Every school staffroom has its unsackable barriers to progress

A school might have a teacher protester outside the building, prepared to go to prison if they disagree with its philosophy.

But every school has its staff protesters, quietly eroding and preventing progress from within.

The difference is that they are sitting inside the building. These protesters work invisibly and tenaciously in their pursuit of maintaining the status quo and preventing change or progress in our schools.

At a principals’ national conference in Croke Park in 2024, a keynote speaker articulated this idea through an aerial photo of the outline of a 19th-century shipwreck discovered in the 1990s and visible again since 2019 on Portmarnock beach. This drone image of the surface area of the ship looked like an aerial view of a child’s drawing of an almond-shaped eye. Visible to the naked eye or not, the speaker stressed that the shipwreck remains.

“Who are the shipwrecks in your staffrooms?” the speaker asked.

The rumble of laughter among principals confirms what I already knew.

Every school, staffroom and staff meeting has its shipwrecks.

Given principals’ inability to fire teachers beyond their first year in schools, the shipwrecks cannot and will not be moved on or out of our schools.

These teachers are barriers to progress.

I tried to solve the problem of the staff shipwreck in my early years with new staffroom tables. I could see that the source of the shipwreck in our staffroom came from one long banquet-style table housing mostly long-standing staff members, each with their own place at the table and with their own staffroom cup. I naively thought that by substituting that one large table with several smaller round ones (bistro style, if you will), that I could break them up literally and metaphorically. Within one day, they merged the bistro tables to create the previously installed banquet table.

The shipwreck rose to the surface again.

Even I couldn’t help but laugh at my innocence and lack of cunning.

[ Secret Principal: ‘There is no training that could equip you for this role’Opens in new window ]

In trying to explain to another principal just how debilitating this is, I compared the quest of the principal to that of Odysseus trying to get to the destination not of Penelope but let’s call her the elusive goddess: Progress. When Odysseus visits Aeolus (King of the winds), he is handed a bag containing all winds except the crucial west wind that would take his ship home. His crew open the bag, releasing the wind and blowing him off course.

Working as a principal sometimes feels like trying to get to what looks like a reachable destination (a small piece of progress) moving in a straight line. But arrival will, in reality, involve fighting against the elements – the Department of Education, staff, parents – all the while knowing that the bag of winds could burst and throw the ship off course at any time.

This workplace phenomenon is so common that Australians have coined their own term for it: white anting.

Just as white ants or termites destroy wooden structures from the inside while maintaining the exterior (thereby making the surface structure look intact), these surreptitious teacher termites destroy structure from within. White ants nibbling slowly and surreptitiously at structures or progress can unwittingly be taken for an animal synonymous with loyalty; a graceful swan perhaps, loyal to its partner until the end. But beneath their unruffled feathers, they are pedalling ferociously against change and progress.

This silent sabotage is corrosive and damaging and cannot in the main be called out, because it is simply so hard to see.

So how do white ants destroy the boat, causing shipwreck?

[ Interviewing Gen Z teachers: A candidate told me I was in a bidding war for herOpens in new window ]

In my first year in the role, I facilitated a lunchtime meeting, open to all staff, to further discuss an area of progress that was disproportionately contentious (allowing students attend senior cycle parent-teacher meetings, something now mainstream in most schools). Three staff members opposed to this entered the room halfway through the meeting, and one by one vocalised their discontent and then abruptly left. They acted like hungry, bickering birds, picking at the carcass of progress, squawking and then exiting. The last item on the agenda, which was explored in their absence, was ethos, and how we could further promote our values in our school.

Teacher protests manifest themselves in other ways, too. One new principal moved a painting in her first year to make room for a “student success” board. This caused uproar and upset among staff to the point where she returned the painting to its original position. This was not about the painting nor its inherent beauty, but fear of change.

A former principal, knowing the amount of resistance I was encountering around change management in my early years, also used the image of moving a painting and its position to stress staff resistance to change even when the change was manifestly good. I had asked a staff member who had wanted to dangle a banner from the top of the stairs down into the stairwell to find a better place for it, as it blocked visibility around the heavy-traffic area. The morning after resigning from his position, the banner was tied back again to the stairwell, in a final act of rebellion at the level of “Adrian Mole at age 13¾” insisting on wearing red socks.

Several years into the role, I now understand that in terms of change management, having an evidence-based good idea that would better the lives of students and sharing that for the first time at a staff meeting is a bad idea. This does not mean the idea is bad. But by not drip-feeding the idea – slowly, gently, and with caution, listening for the first hint of winds that quickly turn into a bellow – I antagonise the termites.

Managing change effectively might involve subcommittees, whole school surveys, bringing external agencies or teachers into the school who have already embedded the prospective progress. When we introduced what has become a national norm (phone pouches) last year, I strategically placed the pouches (some of which look like oven gloves) around well-trodden areas of the building to physically denote the change before speaking about it. I adopted Hamlet’s approach around murder – which, “though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ”.

After staff meetings, and when all staff have left the room, I sometimes feel the smug satisfaction of the termite having nibbled away slowly at a problem just like teacher termites. In such moments I have, on occasion, mimicked Hugh Grant as prime minister in Love Actually, indulging in a dad dance as he ceremoniously strips off his tie in 10 Downing Street to The Pointer Sisters song Jump.

No principal will ever ultimately take down the termites.

The best we can do in terms of annual progress is, as John O’Donoghue describes in his poem At the End of the Year:

We bless this year for all we learned,

for all we loved and lost,

and for the quiet way it brought us

nearer to our invisible destination.