As yet another of those endless, baking Saturday
afternoons that characterized this summer, slipped effortlessly towards
early evening, several of us were sat outside the pavilion, watching Tynemouth
coast to victory against Sacriston. The obligatory cool cans of Red Stripe, bought for the purpose of
nostalgic rehydration became the basis for our toasts of celebration as the
Croons clinched an emphatic 70-run win. Without doubt, the combination of the
very best of weather, company and cricket elevated the mood to something
approaching euphoria. Who needs foreign holidays when this is on your doorstep
for free? My summer home beyond the boundary on Preston Avenue was the only
spot in the world I wanted to be after tea in late July, as a distant Angelus
bell tolled with somnolent solemnity through the shimmering, pollinated haze.
Make no mistake; the mood I’ve just described is not
uncommon. As I approach my 54th birthday, I am the happiest I have
been in years. I am surrounded by the most wonderful crowd of family and
friends, who I love dearly and who love me in return. My beloved pair of
Tynemouth Cricket Club and Benfield Football Club attends to my emotional need
for belonging and support, while Monday six-a-side, recreational cricket with
the Bad Boys and trips to Elite in Hoults Yard, not to mention my trusty bike,
nourish my yearning for participatory sport and something approaching exercise.
Of course, the explosion of microbreweries and the prevalence of quality real
and craft ales at every corner fulfills a more fundamental urge and there is
always music, ancient and modern, to help salve the aesthetic itch. Frankly,
it’s a bloody good job I don’t work for a living as I don’t know how I’d find
the time for it.
Listen, I must say this at the outset, I have not
regretted my decision to take redundancy from Tyne Coast College just before
Christmas 2017 for one single second. If I hadn’t walked out that main entrance
for the last time on December 15th past, I wouldn’t be alive now.
That’s not being over dramatic either, because I would either have dropped dead
with the stress of the place or done myself in, unable to cope with the
Kafkaesque nightmare my role had become. Ultimately and unquestionably, taking
my bit was the right thing to do, as I’d hit what marathon runners call the
wall; I couldn’t go on, even one more step. If I’d continued in employment, the
only way was down.
The sad thing is that my departure was out of key with
the overwhelming majority of my time as a teacher and lecturer. Indeed, for
most of my 30 years in education, it was an honour and a privilege to be part
of the profession and I’ve never regretted the decision to train as a teacher
after my degree. Not once. Sure, there’s always been the constant writing urge
gnawing away, but there was never any money in it, even less than teaching.
Consequently, my extra-curricular scribblings at odd times of the day and
during those extensive, though absolutely necessary holidays have kept the muse
alive and satiated throughout 3 decades and more of employment. To be honest,
it was changing circumstances of what I was required to do for 37 hours a week
that spurred my desire to escape, for if things had remained the way they were
before 2015, I’d have happily stayed in post until I turned 60.
You see, in all honesty, I could never have imagined
leaving teaching during the decade and a half I was blessed with the good
fortune to teach in adult education. Initially this specialized vocation involved
running GCSE English courses for adults at a community centre in South
Tyneside, then 2 idyllic years working in Bratislava for Akademia Vzdelavania, imparting
my particular take on British Culture and Society to timid, incredulous Felvidéks,
before returning to the Cinderella
sector of the domestic education market, by means of time spent as a hired hand
in private language schools and summer study tours in Oxford, Bournemouth and
York. Those were the hard schoolyards; lousy pay, short term contracts, ropey
halls of residence digs, but I came through these privations with flying
colours and my mettle intact.
