Opinion: Relief for Harrogate students as exams season comes to an end

The leaving Proms will by now be in full swing. A Level Results Day will be on August 14, with the GCSE results published a week later on August 21.

Meanwhile our teachers are staggering towards the end of term. They are expected to organise D of E expeditions, sports day, a variety of school concerts and school trips both in the UK and abroad. Meanwhile teachers are also leading the North Yorkshire Schools Cricket and Athletic Teams involved in regional competitions all over the country. And it never ends.

But for some it will. This is the time of year when staff and students say goodbye. For staff retiring it’s like stepping off a treadmill.

But first the heads have to go through the grisly business of the leaving speech at the final staff meeting. Two leaving-do nightmares are to be avoided. The most obvious is the length of time it takes some colleagues to say goodbye. If you know who it’s likely to be, schedule that speech as close to the 5pm cut-off point as possible.

Part of the accepted culture in schools is that some staff simply must leave on the dot for obvious personal reasons. Others don’t but happily join in the exodus under cover as it were. Hard to keep droning on when most of your colleagues have left.

Secondly the time-honoured tradition is to say only nice things. But you normally have a good idea who is going to break the taboo. I used to stand with my back to the gents loo door, leaning backwards on it and as the speech started to decline in tone, I would mysteriously have disappeared from the room, stealthily re-appearing as soon as the applause started.

For retirees some will be dreading it, as I did. Others will be relishing the idea. You need a plan, I was told. I became a teaching assistant at St John Fisher School and until Covid did for me, loved it. A bit like being a grandparent. If ever the going got a bit tricky, I handed the problem back to someone else.

Learn a new skill was another suggestion. Cooking went very badly; ICT was even worse. Am doing better at Duolingo Spanish, but only just. Thankfully I had a lifelong hobby to fall back on. Cricket. Now there I can speak the language. Fluently. Short leg, silly mid-off, long leg, leg break, the gully and the rest.

Poor old Harry Brook, formerly of Sedbergh School, was dismissed in the Test at Headingley in “a leg-side strangle”. That’s a new one. Bashir and Tongue were playing for England and Bumrah and Pant for India. Sounds like a pantomime. Which, in a way it was.

Pant did several “paddles”, loads of “reverse sweeps” and did a full body somersault to celebrate his hundred. Scored another in the second innings and still lost. It’s only a game. Not in Yorkshire it’s not!!