I quit my job as a newspaper columnist and became a high school teacher
Lucy Kellaway
- Lucy Kellaway spent many years working at the Financial Times as a writer, editor, and columnist.
- She gave up her six-figure salary to retrain as a teacher and set up the charity Now Teach.
- She now makes about a third of her previous salary but says being a teacher is "amazing."
This is an as-told-to essay based on an interview with Lucy Kellaway, who stopped being a full-time writer for the Financial Times to become a teacher. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I joined the Financial Times as a journalist as a 25-year-old after I spent two years working as a banker for JPMorgan.
I really loved working at the newspaper. They gave me lots of different and interesting jobs to do, including as an associate editor and my last role as a career columnist. It was a very cushy, privileged job.
Although it was glamorous and fun, those things started to wear off. I worked with great people, but I found myself in my late fifties considering if I actually wanted to do one job my whole life.
My mum was a great school teacher and when she died when I was in my forties I briefly thought about becoming a teacher like her.
But I thought I might have left it too late. Ten years later when my dad died, I thought I needed to do something radical with the time I had left of my working life.
I knew from my daughter, who is also a teacher, that there was a desperate need for more teachers in the UK. So I thought, "that's what I'm going to do."
Earning respect
I left the FT in 2018 and now I teach business studies three days a week in a comprehensive school in Gateshead in northeast England, where I've been for a year.
Next year I'm going to teach my true love — economics.
Going into schools was a complete culture shock. Going from having been a very respected person in a senior position at the FT to being at the lower end of the ladder was a shock.
The next shock was the kids.
They don't think "we've got Lucy Kellaway teaching us." You have to earn their respect.
I had led an intensely privileged life. I went to a grammar school, I had middle class parents, and lived in houses full of books.
Then I attended Oxford University and worked at the FT, which was pretty much an extension of that institution in my early days there.
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To go and teach in an inner-city school in Hackney in east London, where about 40% were on free school meals and only 15% of students were white, was a shock too.
I was suddenly right up close to a world in which people were not like me. They didn't sound like me, and most importantly, weren't like me either. That is truly an interesting and exciting experience.
In my first year as a teacher I was paid as a trainee, which was around £25,000 ($32,000). That was a significant salary cut from the more than £100,000 ($128,000) I was earning as a columnist.
I was also making a lot of money from public speaking, so my income took a huge cut.
I've been lucky because a year before I took the leap to become a teacher full-time, I stockpiled cash and have been cushioned by those savings.
I can't say that I'm living the life of a teacher who earns about £35,000 ($45,000) because I also have an FT pension.
When I first joined the school in Hackney during the pandemic, I was surprised by the level of the dependence of families on food banks.
The education 'machine'
Real life is not like the Hollywood depiction of teaching. If you think of the movie "Dead Poets Society," where the privileged white teacher has all the kids fall in love with the subject – it's not like that.
Education is a system and a machine and actually the person who needs to do the adjusting isn't the kids; it's you.
You're a part of that system and the minute the machine says deliver the exam results, that's what you have to do.
So for me to leave readers with the impression that my life is like "Dead Poets Society" couldn't be further from the truth.
As well as retraining to become a teacher, I decided to set up a charity, Now Teach, which supports people who want to retrain as teachers later in life to help fill the shortage.
I knew from writing about working life that many people in their fifties who were lawyers or worked in other corporate roles get bored with it and want to do something more useful.
We've had about 700 people sign up to train as teachers. In the first year there were many corporate lawyers, ex-bankers, and consultants who joined. Now we're much broader.
We don't do the training ourselves – we encourage and reassure the people signing up to become teachers. They come to the Now Teach website, we explain more about what it involves then we put them in touch with the training programs.
Feeling great
We are this built-in network and support group of people who have done the same thing, and we offer a lot of networking and training sessions that are aimed specifically at this cohort.
We now employ about 18 to 20 people who work mainly part-time and they are involved in running the networks and then helping us select and recruit the candidates. I don't run it as I focus my time on teaching.
As a journalist, I always felt that I'm only ever as good as my last piece. But as a teacher, after days where I feel I've taught a good lesson, I feel great.
Even on the days where I think I didn't teach very well, you can still say those students learned something new. All teachers have something positive to notch up every single day and that's amazing.
Lucy Kellaway has written a number of books, most recently "Re-educated: Why it's never too late to change your life," published by Penguin.
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