Enjoy what you do: hope, joy and staying power

Top takeaways

• Enjoyment is key – If you don’t genuinely enjoy teaching, it’ll become a burden fast. Finding joy in the job is what keeps people in education long-term.
• Staying power isn’t a skill – It’s not something you can teach. It comes from feeling like you’re doing well, making a difference, and wanting to stick with it.
• Retention matters more than recruitment – The system should focus on keeping good teachers, not just attracting new ones. Experience and consistency are what make schools thrive.
• Community is everything – Schools work best when leaders and teachers stay long enough to understand and shape the culture, rather than constantly rotating staff.
• Stay curious – Keep learning, reading, and engaging with education beyond the classroom. A curious mindset helps maintain motivation and resilience.

Listen to the recording (32 minutes) or read an edited version below.

Josephine Smith is headteacher of Kesteven & Sleaford High School, part of the Robert Carre Trust. Carl Smith is principal of Casterton College, Rutland. 

Jo: I'm really fascinated to understand what keeps people in this crazy world of education. Rather like me Carl, you’ve worked in education and been in your role for quite a long time. What’s your current position? 

Carl: I've been principal of Casterton College for just over 10 years. Before that I was heading up the sixth form college for five years, and before that I was a deputy head for 10 years. 

I joined the teaching profession straight out of university, doing my PGCE and then into school. And then the rest is… I'd like to say the rest is history because I'm a history teacher! 

The notion of staying power

Jo: So something must have kind of kept you in this educational world. I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘staying power’. What does the notion of staying power mean to you?  

Carl: Well, I think it means staying around. In a purely factual sense, you're there. I think that I would hesitate to talk about staying power in terms of it being a positive characteristic. I would say it's a by-product, a happy by-product, rather than a deliberate thing or a quality that I would see in myself.

I would see staying power as being somebody who is able to even out the peaks and troughs, within reason, given that I don't make assumptions about what people's lives consist of. 

I think we need to be very careful to acknowledge that some people go through very different circumstances to others, and it would be wrong to start a conversation about staying power by giving the impression that some people that have dropped out of the profession are wrong or have done something wrong because I don't think that helps or really reflects what's going on.

For me, I think probably you have to feel at some level that what you're doing, you're doing well. You do have to believe in yourself, not in an arrogant way, but believe that you can do what you're doing and you're making a difference.

Beyond that, I think it’s largely a question of who you think you are and what you believe gets you up in the morning. And for me, well, I've just enjoyed working in schools.

I wouldn't say it was a grand intention or noble passion for changing the lives of young people. I'm a secondary teacher by trade and I came in originally just because there were a number of careers I was looking at and, when I tried out teaching, I actually found that it was something I really enjoyed. And because I enjoyed it, I wanted to do more of it.

People have got to enjoy this job because there's so much in it. It is such a consuming experience that if you don't enjoy it, it's going to become a burden quite quickly. You will really struggle if you're just putting up with it for a long period of time.

Does vocation matter? 

Jo: That's a really fascinating answer. At interviews people often talk about teaching as a calling or vocation. Did you feel that sense at the beginning that this was a vocation that you were joining?

Carl: Good grief no! I have always felt that education is important. It's something that matters to people. So I suppose on a general level, I believed in education.

And I always enjoyed learning myself. You tend to think that the process is positive if you've had a positive experience yourself. I enjoy the process of learning. I enjoy finding out more about things. 

But did I start with a fully formed sense of calling and vocation? No, not at all. You develop a greater sense of the power of education when you've been in the job for a while. I do have quite a clear set of principles now. There are some things I am very definitely passionate about in my job. 

So, it's more something that crept up on me and evolved over time than something that I started with. 

Joy in the job

Jo: You talk about a sense of doing the job well, needing to enjoy what you’re doing, a constant curiosity, a clear set of principles. Given that there's a lot of talk about a retention crisis in schools, do you think it's those things that the DfE and the teacher training institutions should be teaching others, or trying to inculcate? Is that going to help? 

Carl: I think that what's happened over the course of my career has, for many people, taken the joy out of the job. And when you take the joy out of this job, then it's just really hard and in the end people won't stick it out.

When I started teaching, Ofsted, the national curriculum and league tables were just being introduced. 

There was a new wave of thinking that was going through the public sector, borrowing ideas and concepts from the commercial world and applying them to services like education. Trying to make a market work that would incentivise people to perform well.

I’ve been lucky – and I don't downplay luck, I think luck's a very important part of it – in that I got a very early break in my career. I was covering a maternity leave for my first year in teaching, then moved schools and was fortunate enough to get a head of department role. So I immediately had some kind of agency. 

I was in a school where things were going well and really enjoyed that for 10, 12 years of my career. So I've had a degree of control, maybe, and a fortunate set of circumstances that not everybody's had.

That's helped to balance out what I can see as being the increasing commercialisation and marketisation of the experience of being a teacher, which for many people has taken away their agency, taken away their sense of joy. And that is a misunderstanding, I think, on the part of people making decisions about what education is and how it should be organised, when those people themselves have very little experience of education.

I think we're now seeing the results of that. And I agree with you, Jo, that the emphasis should be on the retention crisis.

Recruitment will ebb and flow according to all sorts of things, including pay, but retention's the key. Education is a job that you should be in for a long time. It's not one of those things you flit in, do a little bit of, and then flit out again. It's not like part of your career portfolio, as it is in many business careers.

