‘They see me as a bigger version of themselves’: teacher George Pointon on life lessons from five-year-olds

George Pointon sent the tweets without really thinking. He only had a modest 400-odd followers, most of them friends. That term-time Wednesday morning, he’d asked his Year 1s to share their best jokes for the class. “And what they were saying,” he explains, “was just so funny, I wanted to document it somewhere, so I wouldn’t forget.” During his lunch break he posted a thread, setting out what each child had offered, alongside brutally blunt reviews, for the enjoyment of his mates:

Mikey: What did the cow say to the road? – He had a cow and then the farmer didn’t even know what to do.
What a fucking shit show from Mikey. No laughs. No real punchline. He walked up with a grin the size of the Cheshire cat, thinking he was Johnny Big Spuds. Trainwreck. 1/10

Jack: What did the toilet say? – Poo.
Poo joke. Too easy. The class erupted in fits of laughter, however I found it cheap, lazy and crass. He’ll probably end up enjoying Mrs Brown’s Boys. Bang average. 5/10

“It went viral,” Pointon says now, three years later. Across platforms, we’re talking millions of views. “We were just after the second Covid lockdown, March 2021. Everyone had been bombarded with bad news. This thread broke up timelines, I think. An injection of fun and positivity. It blew up from there.”

The next morning, slightly alarmed, he popped into the headteacher’s office. This was his first year working in education and “accidental-school-based-social-media-stardom” hadn’t been covered on inset day. “I went through the details: I don’t say where we are or use their real names. No identifying info. Everyone was enjoying it.”

With the bosses’ blessing, Pointon carried on sharing snippets from the classroom. He poses his pupils all sorts of questions – what’s a good mantra for life? Who should be the next prime minister? How can you tell someone is a good person? – uploading their responses to an ever- growing following: 160,000-plus, to date.

“It’s all been met with warmth,” he believes. No pushback from pupils or parents. He’s moved schools now, but the tweeting lives on. “I approach it all with respect. I’m trying to understand and learn from the kids, not patronise them.”

It’s this same outlook which pours from the pages of his new book, Teacher Man. It documents the heartwarming, endearing and, at times, baffling events inside his classroom over one school year. “Writing about children with that respect,” he’s clear, “was a no-brainer. The way they problem-solve is brilliant – they think of ideas we’d never consider. And I was writing this at a time when there was so much immaturity coming from the top.”

The book recounts the 2020-21 academic year: Boris Johnson’s cabal still firmly in Downing Street. “We were just expected to respect and take seriously those in power. Meanwhile, we treat children – who’ve done nothing to mess up the country – as if they’re not worth listening to?”

We’re speaking over Zoom, Pointon from his Portsmouth home, a virtual interview the only way to squeeze me into his schedule. Halfway through the summer holidays, there’s been no let-up. August has been spent completing an exhausting list of fundraising challenges for child poverty charities. In true teacher form, a whiteboard listing them neatly peeks into view behind him. The day after we speak, he’s climbing Ben Nevis.

When embarking on this teaching trajectory, Pointon was 24. “I’d been living in London with my partner for years, both working as actors.” Then Covid hit. “We decided to move down to the south coast to get out of London. We’d both been to drama school, but weren’t enjoying the industry. Something wasn’t working, so we reassessed. I needed purpose.”

Pointon is chatty, playful and extroverted by nature. “I’d always been good with kids. My method is simple: I’m yet to mature into a real adult, so I think they see me as a bigger version of themselves. People had said that I’d make a good teacher. I never thought much of it. I wasn’t committed enough to be sure I wanted to train.”

The couple set themselves up in Portsmouth. “That’s when I saw a teaching assistant job being advertised at an inner-city state primary, right around the corner from our new home. It felt like the best way to test the water of education. I could go in, scope out the environment and learn from other teachers.” What, if anything, he had to offer in a classroom was a source of significant concern. “It is irresponsible to leave your child with me and expect them to learn something,” he writes early on. “I am an idiot… People might’ve said I would make a good teacher, but people can be stupid.”

