Once a teacher...

Fliss Falconer | 17 January 2026

The Aftermath We Don’t Talk About Enough

There’s a phrase I’ve been using lately — the war effort. Not because the pandemic was a war, but because in educational terms, it was a rupture of the same magnitude.

It broke routines. It broke stamina, expectations, trust. It broke the illusion that the old ways would always work.

Just like the post‑war years, we are still in reconstruction. Everything is fragile, up for review but everything is possible.

Yesterday, standing in a classroom again, I felt it sharply. It was lovely — warm, familiar — but it was no longer home. I saw photos of my last classroom recently, and it was beautiful. But it belonged to a different version of me. A version who was surviving, not thriving.

And that’s where this story begins.

The Bullet Journal That Never Needed to Save Me

For nearly 3 years, I have kept a Bullet Journal as a kind of emotional insurance policy. Not for organisation — for reassurance.

In case I ever thought I’d made a mistake leaving teaching or in case someone ever said, “See? You shouldn’t have left. Look what it’s done for you: nothing.”

But that moment never came.

In three years of my new life, I’ve had maybe three bad days — all because I felt I hadn’t done my best, or let down my team but not because I regretted leaving.

Tucked inside that journal is one entry: marking.

Not the act itself — the relentlessness of it. The way it swallowed evenings, weekends, identity. The way I felt that neatness and consistency mattered more than children’s welfare. The way I was held accountable for outcomes in ways that made the appearance of learning more important than the experience of learning. My colleagues' hands being tied because their leads' hands were tied... as were theirs'... ad infinitum.

In that final term, I was really ill from exhaustion. 2am marking on top of a pseudo-part-time timetable with full time home responsibilities, and two little children - it was exhausting. I missed my own children's milestones. In five nativities, I have only seen one.

In my darkest moments, I still think about things I said or did out of sheer depletion — moments I can’t take back. Moments I hope those pupils don’t still carry.

That dissonance — the clash between who I was and who the system forced me to be — is what broke me.

So I stepped away. Not because I didn’t love teaching but because I was becoming someone I didn’t recognise.

Five Years On: A Family Still Healing

Today is Hamish’s fifth birthday.

Five years ago, after nine months of lockdown, his arrival marked a strange turning point. Leo had exactly two weeks of “proper” lockdown learning before I took my foot off the pedal. His lessons became gentler, looser, more forgiving — because survival became the priority.

We were lucky. Leo took to learning like a duck to water, especially after getting glasses at five. But he also developed his own version of “social thinning” — that hesitancy to push himself into interactions, that instinct to retreat, that occasional brusqueness that masks discomfort rather than intention.

We talk often about what social interaction does for us — the benefits, the frustrations, the courage it takes to be scared and do it anyway.

And now, with Hamish starting school this past September, he’s entering education in what I can only describe as a “mending” learning sphere. The system is still healing. The children are still healing. And the truth is, it will never be what it was. Pros and cons to that.

If I — a teacher, a parent, someone who works in education every day — still struggle to get everything together for school, still struggle to keep up with reading books and forms and routines… then how on earth is everyone else coping?

This is the part we don’t talk about enough. The aftershocks. The quiet reconstruction happening in every family home.

The Shift: Discovering a New Way to Teach

I haven’t planned lessons with AI in the traditional sense for a classroom.But I have used AI to plan learning — for tutoring, for online sessions, for SBE resources, for scaffolds, for tools that support real students in real time.

That’s still teaching. It’s just teaching without the exhaustion, the guilt, the 2am marking, the pressure to perform, the endless data cycles, the non-negotiables, the performative neatness.

Currently, I am still seeing 2am more often than I should. This is the hard work that I am choosing right now. This push for the big pay off later. My choice this time.

The first time AI helped me plan a session, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years: presence. I have said this so often but 'Where was AI when I was teaching?'

I am tutoring and I am teaching. AI is here and I am all for its amplification of what I was and what I am and will be.

What AI Actually Does for Me

AI isn’t magic. It isn’t a shortcut. It isn’t a replacement for human connection.

What it is — for me — is scaffolding.

It helps me:

• plan tutoring sessions efficiently

• differentiate resources for mixed‑ability learners

• create scaffolds like FAB frameworks and Golden Essay Structures

• draft communications with tact and clarity

• brainstorm ideas for Study Beyond English

• develop tools like the Essay Checker and EchoGuide

• organise workflows so my energy goes to people, not admin

• amplify creativity rather than replacing it

It gives me back the bandwidth to be the teacher I always wanted to be.

Why Teachers Need AI

Teachers don’t need more pressure.They don’t need more expectations.They don’t need another initiative that adds to the workload.

What they need is breathing space.

AI can take on the administrative load that has been crushing the profession for years. It can free teachers to focus on the human parts of education — the parts no machine can ever replicate:

• emotional support

• connection

• guidance

• confidence‑building

• presence

AI doesn’t replace teachers. It protects them.

Why I Still Teach — Just Not in a Classroom

I may no longer be at the coal face, but I am still a teacher.

And if others are still down there — soot-covered, exhausted, doing their best in impossible conditions — then it is my duty to do everything I can from where I stand.

This is my war effort. My contribution to the reconstruction. My promise.

Study Beyond English exists because I stepped away — and because I still care.

It exists because I believe in teachers. Because I believe in students. Because I believe in families. Because I believe in education as a human endeavour, not a performance metric.

And because I believe that if I can do anything — anything — to support those still in the system, then I must.

It is my calling. My profession. My promise.

Phew! Cuppa, anyone?