The Classroom Changed. My Purpose Didn't | Why I Left Teaching After 20 Years
By Julian Dance —
Tags: Classroom Practice, Education, EdTech, Personalised Learning, Teaching & Learning
After twenty years teaching science, Julian Dance reflects on the changing role of teachers, why experienced educators matter more than ever, and why he believes technology should amplify, not replace, great teaching.
There is a well-known saying that nobody forgets a great teacher. Whether that's entirely true, I'm not sure, but I do know this. Very few teachers remember the lesson they taught on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November. What they do remember are the conversations that happened afterwards, the students who doubted themselves before eventually succeeding, and the quiet moments when you realise you've made a difference to someone's life in a way that extends far beyond the curriculum. As I closed my classroom door for the final time this summer, those are the memories that will stay with me. After twenty years of teaching science, leading departments and mentoring colleagues, I found myself reflecting less on qualifications, results or inspection frameworks than on people. The thousands of young people I'd had the privilege to teach, the colleagues who had challenged and inspired me, and the extraordinary profession that has given me so much over the past twenty years. Leaving didn't feel emotional in the way many people expected it to. In truth, it felt like the natural conclusion to one chapter and the beginning of another. That probably explains why I never wanted to give a traditional leaving speech. I've always been slightly uncomfortable with the idea that teaching is somehow about the teacher. It never has been. If I measured success at all, it wasn't by examination results or the number of years I'd spent in the profession, but by whether a young person walked out of my classroom believing they were capable of tackling something they hadn't believed possible when they walked in. Instead of talking about my own career, I chose to read a letter that I had received from one of the Year 11 students I had mentored this year. She described what had been an incredibly difficult period in her life and wrote that she didn't believe she would have made it to the end of Year 11, or through her GCSEs, without the support, encouragement and unwavering belief I had shown in her. Reading those words in front of colleagues wasn't easy, not because they were complimentary, but because they captured something that I think many teachers quietly hope for without ever saying aloud. Long after students have forgotten the details of electrolysis or rates of reaction, they remember how someone made them feel about themselves. That, for me, has always been the point of education. Knowledge matters enormously. As a science teacher I have spent years helping young people understand the natural world, challenge misconceptions and develop the scientific understanding that will serve them throughout their lives. However, knowledge and confidence have never been competing priorities. In my experience they grow together. A child who begins to believe they can succeed becomes more willing to persevere when learning becomes difficult. Equally, genuine understanding builds confidence because it replaces uncertainty with competence. Great teaching has always been about developing both. Perhaps that is why I find the current conversation around education slightly frustrating. Much of the public debate focuses on measurable outcomes: examination results, attendance figures, recruitment targets, accountability frameworks and inspection judgements. All of those things are important, but they rarely capture the quiet expertise that sits at the heart of great teaching. They don't measure the teacher who spots a misconception before it becomes embedded, who notices the learner quietly losing confidence halfway through a lesson, or who instinctively knows that today's carefully planned explanation isn't going to work and calmly adapts without anybody else in the room even noticing. Those decisions are the craft of teaching. They are also the expertise we are quietly losing. Like many others, I've watched increasing numbers of experienced teachers leave the profession, particularly within science. That should concern all of us, not simply because recruitment remains difficult, but because experience is not something that can be replaced overnight. We often talk about teacher shortages as though the issue is numerical. It isn't. The real loss is the accumulated professional judgement that disappears every time an experienced teacher decides they can no longer continue. That judgement is difficult to describe because so much of it becomes instinctive. Experienced teachers don't consciously work through a checklist every lesson. They don't pause to think, "Now I will differentiate," or "Now I will adapt my teaching." They simply notice things. They notice uncertainty in a student's expression before a hand is raised. They recognise that two incorrect answers reveal completely different misunderstandings. They realise that a class needs another analogy rather than another explanation, or that a learner who appears disengaged is actually overwhelmed rather than unwilling. Increasingly we refer to this as adaptive teaching. Personally, I've always thought experienced teachers would simply call it teaching. Looking back over my own career, I realise how fortunate I was to begin teaching at a time when there was genuine investment in developing the profession itself. The National Strategies are often remembered for their frameworks and initiatives, but what I remember most was the time they created for teachers to think deeply about teaching. Schools received ring-fenced funding for professional development. Departments observed one another, discussed pedagogy, explored misconceptions and shared ideas without feeling guilty that every spare moment ought to be spent completing another administrative task. Those conversations mattered. Some of the most valuable professional development I ever experienced came not from formal training courses but from standing at the back of another teacher's classroom watching how they explained an idea, questioned a learner or managed the pace of a lesson. Teaching has always been an apprenticeship as much as a profession. We become better largely because we spend years learning from people who have already mastered the craft. As a science teacher, I