Then on day one, as he’s shepherding his flock of Year 1s from their parents’ arms towards their tiny tables, disaster strikes. One little girl, Lola, trips up as she’s crossing the classroom threshold. “She fell down and face planted,” Pointon recounts, “helpless as a domino. In a split second, I saw her whole school life unfold from this career-ender.”

Pointon catastrophised. “I was so embarrassed for her. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, when making first impressions. If it was me walking into a room – then bam, flat on my face – I’d have been mortified. Obsessed over it. Panicking. It would define me forever. But Lola? Well, she just stood up, pronounced, ‘If it doesn’t hurt, I don’t cry,’ before breezing into the room and continuing her day.

“The only person who cared that Lola had fallen over was me,” Pointon realised. “I was the immature one, obsessing over nothing. Kids are just resilient and move on. They don’t really care about how others perceive them. And because of that, their peers aren’t bothered. It dawned on me then that I’d been so focused on what I could teach them, but it hadn’t even crossed my mind they might, in fact, be the ones giving me lessons.”

Insights like this are littered through Teacher Man’s pages. One in particular sticks in his mind. His Year 1s were divvied up across three large desks, based on how much support they required. “I worked closely with those in need of immediate attention. As teachers, we lovingly referred to them as ‘the usual suspects’, and we formed a great bond.”

Midway through the year, a new kid joined the class, who spoke little English. “I looked over and saw one of the usual suspects – who had only started learning English a few months earlier – was helping this new girl, who spoke even less. It was instinctive and intuitive, instant empathy: I’ve just learned this, so I can help you. The kid wasn’t doing it for kudos, or because someone had told her to. It was kindness. That generosity? It’s hardwired if we nurture it.”

His earnestness is balanced by more absurd anecdotes unfolding. There’s the phantom playground pooper; a nasal cavity raisin rescue; the mystery of the stolen pens. “Or take the nativity,” he says, “which we had to film that year, as parents weren’t allowed in. The show was only 12 minutes, but with the amount of takes we recorded, it could have been a full-length movie shoot.”

Seeing children asked to act for the first time offered endless surprises. “The best bit, though, was the break times: seeing the back half of a donkey playing stuck in the mud with the Virgin Mary; a wise man, the innkeepers and Cow 1 throwing baby Jesus around.”

Most moving are his reflections on the prospect of parenthood. “Being surrounded by so many children,” he reckons, “is an intense backdrop to thinking about becoming a dad. My partner got pregnant for the first time during that year teaching. I was seeing how parenting and early years so massively shaped children; jumping to conclusions about my capacity to be a dad based on random interactions.” It was overwhelming. “Then we found that it was an ectopic pregnancy. It was huge, and devastating. Being met every day by those kids helped me switch off from it all; to come out the other side.”

While daily life in the classroom, Pointon found, was horizon-expanding, coming face-to-face with the British education system has had its own eye-opening effect. “You hear stories,” he says, “but I wasn’t prepared. What hit me most was how nothing fazed the teachers; how normalised all the problems had become.”

Nationwide, schools are quite literally running out of cash. The classroom teacher he worked with, Pointon estimates, spent about £600 of her own money in just one year on kit and equipment. “Basic necessities, like snacks, stationery, electronics. Stuff that really shouldn’t have been coming out of a teacher’s pocket. She wasn’t being praised or commended for it, not being asked to stop, either. It was just normal. Expected. Something you had to do if you were going to get through the year.”

Pointon’s primary sits in a deprived area. “One of the poorest in the UK,” he says, “and every single child in that room has huge potential. But so many had obstacles to contend with. They were about to start a race. Even at that early stage, you could see how varied their starting lines were. Some people start on the 100m sprint line; others are 250m behind. Not through their fault, but through circumstance.” This attainment gap is widening. “In a totally underfunded system, we expect them to finish at the same time.”

