A book I’ve started reading is (Un)educated: My Life as a Teacher, and Why You Should Never Become One, by Francis Foster. Some of it is laugh-out loud funny, but some of it, about his reference being spiked, made me angry because I know someone who couldn’t get another job until the headteacher was ill. With him away, the deputy head wrote her an HONEST reference.
Something similar happened to me. I was head of Computing for just over a year before I saw my dream job advertised. The headteacher was annoyed that I was applying for another job so soon, but I felt the opportunity was too good to miss. I applied and got it.
During the time I was at the school, I vastly expanded the Computing department, so successfully that we had to take on extra staff. Results improved, usage amongst staff went right up, and an Ofsted inspection six weeks after I’d started concluded that I was doing a great job. I mention all this not to boast, but to place in context what transpired.
After I’d been working at my new job for a couple of weeks, my boss, G, suggested I went to the council office to look at the reference I’d been given. I said, “Why?” He said it was because we had the right to see our references, and thought that if people didn’t take advantage of that facility it would be withdrawn. Reasonable enough, I thought. So I trotted along to the council office, asked to see my reference from my previous employment, and gasped in horror and disbelief as I read it:
“Terry Freedman has worked in this school since —.”
When I returned I said to G,” How come you gave me the job, given that that reference made it sound like my biggest achievement was turning up every day?” He replied that he mused that anybody getting a reference like that must be so good that the headteacher didn’t want him to go! So, a bit of an own-goal on the part of that headteacher, and a big disappointment to me, because I liked him but now felt that my liking had been misplaced.
