Teaching is Not Therapy: Why Schools Cannot Fix Society’s Failures

There’s a glorious Armstrong and Miller sketch in which a male teacher engages his class of rapt children in the beauties of mathematics. As they hang on his every inspirational word, he illustrates abstract concepts with examples from their everyday lives. The bell rings. He whips out his newspaper and tells the shocked children: “Fuck off. This is my time.”

While perhaps not quite so bluntly, this has always struck me as a sensible approach to a demanding profession. Turn up, know your subject, build decent relationships, stay affable, and be relentless with the ones who test you. Get the day’s work done well, then take off the teacher costume and rejoin the ranks of normal people. If, along the way, I’ve been ‘inspirational’ for a few, that’s a bonus.

A recent Multi Academy Trust conference, however, revealed that teaching is no longer enough. Apparently I am now expected to be a “trusted adult”: part social worker, part therapist and part emotional support human – whether I signed up for that role or not.

Multi Academy Trusts have traditionally made perfectly good economic sense. Pool HR, bulk-buy resources, share expertise where possible and occasionally spread good practice across schools. The economies of scale are obvious. I’m hardly going to complain if my sixth-form staples arrive cheaper because they were ordered alongside Miss Johnson’s Year 7 exercise books down the road.

They could have stopped there and most teachers would have considered the arrangement a success. But modern education can never simply leave well alone.

Hovering over everything is Ofsted’s increasing emphasis on wellbeing, belonging and inclusivity. These are perfectly worthy aspirations, but they have encouraged schools to drift steadily beyond education and into social reconstruction. Increasingly, we are expected not merely to teach children but to repair them.

The conference’s saccharine tone is established immediately. The impeccably turned-out CEO unveils the programme with the earnestness of a man announcing a peace treaty. Once an IT teacher, he has successfully reinvented himself as an emotionally intelligent educational visionary. Alongside his performative affection for “our children”, he regards one of his principal duties as reading airport business books and distributing their wisdom to the assembled staff.

This year’s offering is “Whakapapa” – the Maori concept of ancestry and interconnectedness, recently popularised by the All Blacks. He pauses reverentially, allowing the imported wisdom to settle over the room like a particularly pious fog. Blimey, I find myself thinking. This feels a bit strong for a trust that’s barely out of nappies. And at what point did we decide our own educational traditions had so little to teach us?

Next, the surprisingly young keynote speaker promises to explain how we can save disaffected boys. She begins, as these speakers invariably do, with the obligatory origin story: working-class child made good via Cambridge. Her ‘inspirational’ – this word will be doing a lot of heavy lifting today – mother, we’re told, “worked herself into the ground” running a sixth-form college. The definition of “working class” is evidently more elastic than I remember, but no matter. I’m impressed that despite still being in her twenties, she has apparently discovered the magic bullet that has eluded the hoary old practitioners in the audience for decades.

Her epiphany, she tells us, came while listening to Gareth Southgate discuss toxic masculinity and absent male role models. Like Bruce Wayne answering the Batphone, she resolved that “Something must be done!” and founded an organisation using football to reach vulnerable boys. A still from Adolescence flashes up on screen. I sit up, ready to be duly outraged by her confected outrage – but she moves on. I wonder how long it will be before someone suggests we fix the problem by talking about feelings in a circle.

We are then invited to reflect upon the “trusted adult” in our own childhood. After a moment’s thought, I settle upon my blunt working-class father, whose principal educational philosophy consisted of shouting “Yer daft bugger!” for the best part of two decades. A revelation dawns. What our wayward youth really need is an army of middle-aged blokes wandering the country bellowing “Yer daft bugger!” whenever common sense deserts them.

Curiously, this is not the programme being proposed.

Instead, we watch a video about a young teacher appointed as trusted adult to a group of persistently troublesome boys. In soft, therapeutic tones she explains how the sessions provide a safe space in which they can express emotions not permissible elsewhere in the school day. I’m wondering where the football has gone. We are introduced to one of her charges, his quietly seething persona peeking out from beneath a greasy fringe. He reflects: “I was always getting into trouble… well, I still do… but not as much.”

For a moment I picture the young woman gamely trying to explain the offside rule while her charge stares blankly into the middle distance. He wants to be somewhere he can move, compete and test himself; but instead, here he is sitting in yet another circle of soft-voiced emotional reflection. If this represents success, I would hate to see failure.

None of this is the young teacher’s fault. She is trying conscientiously to deliver precisely what the system now demands. Nor is there anything objectionable about children having trusted adults in school. Every good teacher has quietly fulfilled that role from time to time.

The problem begins when what was once an occasional act of humanity becomes a formal institutional expectation. Some children desperately need pastoral support. Some arrive carrying burdens no child should bear. Schools should help where they can. But somewhere along the line, “helping” has become “replacing”. Teachers are now expected to compensate for fractured families, absent fathers, adolescent mental illness, online harms, social isolation and every other failure of modern society. No profession can absorb that many responsibilities without losing sight of its primary purpose.

Teaching, at its best, is already a profoundly humane profession. Introducing students to Shakespeare, algebra or the periodic table is not a lesser contribution because it isn’t therapy. Helping young people understand the world through knowledge is itself an act of care.

For my own part, I’ll happily explain how 14 lines of 10 syllables can illuminate the human condition. I’ll gladly spend an hour showing why Willy Loman still matters. If that helps a student better understand themselves or their place in the world, so much the better. But ask me to become their counsellor, social worker, surrogate parent and emotional life coach as well?

Fuck off.

This is my time.

Dave Summers is a Sixth Form teacher and his name is a pseudonym.