The varied, extensive experience I gained in dealing
exclusively with adults for those itinerant years made me almost marketable, as
I was offered a job at Sunderland College. In truth it was a timetable no-one
other than me would have wanted; split three ways between EFL to Asylum
Seekers, Access to HE with adult returners and Foundation Year University
students on an intensive language course. In retrospect the new vision and
actual reality of the way learning was being marketed in the 21st
century was encapsulated by the competing elements of my role. The glorious,
blessed widening participation agenda was trumpeted endlessly by Blair’s cronies;
as such, Access to HE became a massive growth area for a dozen or so years. The
responsibility of giving a second chance to those culturally and economically
marginalized victims of the Thatcher years who’d never had a first one, was the
greatest reward of all my years in teaching. I know, without a shadow of a
doubt, my work helped possibly adult 2,000 learners raise their expectations
and change their lives. Additionally, the exponential growth in Asylum Seekers
and Refugees in the early years of the century, not to mention learners from
the 2004 accession states entitled to free English tuition as part of the
Maastricht Agreement, gave FE Colleges a socially responsible role in helping
to integrate marginalized, disaffected and vulnerable people, thousands of
miles from home, into their new surroundings. Again, I think back to literally
hundreds of learners who worked with admirable dedication to improve their
language skills, just so they could get a job, or talk to their child’s
teacher.
Of course, it wasn’t all glittering prizes and
unqualified success; Sunderland College, like every other FE provider, had
learned the terrible beauty of avarice post 1994 incorporation. As businesses,
FE colleges existed purely to turn a dollar and charging Chinese students the
thick end of £5K a year
cash money to learn irregular verbs by rote was a lucrative market. The
students didn’t want to attend these classes; they wanted to sleep through the
day and get on MSN Messenger to their pals at night. However, they’d paid up
front, or their parents had, and the worthless diploma at the end of the year
was the necessary evil required for entry into a full degree programme they
assumed was the next step for them. Regardless of educational merit, the
college obliged; they all passed and undoubtedly their degree would have
followed a similar, lax pattern. It was the kind of educational fraud I felt
glad to leave behind, for a brief while at least, when I got my next job, back
this side of the river.
I was appointed by Tynemouth College in 2003, which
became Tyne Met in 2005, which became Tyne Coast in 2017; each institution was
progressively worse in terms of management, working conditions and staff morale.
The old Tynemouth College was primarily a cheerfully eccentric combination of
the world of Goodbye Mr Chips and the
attitudes of Paris 1968; the oddball coastal Goths and gays who didn’t fit in
at Tommy More or Whitley High came there to be taught by a wonderful collection
of ageing, boozy, unconforming academic high flyers. I’d never seen so many lip
piercings and Nirvana hoodies in my life. Despite having one of the 3 most evil
people I’ve known in my entire life as my boss, I adored my job, teaching
Access to HE, EFL and A Level Literature. Certainly, the first two parts of my
job were the parts of the syllabus none of my dear old colleagues wanted
anything to do with. Of course, despite succeeding superbly in its founding mission
to send the cossetted and clever children of petit bourgeois coastal parents to Russell Group universities,
Tynemouth College was deemed too small to be viable, and once the North Tyneside
behemoth came calling, it was inevitable that Tyne Met would be established.
Frankly an account of what went on in the higher
echelons of the successor institution between 2005 and 2009, which combined the
economic acuity of the Weimar Republic with the moral code of an Elizabethan
revenge tragedy, really ought to have been made into a Panorama special, if not the subject of a full scale investigation
by Northumbria Police, but we’ll leave it there. Suffice to say, unlike just about
every other ordinary member of the teaching staff, everything came up roses for
me, as restructuring and repositioning meant my job from 2006 until 2015 was
entirely dedicated to leading the Access to HE programme. Numbers were through
the roof. Twice our learners won national awards. Twice I won teaching awards.
Twice the department was honoured by Northumbria University and the college
itself. Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the best decade of my working
life, but the dread hand of the Tory cuts post 2010 started to chip away at the
foundations of my socially inclusive Soviet.
