054 - Pit Pony Jeanette Thompson-Wessen - Classroom to ADHD Nutritionist - Part 1

In this powerful first part of our conversation with Jeannette Thompson-Wessen, we hear how a passionate, dedicated food technology teacher went from being earmarked for leadership to being bullied, ignored and broken. After returning from maternity leave, the praise disappeared, the support vanished, and the treatment became so toxic it pushed her to the brink.

Jeannette shares her early love of teaching, her impact on students in a deprived area, and how it all began to unravel – from sudden hostility to being shouted at while heavily pregnant. This episode is a raw and unfiltered look at what happens when good teachers are treated appallingly by the very systems that should protect them.

Trigger Warning: Mental health, bullying, pregnancy discrimination.

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Edited with finesse by our Podcast Super Producer, Mike Roberts of Making Digital Real

Transcript

Thank you to our sponsors Little Voices. Are you a teacher with a passion for drama, music and performance or feeling stuck in the classroom? Little Voices gives you the chance to step into a role where you can truly inspire young minds through the arts. This is a company I know well and admire. 

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Plus, with the support of a nationwide franchise network behind you, you can run your own successful business, doing what you love while teaching in a way that truly fits your life. Hello and welcome to the Pit Pony podcast with myself Sharon Cawley and me Sarah Dunwood, in which we talk to teachers from all walks of life who exited the classroom from what they thought was a job for life and thrived on the other side of teaching. Coming up in this episode, apparently it's an emergency, you've got to go up and see him straight away. 

I've walked as quick as I can thinking, oh my God, what has happened? This is an emergency. Like I hope everything is okay. I wonder what I'm going to be dealing with when I get there. 

I opened the door to this man who was red. He told me to sit down and started shouting at me and he said that he's going to make sure that a formal complaint is written about me and he's going to make sure that he is going to create the end of my career, if I carry on going the way that I go. Hello listeners and welcome to another episode of our Pit Pony podcast.

And we've got a great one. As always, we've got Jeanette Thompson-Wesson with us, who had been teaching for quite some time. And in her own words, it was so exciting being able to help and support children to learn something that is a life skill and the entrance to a number of fantastic careers. 

She thrived off it. She worked in the same school that she was a student teacher for the whole of her career. It was in a deprived area and the children, in her own words, were wonderful. 

But she watched mental health in children hit an all-time low. She saw practical subjects in a deprived area where many of the children's parents did those jobs, forced away from those subjects into other areas. She had a baby and went from being earmarked to becoming an assistant head teacher to, in her own words, just a nobody.

She was bullied, shouted at, and they are just a taster of a few things to come. Wow, already what an amazing episode we're going to have. So Jeanette, no longer that teacher of wonderful children, what is it you do today? I'm a health and safety ISO consultant and also an ADHD nutritionist. 

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. So with no further ado, let's get into it. Talk us through life as a teacher in that environment and your exit. 

Yeah, I mean, I loved being a teacher, going in and becoming a student teacher. I did a degree in human nutrition and really enjoyed that and I kind of came to a crossroads, whether I wanted to go and become a dietitian or whether I wanted to become a student teacher. I'm not a student teacher, a teacher. 

I went down the road of being a teacher for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was I worked as a dietetic assistant and really enjoyed the facilitation, the educational element that came with nutrition that I felt and still feel is obviously so important, so essential for literally every single person. I also felt for other reasons why I didn't want to go down the dietitian route at that time. 

I thought to myself, maybe I'll come back to it, but no, actually my sole purpose at the moment in this time is that I really want to educate people. I want to specifically educate children and help children and I didn't actually realise how much I was going to enjoy it until I was actually doing it, but doing it in that school, I ended up working in my whole career. Like you said, the students were wonderful. 

I was a food teacher. I ended up working up to becoming a head of department of design and technology within that same school as well and they loved catering and hospitality. They loved food tech, which obviously changed qualifications and there was this moment where I think I had just come out of my first year teaching and there was this boy who I'd been working so hard with. 

He didn't get good grades anywhere, but he absolutely smashed hospitality and he came back to me and said I'm going to go to, he got a place in Catering College and I was so proud of him and before the last time I saw him, he said to me, ma'am one day I'm going to find you and I'm going to tell you that I have a cafe and I'm running it myself and I'm cooking things and I'm enjoying it and that's my dream and my dream is that because of you and I mean I'd love for him to come and find me. It's very difficult to find now because I'm not actually a teacher anymore. So I loved that and those were the kind of things I was having all the time. 

