Vicki Harvey

Hello, I am Vicki and I am Head of English and Drama at a prep school in Norfolk.

So most of my time is spent in lessons, which is just brilliant because that's why you become a teacher.

So pretty back to back teaching most of the days and obviously lots of lovely meetings, parents meetings, marking, all the usual teachery stuff really.

Okay, so a typical day you're in work before eight o'clock, usually about quarter to eight, getting your last minute resources ready, firing up your laptop, that sort of thing.

Tutees then start coming in from eight o'clock. Sometimes you've got a parent to meet, just some sort of, you know, little questions, things like that.

And then we start teaching at 8.25. And most mornings for me are a back to back teaching morning. So you're kind of, you know, you put tools down by 12.35 with a short break in between.

And then you can be on a lunch duty or I might be rehearsing. I might be seeing a child for one-to-one and then you're teaching again in the afternoon.

And we have tutor periods then at the end of the day, which is lovely because you just get that moment to touch base with pupils so that they're not hanging on to a worry and going away with it. That's not what we want.

And you form a really close bond with your tutees. You become a bit like a sort of family to be honest.

And then at the end of the day, it's lovely shaking your tutees' hands, seeing the parents of the children that you teach. And again, another chance just to connect again and just to have those little important conversations.

And then it's usually after a rehearsal for a play, which, you know, sometimes at the end of the day, that's challenging.

But most of the time it's glorious because the children all want to be there and you know, drama is playing really, it's fun.

So my English team is about 10 staff. So it's my kind of my team, I suppose that I manage. And drama wise, there's just two of us.

But as with any subject, creative subject, you end up feeding a lot on people's kind of goodness of their hearts and goodwill. So I do work with a wide range of people who are like helping in the green room or they're helping with costumes.

And then beyond that, my kind of collegial group. I really wouldn't say they're colleagues, most of them are friends and again, almost become like family. So we're a pretty tight knit common room.

A lot of us have been here 20 years plus, taught each other's children or got parents to each other's kids. And you end up really knowing each other inside out.

And actually when the tough times are tough, we are there for each other and equally we're there to celebrate each other's successes. So it's a special place.

I think teaching is such privilege and I think it's really easy for that to be forgotten in the current climate.

There's a lot of negativity about, you know, losing teachers and retaining young teachers. I think it's a privilege.

You are part of a young person's journey and however significant you've been in that journey, just the thought that you've had the opportunity to influence them or to change something or to offer a caring hand or a caring word, I think that's an absolute joy.

Switching off. I think it's really hard to go home and for me to switch into mum mode when you've had kind of questions all day and your life is busy to then have to kind of decompress and my children often say to me stop talking to us like you're still in the classroom and I'm like gosh, yeah, I've got to stop being, you know, teachery.

And so I think that's hard and it is the sort of job you are still thinking at 10 o'clock at night about tomorrow's lesson. How am I going to make the capital letter more interesting when I've taught it 56 times before. But that means you care.

I always think the time I stop thinking about how I can make this interesting, that's when I probably need to stop teaching.

It's a bit tragic to be honest. Initially I wrote to Jim'll Fix It. And I asked, you know, not to go skydiving or go and watch tigers in India. I asked to be a teacher for a day. Needless to say, I never got a reply.

But I think I always knew I wanted to teach. And then I did my degree in English and drama. And as part of my dissertation, I worked for about six months in Guy's Evolina Hospital School, which if you ever get the chance to visit, is completely incredible.

And I was really lucky enough to work with children who were on dialysis and for children who were kind of long time residents in the hospital. And it was just fascinating. I did a lot of drama therapy with the pupils and with their families.

And there were some very sad times as well because sadly, you you did lose children. But it was so rewarding and again just those little pockets of a moment with a child when you'd seen that you'd made their day a bit better or you'd made them feel good.

I think that was for me what really confirmed I wanted to go into teaching. But I worked in PR (public relations) for a little bit and basically got fed up of smiling the whole time and going to events and kind of that and I thought right I want to go into teaching.

So trained in London and then got the job here and have been here 23 years.

I think I was really lucky to have kind of two teachers that really changed my kind of perception of what I could do. And I didn't know it at the time, but I'm dyslexic and I didn't actually find that out until I started teaching.

I had two teachers, one at a junior level who was just brilliant at saying to me, just get it on paper. Don't worry about it. Get it on paper. And she really made me think I could do it and it didn't matter that I couldn't punctuate, I couldn't spell.

And the other one was a GCSE English teacher who just used to cry whenever I wrote something creative, she started crying. And I just thought, this is brilliant that my words can do this to someone.

So I think they really inspired me to think actually teaching is kind of gold dust.

It was a year 8 group on their last lesson and they'd really come on as a group. They had quite a lot of needs, they were very bright, but they had a lot of needs and some of them had really, really struggled.

And on the last lesson, I walked in the classroom and each of them one by one stood up, I get emotional thinking about it now, on their desk and turned around and went "O Captain! My Captain!"

And it was like this, you know, replay of that really, you know, iconic scene from Dead Poet's Society and I just burst into tears and sobbed but I'll always remember that.

Don't worry so much. Enjoy every moment and just don't say no. Go for it.

Like what's the worst that can happen? I think just grab, just grab any opportunity. Say yes.