Written submission from Anonymous (MPD0025)

I am a teacher in a primary school. My experience was not the best throughout pregnancy, maternity and returning to work. I will give a brief description of the problem and some ideas to help in future reference.

When telling the head teacher of my second pregnancy, they seemed pleased. Bearing in mind I hadn’t worked there a year. I was currently on a support programme with the school as I was in the middle of transferring from secondary to primary. This had basically stopped as soon as I had made it known I was pregnant.

I was offered no support throughout Ofsted, and was left with quite a violent class at times with no support of risk assessment completed. I had asked many people throughout my pregnancy whether I could have a risk assessment completed due to the nature of my class. Sadly it took the school until I was 24 weeks pregnant before this was put in place. I was threatened competency even though they had stopped all support when announcing my good news. This was hard as not only did this mean they could ruin my career but also put a lot of stress on myself, the baby and my family. Finally when the unions got involved with the matter the school seemed to back down and within 3 weeks I was issued with a good lesson observation.

I left for maternity leave well and nothing was said untoward. I went to school to allow the staff and children meet our baby for the first time and nothing was said. I had mentioned to some of the staff that I had been reading the weekly bulletin to see what they were all getting up to (was secretly using it as a way to pass time when breast feeding). That afternoon most emails were stopped to my email account.

I arranged a meeting with the head teacher to discuss coming back to work early 2016. When I arrived to discuss back to work and what would happen (e.g. what year group I would be working with) I was shocked to see that not only the head teacher, but also the deputy head teacher in the office. I was told I would be on the beginning stages of competency. I didn’t need to hear this when I had at least 3 months left on maternity leave. They then went on to say how much of a bad teacher I was, asked how I would feel if my children had a teacher like me, told me I should spend less time with my family and more time working (even though I was getting into work before 7am and not leaving until after 5 AND taking work home). I ended up extending my maternity leave and had the meeting later on but with union representation. In this meeting I handed my notice in as could not see a future working for a school who could not support their staff.

I have had a bad time with it and am sure I am the extreme. I believe that if they hadn’t of judged me for being pregnant and not left me with any support, none of this would have happened.

I also feel that head teachers (or SLT to be general) need to be made aware of the fact that just because a woman is pregnant, it does not mean we cannot work just as hard, and achieve just as much as the next teacher. I felt like a disappointment to the school for doing something so natural to every woman. I feel more trust is needed in teachers who are off a maternity leave and understand that when we come back to school we will need support to enter back into work life. We have been out of the loop for a number months!

So in a nut shell:

Organisations need to be more supportive of pregnant colleagues

Expectations and opinions of staff should not change

Being understanding of woman coming back tp the work place can be stressful. To show support for women coming back not only emotionally, but also physically and for my case subject wise.

May 2016