So I mean you've just managed in a nutshell there to capture all the trade-offs, all the rubbish, all the pain, all the 80 hours. I remember them when you were talking about that kid. Sarah, I bet you've got a couple because you worked like us all in deprived areas. 

Can you remember those wonderful kids? They're currently playing in my head right now and that is the joy of teaching, isn't it? It's all sorts of children. I mean some and it's no disrespect to them when you teach the volume of children that you do, you're not going to remember everyone but so many stand out in memories for so many different reasons and it's it is the thing that makes me a little bit nostalgic for teaching and then I remember. Yes. 

Yes, let's go back to the I remember. So Jeanette, that's one side. How did it work out? Not too well. 

I was at the time when things started to go downhill in my teaching career, I was thriving. I mean absolutely thriving, so much so the head teacher had taken me into the office and said to me, Jeanette look we need to start thinking about how we can get you moving up to assistant head teacher. He was so happy with me, so happy with obviously the results that the department was getting, how I was managing and was just really thrilled with everything that was happening and it felt like I was really getting somewhere with my career even further. 

That's where I wanted to be. I wanted to end up being an assistant head teacher. That's where I saw myself going. 

Then things kind of got difficult. I fell pregnant and I remember telling the head teacher and he could not be any less interested and I went from, and I think this was within maybe even a few months, I went from having that meeting with him in an office, him singing my praises, seeing me in the corridor having conversations about what we're doing and me feeling like yes I'm doing something, I'm getting somewhere to then just those conversations stopped happening completely. You go from golden child, basking in the sunshine and it's very cold in that shadow. 

It is very very cold when you thought I've been there. It's really difficult to comprehend it as well and I don't know about with you Sharon but with me it was a female deputy head who went from completely under her wing, sending me on courses. I hate to use the word grooming but kind of shaping me to be a middle leader and it was literally, I got pregnant and it was like I'd got the plague. 

This is a woman who read at my wedding. She read at my wedding, the deputy head and there was nothing. Now I knew at the time those favourites and those cliques and you're either in or you're out but I was naive at that point. 

It wasn't my first school by the way and it wasn't my last and I went from literally being the best thing since sliced bread to being ghosted before ghosting was even a thing and I remember coming in. I've not Pited up on it when I announced my pregnancy but it's when I came back. I was dead to that woman and I watched her because I was spying. 

I was like hi, let's call a Joan for sake. Hi Joan, how are you? I'd have been welcomed into your office for a cup of tea. Tell me about your day and I was blanked.

I was ghosted and then I had to sit on the sidelines and watch her behave in that kind of behaviour with somebody else and I was in the shade and it was so lonely. It was such an abusive style of management that I was lost and stayed probably for about 12 months because it was too hard and hurtful to be in that woman's shade. It was horrible. 

But it's interesting because I know we're older but we're not that old. We're not talking about the 1970s. For me, it was the very, very, very late 90s and I mean Sharon, it would have been for you, wouldn't it? So there was still an attitudinal thing there which was very much of the pre-all maternity rights and things like that and it just, it's stark for me that it's still happening even though we're 50 years on from all of those rights being in place.

Do you know what? For me, when we're recording these Jeanette, there's always two really big seismic moments in a teacher's career that normally does it. The first is a return from a maternity leave and then COVID. So they're the two. 

COVID and maternity leave tend to be the markers in the sands of people's story. So you commit the horrific crime of wanting to start a family and you start to enter the shade. How's that feel? You said it all. 

Lonely. I felt lonely. I felt devastated because I felt like I had the grasp of where I wanted to go and I felt like I'd been put back years. 

You read the stories, don't you? You read the stories of people falling pregnant and then losing out on their careers and losing out on money and I was so sure that wasn't going to happen to me but then it was happening to me. I thought my management would do that to me. It's fine. 

No, my management was actively doing that to me and it was an active because it wasn't just the return back from work. It was before then that the line was put into the sand. Unfortunately, I was a long streamer of events.

I lost a teacher. He was fired on the spot when I was around about 34 weeks pregnant. That got taken to court in the end and he still teaches but that was a stressful situation being heavily pregnant because unfortunately, he was a person who raised his hand for a child in a workshop which was why he had to leave the school immediately. 

It was dealt with very well from him but from me as a manager, I had no clue what had gone on and I wasn't clued in with anything. I was very much like, okay, we move on. We continue with what we're doing.

