From steelwork to homework

"I reckon that Corus did me a favour." Not a statement you hear often in south-east Wales where memories of the devastating redundancies announced last year by the steelmaker are still vivid and raw.

The speaker, Simon Webb, 31, was until last year a loading clerk at the vast Llanwern works in Newport. "My job was dispatching, dealing with lorry drivers and the rail network." Now he is a student on the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course at the University of Wales College, Newport, and only a few months away from qualifying as a teacher.

It used to be said that Wales' three great products were coal, steel and schoolteachers. In moving from one to another Webb reflects modern Welsh life as traditional industries shut down. UWCN, local university for the area most affected, has seven ex-Corus workers retraining as teachers.

Webb spent nine years at Llanwern and was in no great hurry to move on, qualifying as a trainer and taking an Open University degree in information technology for reasons of personal interest rather than career ambitions. "But it became very clearthat the prospects in the steel industry were pretty uncertain," he said.

He knew what to expect because his wife is a teacher: "I knew it wasn't a matter of working short hours and getting six-weeks holiday in the summer. I see how much she has to put into her work, and that she often works for four of those six weeks."

Even so, he has been surprised by the workload in two periods of teaching practice – six weeks at Ebbw Vale comprehensive and 16 at West Monmouthshire. Webb says: "There is a lot of extra administrative tasks, planning, assessing pupils, evaluating my own performance and preparing lessons for the following day. I get home between 3.30pm and 4pm, start work at five and on most nights I work until 10pm – that's an extra 25 hours a week." Pretty demanding, even though he was used to 12-hour shifts at Corus.

The work experience helps in dealing with classroom problems – stroppy teenagers hold few fears for someone accustomed to angry lorry-drivers. As a trainee information and communications technology teacher he can draw on techniques learnt at work. "Barcodes and databases were important, and it helps get pupils interested if I put them in the context of how we used to use them," he says. A background in steel did no harm in creating empathy with pupils in Ebbw Vale, the town that was hardest hit by last year's redundancies.

While the £6,000 training grant from the National Assembly for mature trainees, with a further £4,000 to come after a year of teaching a scarcity subject, have eased his transition, his technology qualifications could have won him better-paid work in industry. "Doing a job I enjoy is more important than the money," he says. He exudes that enjoyment, enthusing about his course and pupils: "Of course some kids can be hard work, but that is far outweighed by the pleasure of seeing someone start to grasp something that you have explained to them. You have to be 100 per cent committed and positive. If you aren't, why should the pupils be any different?"

Brendan McMorrow, 42, taking the two-year Bachelor of Education course, has had a rougher ride. He believes Caerleon Comprehensive, the location for his first teaching practice, is "a good school with teachers who are committed to doing the best for their pupils". But he still experienced culture shock.

"I was shocked by the attitude of many children and their complete lack of regard for authority." And he feels that a system driven by tests and league tables does them few favours: "Teachers are pushed into doing a great deal of work for their pupils, to ensure that the grades on which the school is judged are good enough. I don't blame the teachers. They don't make the system. But it helps nobody."

McMorrow also worked at Llanwern where he did a variety of jobs over a period of five years, including crane driver, mould operator and team leader. He has found limits to the direct applicability of steelworks skills. "You can tell a stroppy driver where to go, but you can't do that to a child." Previous work as a sales manager is, however, highly relevant: "Organising, setting and working to budgets, evaluating myself and others and looking for ways to get the best out of people are skills found in both jobs."

His culture shock at classroom conditions is compounded by utter bafflement at the student finance system. He has three children, one disabled, and says that if his problems with the system cannot be resolved, he may not be able to complete the course. McMorrow sees teaching as offering greater security than engineering.

Carl Peters, Head of the School of Education at UWCN, points to this as a reason for an upswing in mature applicants for teacher-training courses in Wales: "People are losing their jobs or going on to temporary contracts in industry. Teaching allows them to use their skills in more secure jobs."

People who retrain bring valuable attributes to their career change. They learn fast and are used to deadlines and to line management. A 30-or 40-year-old who has made a career change is committed in the way that a 19-year-old cannot yet be.

Hugh Jones, convener of the Welsh Teacher Training Forum, says that mature students bring, "a knowledge of themselves, of their capabilities and limitations, produced by experiences with families and in the workplace".

Experience is not always advantageous, says Jones, who believes mature teachers "often have to do some unlearning... they have to realise you cannot deal with children in the same way as adults". Peters says mature teachers are not automatically better at classroom control than a 19-or 20-year-old. "It isn't at all simple, so not everybody will be good at it." But both Peters and Jones say the pluses outweigh the minuses. Not least of these benefits is commitment to their own localities: "They tend to teach in the area they are from, bringing an understanding of the children of those communities," says Peters.