Making Time for Young People

School is hard. For young people and for teachers. It can be a lot of fun, but it’s also hard.

Time is always slipping away – through the cracks in the playground in your break time as you go out to find a pupil who left a book behind… in the interminable journey around the one-way system… and most of all as soon as you try to eat lunch. One of the lasting impressions that I have of being a teacher in a maintained secondary school is the sense of being in a rush.

That’s a problem for young people. They need our time, and in a room of 32 pupils who I’ve got an hour with – call it 55 minutes by the time things are warmed up and warmed down – there just isn’t enough to give them much in the way of individual attention. That was one of the things that drew me to mentoring with Oppidan in the first place: the ability to do real relationship-led, character-building work. Don’t misunderstand me – there are lots of amazing teachers in the maintained and independent sectors who carve out time for this, but it's an act of heroism, and something that I always struggled with.

Time with my mentees at Oppidan was a bit of a guilty pleasure, even the sessions that didn’t quite land the way I wanted or where the mentee was on their last legs after an afternoon of back-to-back extra-curricular sports. Spending time with kids one-on-one, feeling like you can almost see the difference you’re making in real-time, invariably laughing, was a great tonic after a day at warp speed.

It’s a real pleasure to be on the inside at Oppidan now – sadly no longer mentoring, but instead helping with bringing the mentoring approach to the secondary schools we work with. It was always apparent how much young people gained from being encouraged to flourish as fully rounded personalities, not just as intellectual repositories, and working to cement that as one of the things we really value in educational culture in the UK is an incredibly motivating challenge.

Harry Lancaster