The next thing is that I need to make sure that I'm preparing my GCSE classes to be handed over to someone else because I don't want that. There's something about being pregnant and feeling so guilty about being pregnant at the same time when it comes to students. I was so desperate that my being pregnant and me having a baby was not going to impact the students. 

I really, really wanted them to carry on doing just as well and it was a desperation because it was like a moral thing. I have such a strong moral compass. I wanted them to get those results. 

Don't you feel that we are this paradox as teachers? On the one hand, we refer to ourselves as just a teacher and we're just doing this but we think we are so critical. We're such a critical part of that child's GCSE journey that we take all responsibility on the child themselves, the greater environment that's going on in schools, study support, careers guidance. It's on our shoulders how that child does and you talked about being a facilitator at one point. 

It's as if we're doing the thing for them because on the one hand, we've diminished ourselves but on the other, we've made ourselves utterly crucial to the success of that child, Sarah. But that intrinsically comes from the messaging that we receive from the people above us because we are Schrödinger's teachers. We are both at the same time, not good enough but completely responsible for the entire outcomes of every single child and that is the message that we get. 

And it wasn't the message that I got when I was early years teacher. The first seven, eight years of my career, it wasn't like that. It was much more rounded. 

I don't know whether I was just in a really great school or not but intrinsically now, you are both things at once. Completely responsible even though there's a body of research out there that quite categorically says the amount of influence that a teacher has on a child's actual results is so small that it's ridiculous. It's the environment we're in.

It really is. So you're doing everything you can. Planning, preparing, you've got the whole weight irrespective of the fact that you're doing seven other subjects. 

Oh no, no, no. This child needs to get these grades and if they don't, it will be catastrophic. So therefore, under normal circumstances, in a different work environment, you announce you're pregnant. 

Right, what special accommodations do you need? What can we do to help you? Can we start with ergonomic chairs? Would it help if you came in later? We've got doctor's appointments. We've got to manage your hormones. How can we make this, oh no, crack on, work even harder? So that presumably is what you did. 

It was, which was really hard in a practical subject. Really hard in a practical subject. I'm wandering around kitchens, still carrying on cooking. 

I would not have been able to do it without the technician that I had at the time as well who was absolutely incredible, any technician out there, just lifesavers. So I did that and I knew the person who was going to be taken over from the class and we started doing a handover where I was sitting in because he wasn't a subject specialist, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I just wanted to make sure that, especially when it came to coursework, because he wasn't a specialist in that subject and that was coming up and that would have needed, the practical would have needed marking and anyone who teaches food, you get really good knowledge really quite quickly when you when you go into teaching food. 

You know exactly how to get those higher skills in and which children can get those higher skills in. So I was trying to point those out as much as possible, left so many things and the teacher that was taken over just needed a lot of additional support, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I was very happy to give that but when that person started not marking or not taking on any feedback, I was feeling quite low in confidence anyway with what happened with the other teacher who had to be fired really quickly because I wasn't really clued in with that process. 

So with this one I was like okay, I need to make sure I'm part of this and doing all the right things to try and help and support him. So then the children are helped and they're supported as well and I went to my assistant head not through complaints, more out of, I'm not sure what I can do, can you help me out please? I just need a hand, what would you suggest I would do in this situation because I haven't been in this situation before. The assistant head had worked in that school the whole of his career and I think he retired maybe last year. 

He's been in the game for a really long time. I was really hoping for some support and some quick support because my maternity leave was coming up and he didn't give me any support. So I was like okay, where else do I get that support? I asked some other people, spoke to my other teachers, my colleagues around me and decided the best idea would be going to the deputy head and made it clear to the deputy head, once again this isn't a complaint, I'm not trying to put in a complaint, I just need some support. 

Can I have some help please? I've asked this other person for some help, I've asked other people for help, I need something please, can you help me? I'm going to pause you there. I'm going to play guess what happens next, all right, just out of interest. Sarah, we could introduce it as a new round in the pit pony, we could do a jingle and everything, we could get Mike to sort us out a jingle, guess what happens next? I'm going to take a pump because if you have told me, I can't remember and I've certainly not got it written down. 

I'm going to guess Sarah, get yours in your head. Oh I know what mine is, I know what mine is. I guess that what got lost in translation was that you needed help and guidance and the assistant head took umbrage because you had gone over that person's head and you got caught in the crosshairs of an egocentric political battle with SLT.

Don't answer, don't answer. I think you got put on a support plan because you went and asked for help and they decided you weren't doing enough. Okay, pause, dramatic pause, okay.

Sharon you're more right, okay. I'm not winning. I need to set the scene because I am so close to going on maternity leave. 