First of all, fees became payable for all those over
23, regardless of their educational history or prior qualifications; even if
you had barely a handful of GCSEs, age made you liable. The nostrum if you think education is expensive, try
ignorance is undeniably true, but economically unhelpful in those
circumstances. This debt was managed in the shape of a loan for £3k that the
learners never even saw but would be liable for if they didn’t graduate 5 years
after finishing their course, never mind ditching the Access course as many did
when life’s impecunious pageant intervened. Those regulations put a lot of
obstacles in the way of even the keenest learner. Next up, some bright spark
decided Universities were no longer allowed to design Access courses; at a
stroke destroying valuable partnerships and networks that had been built up
over decades. Previously Universities had structured Access modules to ensure
adult learners were briefed in what they actually needed for degree level
study. In English this meant: academic writing, referencing, personal
reflection and analyzing contrasting opinions; a skills-based course tailored
to equipping undergraduates with the raw materials they needed to produce
degree level work. It was ideal, which is probably why it was abolished. In its
place, faceless regional exam boards designed generic, off the peg rather than
bespoke courses, taught on strict, inflexible “pathways.” Then, the coup de grace; those bloody Tories did
away with the nursing bursary, so instead of getting £8k a year to train, wannabe
nurses had to fork out £9k fees instead. This is just another of the catastrophic
wounds our beloved NHS has had to endure in recent times. Consequently,
applications to Access plummeted, the bottom dropped out of my professional
world and, unable to play the career politics game like a couple of so-called
colleagues who accepted the King’s shilling by moving into management like the
Vichy academics they were, I was cast adrift. I could have taken VR then, but I
chose not to.
As regular readers know, I was poorly in 2015, but I was
determined to display my recovery by returning to work, in whatever capacity.
There was an economic necessity for this as well; Ben was only in his second
year at Uni and I couldn’t let him down. Therefore, I accepted the rancid hand
I was dealt and played it with as much finesse as I could muster; a
redeployment “opportunity,” attempting to instill a desire to pass re-sit GCSE
English to swathes of bored, shiftless, lazy teenage sports duffers, dull,
quasi-automated Uniformed Services squaddies in waiting and the diabolical
daughters of Beverley Allitt and Myra Hindley in the shape of the terrifying
Health and Social Care harridans. Not
only that, several times a week I descended like Orpheus in a nuclear powered
bathoscope to plummet to the depths of academic Styx to teach Functional Skills
Level 1 to those poor wretches who oscillated between barely sentient vacuity and
profanity-spewing hyperactivity. It was education, but not as I knew it.
Actually, I’m gilding the lily here; most of the kids
tried their best and were in those classes because they had generally been
either poorly taught, were suffering with undiagnosed special needs or were victims
of horrendous social deprivation. I tried my best and so did they in the most
part; me for 2 academic years and so, sadly, did many of them as well. However,
you simply can’t pretend to love what you do when you don’t, or I can’t and
almost all of the time I felt I’d been comprehensively deskilled as a
functioning human being. Drowning in a sea of branded polo shirts and leisure
wear. Suffocating in an ionosphere of Lynx
Africa. My mother’s death the weekend before classes started in September
2017 gave me a sense of perspective. I took bereavement leave and thought about
handing my notice in, though reasoned this would have been financially idiotic.
Instead, I resolved to return and see the academic year through.
What stopped me from completing this plan was my final
and complete realization that Further Education is now completely unfit for
purpose; it is so badly underfunded that the only way Colleges keep going is by
widespread fraud, by waving through students who’ve either handed in inadequate
work or left the place completely. The reasons for this are simple; money.
Every pair of legs that remains on the books produces funding, which increases
if these vile bodies pass and this is what keeps the place open. The dirigistic
power imbalance, akin to the feudal pyramid structure of society or the
Leninist model of Democratic Centralism means all policy decisions handed down
by the elite corps of power-dressed preening narcissists on six figure salaries
must be obeyed and carried out unquestioningly; if you are told no-one fails
and no-one drops out, you make that happen. Otherwise, there is trouble. This
means staff who have been physically attacked by students are forced to keep
brooding thugs in their classes as the scrutiny afforded to retention figures
if the yobbo in question is thrown out is almost intolerable. I’ve known of
cases when a student quits at Christmas to take a job, but is kept on the
register and somehow, miraculously, achieves the qualification on which they
were enrolled, even without being near the place for more than 6 months.
