The Job Nobody Wrote Down: Why We're Thanking Teachers Properly This Year

National Thank a Teacher Day falls on 17 June, and most years it passes the way these days often do - a nice sentiment, a few posts online, then back to normal. This year we wanted to do something a bit more than that, because of where we sit.

At Vital Facilities Solutions, we work inside schools and academies across Yorkshire and the North every day — cleaning, grounds maintenance, premises and compliance, the things that keep a site safe and running so nobody else has to think about them. But I also sit on the other side of the table. I've been a school governor for more years than I care to admit now, across a number of schools, in just about every role going: parent governor, chair, local authority governor. Between the two, you end up with a fairly unusual view of what a school actually is, day to day, behind the timetable.

Two views, one conclusion

Run a facilities business inside schools long enough, and you start to notice the same things a governor notices, just from a different angle.

• You see which classrooms get used hardest.

• You see a site manager quietly fixing something before anyone official knows it broke.

• And you see teachers, every day, doing work that has very little to do with the subject on their timetable.

Sit as a governor long enough, and you see it from the budget end.

• You see safeguarding logs.

• You see the conversations that happen in private about a child who isn't quite right, long before anything reaches a parents' evening.

• You see how much of a teacher's actual job now sits well outside anything written in their contract.

  
  

Put the two views together, and the picture's consistent: teaching has changed shape. It's still curriculum, still marking, still getting twenty-eight different children to understand fractions by Friday. But increasingly, it's also something closer to frontline pastoral care — spotting the child who's gone quiet, noticing the coat that's too thin for the weather, being the one steady, dependable adult in somebody's day, sometimes the only one they get. None of that gets written down anywhere. It just gets done.

Why this matters to us

We exist, as a business, to take one kind of pressure off a school so that teachers have more room for the kind of work that can't be automated, outsourced, or handed to anyone else - the actual job of teaching and looking after the children in front of them. A safe playground, a clean classroom, a site that just quietly works in the background: none of it is glamorous, but it buys back time and headspace for the people who genuinely change a child's future.

That's always been the point of why we do what we do.

What we've watched over the years working in and around schools, and what's become clearer every year I've sat as a governor, is that the margin teachers are working with has got smaller, while what's being asked of them has got bigger. They're absorbing more, with less around them, and largely without complaint or fanfare.

Saying it properly

So this Thank a Teacher Day, we didn't want to just post something and move on.

We made a short video, because some things land better spoken than written, and they're worth five minutes of your time if you've got a teacher in your life who deserves to hear it.

But the short version is this: thank you.

To every teacher, every teaching assistant, every member of school staff in every school we're lucky enough to work with - for the curriculum and for everything underneath it that nobody wrote down.

If there's a teacher who's been that person for you or your child, this is your nudge to actually tell them.

Today's as good a day as any.

Vital Facilities Solutions supports schools, academies, and trusts across Yorkshire and the North with grounds maintenance, cleaning, caretaking, and premises compliance - so school staff can spend less time worrying about the site, and more time on the children in front of them.

Transforming Your World | vital-facilities.co.uk | 01484 940234