In his book, and through our hour-long conversation, it’s obvious that Pointon’s affection for his cohort and his passion for education is abundant. It was gutting, I point out, to read that he left the school after just one year. “Honestly,” he replies, “I’d go back and do it in a heartbeat. I’d swap the jobs I’ve done since and would stay in that role – primary school teaching assistant – for the rest of my working life. But the numbers just don’t add up.”

His full-time teaching assistant annual salary worked out at £17,000. “It’s why we miss out on so many great people coming into those positions in education. It’s a mystery to me how we’ve ended up placing so little value on those who help the next generation – our futures – learn and thrive. I’d built amazing relationships with those young people. I could see, by the end, how my presence was helping them. I’d loved to have stayed. But the money is so poor, so I needed to look elsewhere.”

That’s precisely what he did. As the end of his first year’s summer term approached, Pointon handed in his notice. After looking outside the schooling system for opportunities, a PSHE teaching job came up at a local secondary, where he’s remained for the past three years. “That said,” he adds, “I couldn’t afford to spend a year doing teacher training, especially for PSHE. If I was going to teach maths, English or science, you can get a bursary or grants. But for my subject, there’s no financial support.”

Pointon, by nature, is upbeat and uplifting, but today – much like in his closing chapter – Pointon offers a sobering assessment. Currently, 25% of teachers leave the profession within the first three years. Annual recruitment targets are missed across subjects, repeatedly, and unfilled vacancies have nearly doubled since the pandemic.

“There’s a reason for this,” Pointon writes. “Teachers just don’t have the time, the energy or the resources to feel an impact can be made.” There’s no punchline. “Through the book,” he explains, “I wanted to bring people into the classroom. To feel how warm, positive, life-affirming teaching is. Of course, with challenges arising. But it’s beautiful. That is what I’ve tried to do with all my social media, too. It’s why so many people engage with it. But at the end, I needed to acknowledge that while yes, teaching is great, and should be the best job in the world – with a queue out the school front gate – it’s not the case. That’s not because of the children. I try to be funny, but this part isn’t: a whole generation is being let down.”

He points to chronic underfunding, crumbling schools, overcrowded classrooms. “And the academy systems are turning schools into corporate replicas, not designed around children and communities. It’s deflating and disheartening. I love my job. Right now, I can still make it work. Not as a TA, but as a teacher. But forever? I can’t commit. I don’t know if I’ll be able to, in all honesty.”

School report: Term starts again… but then lockdown spoils all the fun, an extract from Teacher Man

Day 106
I might have called it too early when I’d said that the first day of any term was the hardest, and compared it to prison. What nobody actually talks about is the second day back. The second day back after a holiday is significantly worse than the first. Why? Simple answer: it’s because the children now realise that this is routine, not a novelty. The first day back is exciting: a warm and joyous greeting, with a friendly face welcoming them at the door. Day 2 is the dawning awareness that a long road stretches out before them. The light workload and Christmas colouring have been packed away and it’s time for number bonds and handwriting pens. However, this year was completely different. In his infinite wisdom, the ham-faced mop of hair that we called a prime minister decided to open the schools in January with the same strategy as all the best retail mega-sales: for ONE DAY ONLY! On our second day back, Zahra got her wish and Boris Johnson, the fairy godfather no one wanted, decided to close the schools again. Brace positions, everyone, I thought. It looked as if we were heading into another national bloody lockdown.

Day 108
First day, again, of remote teaching. I dropped a bar of soap in the shower this morning and caught it on my foot, flicked it back up and carried on lathering without it touching the floor. Nobody saw it, but I felt it was worth sharing. It made this an exciting day. I really needed to go back to work soon. I needed purpose.

Teacher Man: Diaries of Life Inside a Primary School by George Pointon is published by HarperCollins at £16.99, or buy a copy for £15.29 from guardianbookshop.com