What sort of culture allows this to happen?
Dictatorial incompetence from the top down, basically. In my experience, senior
managers are, without exception, psychopathic bullies who prey on the weak,
inadequate and willingly dominated middle managers they have appointed as their
patsies and errand boys. These simpering camp guards, who are only obeying
orders, take their professional angst out on the already undervalued,
underpaid, overworked and disaffected teaching staff, setting them more
impossible tasks that either Alice or the Mad Hatter could manage before
breakfast. Occasionally one of the shop floor cannon fodder goes feral; develops
Stockholm Syndrome and becomes a management grass, while the rest become ever
more disenchanted. As someone who had been the union rep for more than a
decade, I had seen an endless litany of ordinary staff bullied, cajoled and
intimidated into resigning or signing risible compromise agreements by evil
managers, hell-bent on self-preservation, motivated as much by power as money.
Almost without exception, trumped up, non-existent crimes and fabricated
statements acted as the building blocks for another courtroom show trial, with
the top brass acting as judge, jury and executioner. Faced with such impossible
odds, even the strongest, most resilient and dedicated teacher would tell them
to go fuck themselves. Who could blame them? Consequently, when the college sent
round a general email asking for volunteers for redundancy that early December
morning, I applied without hesitation. I’d like to think they accepted with the same
sense of alacrity and glee.
The terms of my departure remain confidential; suffice
to say that when Easter arrived, the Beast from the East and other inclement
weather fronts in the first part of 2018 had prevented me from getting the back
garden in proper shape. However, I’d not been idle otherwise. You know about my
healthy living kick; work would have prevented that. Deciding it was time to
move on, I provisionally registered with 3 supply teaching agencies and set the
wheels in motion to claim Universal Credit. Yes, it is hard to do so, as the
complexity and length of the application form is clearly intended to put all
but the most determined of potential claimants off. However, I stuck to my
guns.
Bearing in mind I was required to sign on at Byker Job
Centre, I was delighted to discover the building and ambience were agreeable.
It wasn’t the whitewashed walls and bare stone flagging of Felling dole office
where I’d graced with my signature once a fortnight at various times in early
to mid-80s, both pre and post University. In fact, I’d signed on in July 1986
as Ian Cusack BA (Hons), much to the fury of the bloke behind the counter. At Byker, the staff were remarkably kind,
optimistic and helpful, even when I tried telling them I fancied being a poet; I William Blake. It didn’t get a laugh,
but I did have a promise of being paid after 6 weeks if I hadn’t got a job.
Remarkably, or so I thought, they made absolutely no
effort in trying to steer me towards any appropriate vacancies, relying on my
knowledge of local teaching agencies to get some work. This I found depressing,
as I wanted to work as soon as possible, doing whatever was possible, until I
could get back into the education game. Obviously, the indeterminate waiting
time for my Police Check to come back was the deciding factor before I could
hope to do that, as without it I was uninsured. Despite attending 3 different
meetings at Byker Job Centre, where I explained my situation in painstaking
detail, nobody sought to help me find work. I’ll say again, and the fact I’m
serving behind a bar for the first time since 1986 shows this, I’ll do anything
within reason to earn a few quid. I am open to suggestions or offers.
In the midst of this, I was delighted to receive an
interim bequest from my mother’s estate, to replace with the redundancy pay off
I’d dispensed with by settling my mortgage. The money from my mam, Laura and I
agreed, would buy her flat, under the new legislation enabling long term
tenants to purchase Housing Association property; unethical I know, but what
the hell? The fact is that Laura and I have been together for 12 and a half
years, but because of a complex set of reasons, we’ve never lived together. Primarily,
the fact she was in receipt of DLA because of her degenerative spinal condition
until the Tories wrecked the benefit system and determined she was not eligible
for PIP. We have been fighting this, at a funereal, bureaucratic pace for over
a year now. During this time, Laura has not been given any money, so the
outright purchase of her flat was actually the only way to guard against her
being made homeless, appallingly enough.
