ABSTRACT
When I started teaching in 2010, it was a fairly desirable profession. The UK was still deep in the throes of a financial crisis, and some of my friends who had landed graduate contracts with top consultancy firms and banks had already found themselves redundant. Teaching, all of a sudden, seemed attractive: solid, stable, with a decent salary and a good pension. Four years later, when I was in my first year as a head of department and in the position to recruit my first English teachers, we had so many CVs we had to set a ludicrously high bar for shortlisting: we only shortlisted people with Master’s degrees.