I am walking around like a penguin. I remember literally thinking to myself why can I not move my hips anymore because this baby, I worked until, I was going to work until 39 weeks pregnant. I worked until I was 38 weeks pregnant. 

I know, I don't know why I did that to myself but teachers, we do these things to ourselves for many reasons and I've got myself into work 35, 36 because yeah around about 36 weeks pregnant. I get in, go to my office and I get a phone call. It's my assistant head teacher.

My technicians answered, apparently it's an emergency, you've got to go up and see him straight away. So his office is up two flights of stairs, really pregnant. I've walked as quick as I can thinking oh my god what has happened, this is an emergency, like I hope everything is okay.

I wonder what I'm going to be dealing with when I get there. I open the door to this man who was red. He was, he told me to sit down and started shouting at me. 

He started shouting at me and he said that he's going to make sure that a formal complaint is written about me. He's going to make sure that he is going to create the end of my career if I carry on going the way that I go. Yes. 

I sat there, took the whole thing and he said you are not to do anything else to support this teacher. You are not to do anything at all. And I let him just rant, him rant, him rant.

You know when you're letting someone just rant and shout. Bear in mind I've got a man who's shouting at me at that pregnant, telling me, threatening my career, threatening a serious complaint against my name. Just generally being utterly horrible and I sat there and really calmly after he finished and looked at me I said okay I won't do anything anymore then with this member of staff. 

No, no it's not what I said. You are to carry on supporting him. Now you've just said really clearly you do not want me to carry on doing anything to help him so I won't. 

This is me saying the responsibility is on you now. If those students get any lower than what I would predict them to get then that's on you which he did not like. He hated and he said no that will be your fault. 

No, I will be on maternity leave. I've done my due diligence for trying to get help and support for myself and this member of staff. With not making a complaint I will not do anything else and I stormed out of that room, went down and had a massacre because it's not nice. 

I mean anyone shouts at you let alone your line manager who is also the assistant head teacher when you are so heavily pregnant. I managed to carry on for the next couple of weeks and I did do what I promised so unfortunately I did step back because I was so fearful that anything I would have done would have turned into that formal complaint. Because I think what underpins this they've not give you the context of what's happened to that other member of staff. 

So you're sat in a pool of fear. Has that person gone because of capability? Have they mucked up exams? You've got all sorts of chimps in your head telling you it could be this, it could be that. So you're not in a safe space whilst you're working because you don't have to be given information and you don't know the circumstances on which somebody left but you could have been given a steer as to what had gone on and then you're trying to do your best you've gone and asked for help and guidance and support. 

But if you do that with a member of staff who feels that they are completely out of their depth they take that as a threat because they're frightened to death that you're going to expose them for the fact they are out of their depth. Now that's a rationale but it's taken me everything within me to go a bloody ma'am whilst you full two full flights of stairs and shouted at you. Give me his address I'll go and have a knock on. 

The head teacher called it a just a clash of personalities, a clear clash. Oh my god it's I mean strictly speaking that would be a disciplinary offence. Can you imagine if it had been the other way around a heavily pregnant assistant head who is absolutely berated by a head of department with screaming and shouting and all the rest of it. 