Unlike my mortgage, this purchase required legal
to-ing and fro-ing, so it took a while to sort out. The end result was that
with the funds resting in my account, my savings meant I was no longer eligible
for UC, even though they would disappear as soon as the purchase documentation
was in place. As I’m an honest sort, I made this entire situation clear to them
via the on-line portal which is the only acceptable form of communication with
the UC regional centre in Middlesbrough. Within hours, my claim was rejected,
and my account closed. The promised payment was also withdrawn. So much for
Giro Johnny Cusack eh? Even more inconvenient was the fact I no longer had a
work coach, for whatever good he did me, to advise me on the best way to find
paid employment. All I could do was wait for my Police Clearance to come back,
which it finally did in mid-May. Now, at last, I could leave the ranks of the
idle poor. Well, that’s sort of what happened. We hear much talk in the media
about the cashless society; I’d like to think I’m a living, breathing example
of it. You see, I simply haven’t got any money, meaning I’ve slipped easily
into the role of non-paying Metro passenger for economic reasons. I’ve been
forced to curtail my expenditure on gig tickets; to the extent I was only able
to see Michael Head because of the generous provision of a guest list place.
Once I’d settled the purchase of Laura’s place, my ISA
contained the grand total of 1p. Each month I need to find approximately £500
to pay for my outgoings: Council Tax, utilities, home insurance, contact
lenses, gym membership, mobile phone, TV and Broadband. It is a battle and it’s
one I’m losing pretty comprehensively. Since the start of this financial year,
or June 1 to be precise as that’s when I got my first pay packets from my two
casual jobs, I have earned precisely £677.98. This comprises £443.98 from
stints behind the bar at Tynemouth Cricket Club, which is a job that I got for
myself and has given me far more satisfaction than teaching did in my last role
and £234 for GCSE invigilation at Walker Technology College and Whitley Bay
High School.
I get £25 per session generally but made the princely
sum of £34 for one paper in which I acted as a scribe for a lad who’d broken
his arm the week before his exams started. I had hoped, nay expected, to get
more work than this, but for whatever reason, the phone doesn’t ring, and my
inbox doesn’t ping. The other 2 agencies have not provided me with any work;
one of them actually required me to provide a signed letter from my GP to say I
was fit for work, after learning about the time I had off for bereavement
leave. As well as being incredibly insulting, it was also financially beyond my
reach because of the price doctors charge for producing such a document.
The situation is this; as I have no savings and have
been denied benefits, all I can do is dip into the large overdraft facility my
bank provided, when such easy credit seemed proportionate to my £32k salary
when I still worked. Each month I get more overdrawn. Each month I get hammered
with yet more bank charges; £40 for this month alone. The only possible savings
I could make from the monthly total expenditure, would involve cancelling my TV
and Broadband package. This would save me £70 a month; a drop in the ocean. Yes,
I am lucky; I have an uncomplicated lifestyle devoted to cricket, football and
writing. Yes, I have a roof over my head;
in fact, I have two, which is why I’ve put my house up for sale, but that might
take another 6 months at least to come to fruition. Yes, I have my occupational
pension that I can access at 55, losing a quarter of its value, or at 60, even
though finishing teaching early means it won’t be as comforting as it could
have been. Most of all, I need a job soon.
Being a casually employed bar man is not lucrative and
I’d love the chance of a proper job, but I’ve not filled out an application
form since 2003. I really don’t know where to look or what to look for. I’d be
happy to do anything, within reason. I’d work nights, weekends, whenever. All I
need to do is take home about £600 a month and I’d be in the pink, as well as
in the black. Giz a job eh? Of course, things could be worse; I could still be
the dead hamster, broken on the wheel of misfortune at Tyne Met. Every day when
I wake up and remember I don’t have to spend any time in that place, I feel
rich as Croesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment