ABSTRACT
Every school has a staffroom, or something that does the same job. The state of it, whether it’s heavily used or not, the facilities in there, can tell you a lot about the health of a school and, particularly, about what the leadership’s attitude is to the care and well-being of the workforce. It’s a theme I’ve returned to several times over the years. Here, I’m moved to return to it by a discussion I found on the TES ‘staffroom’website forum.
What do you think your staffroom’s for? Is it a private place where teachers can ‘let off steam’? I ask because that particular phrase ‘let off steam’ was used quite a lot in a recent exchange on a teachers’ chatroom. The topic under discussion was about how a member of the senior team should handle an overheard insulting tirade directed at the head (who wasn’t there of course).
