become the de facto curriculum, narrowing what teachers can actually do with the years in front of them. Professor Louise Hayward's independent review, published in 2023, recommended scrapping exams below Higher level entirely and building a more rounded Scottish Diploma of Achievement that would value breadth, context and personal pathways alongside traditional assessment.

Hayward herself has since criticised the pace of change, warning that National Qualifications are still treated as the ‘preferred’ measure of a young person's worth, which sends every learner who doesn't shine under exam conditions a fairly brutal message about where they rank. I hope the reader pauses here and reflects on this paragraph, as the curriculum is built to do exactly that… measure a young person’s worth, regardless of the natural pressure of age and stage, specific home-life or learning needs.

As of this year, the old exam authority, the SQA, has been formally dissolved and replaced by Qualifications Scotland. But for a pupil who sat exams in the summer of 2026, almost nothing changed. Same papers. Same marking schemes. Same grade boundaries. Same single week in August when a teenager's sense of their own worth gets condensed into a letter and a number. The proposals for something genuinely different, more coursework, fewer exams, a qualification that measures more than memorisation under timed conditions, have been ‘accepted in principle’ for a while now. Principle is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The detail, the funding, the training, the actual redesign, is still being built. Fifty years of the same underlying expectation, wearing a new logo.

If you want to know what keeps a teacher in a job that's costing them their health, it's rarely a single dramatic event. It's a sentence. Mine was: "The kids need people like you." It sounds like kindness. It functioned as a trap. The responsibility it hands you is enormous and the expectation underneath it is dangerous, because it turns your own limits into a moral failing. Leave, and you've abandoned children who needed you. Stay, and you absorb whatever the system doesn't fix, indefinitely, because ‘doing it for the kids’ has no natural endpoint. I knew, honestly, years before I left, that I wouldn't make it to retirement without real damage to my physical or mental health. I planned my exit. Due to continued pressure to prioritise ‘business’ within our school, values stopped aligning and what felt like trusted, honest relationships ruptured. I had to leave a year earlier than planned. This was devastating and, at the same time, an unforeseen gift.

It’s been a quick year, a happy year and a year of meeting the unconscious emotional and physiological damage. Distance has clarified lots for me. The thing I spent fourteen years teaching, explicitly and implicitly, was relationships. How to build them, trust them, repair them, use them to navigate a complicated world. That was the actual curriculum, underneath every lesson plan and every support session. And relationships were never the priority of the system I worked in. The business of education was the foundation. Projections, results, expectations. Not inspiration. Not connection. Not the phrase every teacher has been told in some form, ‘get it right for every child’.

That phrase, and the pressure hiding inside it, has probably done more damage to the profession than any single policy failure. Because getting it right for one child, every time, inside a system built around aggregate results, is structurally impossible. Teachers aren't failing to deliver that. The structure was never built to deliver it. Getting it right isn't an exam grade. It's raising kind, self-aware people with the skills to navigate a complex world. That's the educational dream I signed up for. It's still the right dream. It just isn't what the system, as currently built, is optimised to produce.

I don't regret fourteen years in education. I don't regret leaving either. What I've stopped doing is treating my departure as a personal failure and started treating it as data, one data point among 408 others just from last year, in a system that keeps asking the people inside it to absorb the cost of its own outdated design.

The kids did need people like me. They still do. But needing us shouldn't mean using us up. Would I recommend teaching as a profession, hell yeah! It’s wonderful, inspiring, challenging and, most of all, an honour to watch an 11 year old child become a 16-18 year old young adult. I have been blessed to witness this over and over again. However, it would come with advice around personal and professional boundaries and understanding own work ethic and emotional capacity. All are needed but sadly not prioritised within the system.

I am still in contact with a lot of the young adults and their families that have left. My heart still bursts with pride when I hear the words ‘Hello Mrs C’ but for now, Mrs C is resting up her hat and getting very comfortable with ‘Call me Sheena’.