This is a job that you get better at the longer you're in, to a large degree, most people anyway. And you need experience, and it takes a long time to be good at it. If you are therefore not retaining those people, the heart goes out of the place. 

Communities with a story

Jo: We've both been lucky in a way in that we have been school leaders in our own institutions, and we’ve both been in our positions for a while. How do you think that’s benefited your school, staff and students? What’s it like to be in a role over a period of time in one place?

Carl: Schools are like many worlds. They're communities. And you have to build a community from the bottom. It has to have real bonds, which are formed between people who work with one another over time. And it must, if it's going to work, have people that believe in it, beyond just a place where they come to do a job and then draw a wage.

Schools aren’t high-powered business environments where you have to stay ahead of the competition all the time. You do need to keep growing and evolving, but also build strong foundations and a community and a story that goes with that community. Schools have to have a story.

They have to know where they're coming from, who they are, and where to a certain degree they're going. And that can only come from having people who have been around, shown that they care, can be trusted. 

So it's a mistake to think that you can just transport or transplant people in, they do something, something happens, and then they can move on. That isn't what makes schools work. 

I remember making this point in a conversation that I had with a DfE civil servant, who was doing a survey into retaining school leaders. They were talking about how we get the best school leaders into the most challenging environments in the country, and how we need to maybe move the best school leaders around and put them in different places. 

And I don't think he liked my answer because I said, no. Domain specific knowledge and experience – and by domain specific I don't just mean knowledge of education, I mean knowledge of your school, of your community, and the people that work in it – is everything. 

If you put me just into another institution and said do what you're doing now, I couldn't do it. Because I am completely dependent on the community and the domain specific knowledge that I have to do what I do now. 

So I said, what you need to do is give people an experience that they genuinely enjoy, so they want to stick around where they are. And when they're in that place, they get so well established that they then develop a passion for it, and they then will stay and keep making a difference. 

Not sure that quite worked with what the civil servant was thinking, but it's what I thought!

Create the conditions for joy

Jo: Do you think then that as leaders, we can’t really coach staying power? It’s not something like resilience or perseverance that you can try and teach people? 

Carl: No, it isn't something you can teach people because it isn't a body of knowledge. You can teach people bodies of knowledge, you can teach them skills, and it's not that either. It's not a skill. What it is, is something that comes from your experience in a certain situation. So going back to my earlier point, I suppose what's given me so-called staying power is that I enjoyed it and that I felt I was doing it pretty well, not all the time and not better than anybody else, but pretty well.

That gives me a sense that, hey, this is okay. We all will stick at things if we like doing them, and we feel we're doing them pretty well. And that's it. 

If you can create those conditions, people will stay. 

This job is a joy for me. There's been times it's not been, but a lot of the time it's been an absolute joy, a privilege. And very often I find people don't really genuinely say that. And I think that's a shame. 

Hope and dealing with the downs

Jo: Both of our careers have seen ups and downs, as is likely in anyone’s. What do you do during the downs? How do you manage the tricky times? What advice would you give to someone who’s finding external influences impacting their joy level or sense of agency? 

Carl: Well, first of all, I really do remain optimistic that we are going into a different way of thinking in education. I think we have reached a crossroads, whether with Ofsted or league tables, and there is now a different way of thinking. There's a general acceptance that those things were not quite right for education and they haven't produced the benefits that they were meant to produce. 

I can see the winds of change moving in a positive direction. Hope is making a comeback. 

But when times are tough, I rely a lot on knowing that the people around you are genuinely with you. It’s hard as a headteacher, because there are times when you are on your own with things. But if you feel like the people you've got around you are genuinely wanting to support you, and genuinely want the best, then that helps you get through almost everything. 

It's people and connections that keep us going through the worst times.

Like me, you were very much in the thick of leading a school during the height of the pandemic and in the immediate aftermath. And it was insane. In many ways it was overwhelming for people. 

And yet somehow, maybe because of the stage we were in our careers, maybe because of other things, but somehow we both got through that period. 

During those very dark times, you hung onto your sense of integrity. If you felt you were doing your best, if you felt you were true to your values and doing what you thought was right, then that made me feel a little bit less overwhelmed. Because I thought, what else can I do?

You have to be self-forgiving as well. You have to be somebody that is prepared to say, ‘Hey, I can't get it right all the time’. In fact, I probably get it wrong a lot of the time, but I'm doing the best I can. 

Jo: I think it's very true that one of the traits that I've seen in people that have stuck around is a sense of hope and optimism, and enjoyment and positivity. I hope readers know the importance of the work they do to generate those kinds of feelings in the teams and people they lead. 

Stay curious

Jo: Carl, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Is there anything in terms of reading or other podcasts that you would recommend – things that have helped you maintain that optimism, hope and enjoyment in your work? 

Carl: Well, what I would recommend is that people read about education, their subject and the things that they're passionate about to do with their work, because this is a job where you have to remain curious.

You have to feel interested in what's going on more widely. I'm very much a person that believes it's important that you continue to be both academic in your work and have a vocational focus because yes, we have things that we do, but we also have a huge body of evolving research and the conversation that goes around all of that.

I really think it would be good if we were able to follow the model that you see in a number of other countries where people have either formal sabbaticals, or contact with universities. Work that involves going out of their immediate environment and finding things out. 

So my recommendation is just read, listen, be interested in stuff, because there's a lot of stuff to be interested in and engage with.