was also fortunate to work in classrooms where practical investigation remained central to learning. Science isn't simply a body of knowledge waiting to be memorised. It is a way of thinking about the world. Students learn as much from predictions that turn out to be wrong as they do from experiments that go exactly to plan. Those practical lessons were often noisy, occasionally chaotic and rarely perfect, but they developed curiosity alongside understanding. They taught students not simply what scientists know, but how science itself works. The profession has changed considerably since then. Not because teachers care less. If anything, I think they care more than ever. Schools now carry responsibilities that extend far beyond education alone. Safeguarding, mental health, attendance, SEND, family support and an ever-expanding range of social challenges now sit alongside the already demanding task of providing an outstanding education. Every one of those responsibilities matters, and schools have responded with extraordinary commitment, but it would be unrealistic to pretend they haven't changed the nature of the profession. The challenge isn't simply workload. Teachers have always worked hard. The challenge is that every additional responsibility competes with the finite amount of time available to think carefully about teaching itself. The conversations about pedagogy become less frequent. Professional development is squeezed into increasingly small windows. Practical lessons require more planning than teachers can realistically find time for. Reflection gradually gives way to survival. None of this is intended as criticism of schools or school leaders. Quite the opposite. Schools continue to achieve remarkable things despite increasingly complex demands. However, I do think we've reached a point where we need to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question. If we continue losing experienced teachers at the current rate, what happens to all of that accumulated expertise? That question stayed with me for a long time. In fact, it became one of the reasons I eventually decided to leave the classroom. Not because I had fallen out of love with teaching, but because I found myself wondering whether the greatest contribution I could now make wasn't teaching another class of thirty students, but helping preserve and extend the expertise that teachers like me had spent decades developing. That idea eventually became SideCog. Interestingly, AI wasn't where the conversation started. Like many people, I'm fascinated by what artificial intelligence can do, but clever technology has never been enough to improve education. The question we kept returning to was much simpler: what actually makes an experienced teacher effective? The answer was never content alone. Great teachers identify misconceptions before learners even realise they have them. They know when to challenge, when to reassure and when to explain something from an entirely different perspective. They understand that two students giving the same incorrect answer may require completely different teaching responses. Most importantly, they recognise that confidence and understanding develop together rather than independently. Those are profoundly human decisions. The challenge we set ourselves was not to replace them, but to make more of them available. That thinking also shaped one of the earliest decisions we made. Rather than creating our own curriculum from scratch, we chose to build SideCog around Oak National Academy. Having worked alongside Oak, I've seen first-hand the care, expertise and evidence-informed thinking that sits behind their curriculum. Their lessons are thoughtfully sequenced, carefully constructed and built by experienced subject specialists. Reinventing that work would have achieved very little. Instead, we wanted to focus our efforts on helping individual learners engage with that curriculum in a way that reflected their own understanding, misconceptions and pace of learning. I'm delighted that my relationship with Oak National Academy will continue because I genuinely believe they represent an important part of education's future. High-quality curriculum and personalised teaching should never be seen as competing ideas. In my view, they depend upon one another. People often ask whether AI will replace teachers. I don't believe it will, nor do I believe it should. Teaching is, and always will be, fundamentally human. Relationships matter. Trust matters. Encouragement matters. No algorithm will ever replace the teacher who quietly notices that a child needs somebody to believe in them before they can begin believing in themselves. Technology can, however, help more learners experience the benefits of great teaching than has previously been possible. If it can identify misconceptions more quickly, provide meaningful feedback outside school hours and make personalised support affordable for families who could never contemplate private tuition, then it has the potential to become one of the most powerful educational tools we've ever developed. For me, that is an exciting prospect. There are, of course, some things I won't miss. Living life according to the sound of a bell every fifty minutes probably won't be one of them, and I suspect I won't look back particularly fondly on meetings that continued simply because they had been placed in the calendar months earlier. I'm looking forward to the flexibility of building something new and focusing my time where I believe it can make the greatest difference. What I will miss are the students, the practical lessons, the conversations after class and the remarkable colleagues who continue to give everything they have for young people despite the growing complexity of the profession they serve. People sometimes ask whether I've left teaching. I don't think I have. I simply believe my classroom has become much larger than it was before. Twenty years ago I became a teacher because I wanted to help young people learn. Every important decision I've made since then has been guided by exactly the same purpose. The classroom in which that happens may have changed, but the reason I became a teacher hasn't changed at all. If anything, it has become even clearer. That's why, as I closed one classroom door, I found myself looking forward with genuine excitement rather than regret. Not because I was leaving teaching behind, but because I believe the opportunity to make a meaningful difference to many more learners is only just beginning.