You bet your bottom dollar that middle leader if it was the other way around would be disciplined and rightly so utterly outrageous. Sarah it's not even that I was in A&E with our Ellie last weekend do you remember and it was the middle of the night and it was when Liverpool had won the champions whatever they'd won so you can imagine what it's like it was murder in the northwest of England in A&E and the guy who was behind the desk the more irate people and I'm not even talking irate I'm talking how long are we going to be we've been here for five hours boom boundary I'm not happy with your tone just and the security on the doors and the whole nine yards zero tolerance you're out can't even get on a bus these days and zero tolerance zero tolerance we will not accept our staff being treated like that. Peak irony it's bloody staff on staff because you know you should have zero tolerance when it comes to kids treating staff like that that's a joke but to have staff treating staff like that mental unacceptable shame on them anyway wow I need to go and have a beta blocker Sarah it's really boring I know I'm furious doesn't end there though oh Jesus Christ let me log on you wait Brief interlude dear listener a couple of questions are you a tutor or even a pit pony considering tutoring and do you fancy getting in the room with myself and Sarah Dunwood learning about the wonderful world of tuition then why not join us at the national tutors conference hosted by Conexus tuition on the 29th of July 2025 it's at Chesford Grange Kenilworth links to the tickets are in the show notes below and we will both see you on the other side so yeah that happened it was horrible obviously had the baby everything was fine came back again returned back full time you know looking forward to be back trying to get it back into new routines did really well you know I thought after that maternity leave did okay I did go to the head teacher because I did feel like this was all because I came back he was still my line manager and I really did not want him to be my line manager after that which is when the head teacher was like it's purely a clash of personalities of course and looking back on it I could see he was very much gaslighting me and he was just basically trying to save a formal complaint being put in to be honest I couldn't see that now I didn't see that at the time but also I didn't want to rock the boat too much because I was like I've just come back off maternity leave I just want things to carry on so things went fine Covid happened because I had a second child as well things went okay there so my second child was nearly one when we locked down we started opening up started going back to school again all fine during Covid I actually had a really great time teaching which I think a rare it was rare for teachers to be able to say I did a lot of cook alums whilst I was whilst we were locked down so part of that was because I was in a deprived school I was really aware that I had a whole lot of children who don't have access to food so I used free school money not free school money free school meals it's very much free school money free school meals money and pp money you know that kind of thing and I access that free school use my own money and I claim that back and I had Tesco's deliver the food to me I'd portion up the food and I was driving it around the area and delivering it to the students obviously asking permission god I really should have made that should have made the bloody press it was lovely I really it was hard work it was really because I was doing that in the evening before I was doing the cook-along god bless and I loved it it was wonderful and I loved that they were coming on they were doing something different to the written work that they were doing it was really really like Covid was horrible but that part of the teaching part was actually really nice to do and it was a lot of joy for me and also the students got so much joy out of it as well so gone back started to return back my mental health took a horrible toll I was feeling the pressure of Covid in general I was feeling very scared about Covid returning back to Covid when it was still Covid and we still have Covid but it was those early days of returning back to school with like face masks and that kind of thing I'm really nervous about that I was really nervous because I'd had such a long time physically not being in school after my second maternity leave and I thought to myself you'll be fine you bust the first return to work like after that you've kind of been working from home anyway but going back to school physically was completely different and it hit me hard it is like way what does it look like when your mental health hits you hard this I am and trigger warning here I wanted to kill myself I was driving into school daily crying my eyes out driving home crying my eyes out wow and I was hoping really casually and that's what the scary thing was it was a really casual thought of what if I could just get into just enough of an accident to have a stay in hospital just enough but then that thought started going further and I did I had some stuff going on at home personally at the same time so my husband was having a hard time personally so I was doing a great job of masking this from any anybody so I was coming to work putting the mask back on smiling carrying on as normal get back into the car break down and sometimes it was like a 40 minutes drive home so it's just 40 minutes of just hard crying on the way home hard crying on the way back again it was hit hard so that probably was about three months that was going on then oh I had a horrible phone call and I was before then I was thinking maybe I need to reach out to my school and tell them how much of a hard time that I feel maybe I need to have some writing lessons at the moment but I was still trying to be like no I am this great head of department I'm going to get this dream back of being an assistant head teacher so I've got to keep on going and also somewhere in the back of your head is the last time I went through something similar where I went and just asked for some help and some guidance it resulted in me getting shouted at so somewhere in my head I'm going to go in order to protect myself I can't now voice that in that environment because history has taught me a lesson exactly that and that's exactly what was happening so I came into school one day and I got I think just about finished form and I saw that my phone was like my mum was ringing me my mum doesn't ring me my parents do not ring me during school because they know that I'm teaching and I'm busy so I was kind of like why is she phoning me now she never phones me during school so I answered the phone call and she said Jeanette I think your father's having a heart attack he's just fallen over his heart rate's gone down he's gone blue I think I need to take him to the hospital but I'm not going to be able to take him in properly because I have the the girls here so I'm just trying to figure out and I've gone what you can probably imagine this is the polite version why the hell are you calling me why are you not phone me 999 get yourself I will get I will leave and she was like how about work I will sort something out take him get something get him to the hospital and imagine I'm in that kind of mental health place I have broken down got off the phone broken down one of the assistant heads at the time saw me I was running out of the school my technician at the time once again so I said wonderful she was like I'll sort it go just go it'll be fine go when the assistant had kind of saw me in a state and she's like Jeanette you can't drive like this I was like I need to get back I need to get back to my parents and I just need to be back with them to try and sort something out it was a horrible day thankfully it wasn't a heart attack you he broke a couple of ribs because he fell over and hit his ribs on a really stupid sofa that literally went the next day but the hat was like wooden because my middle child fell over which was a toddler at the time and she was going to bang her head on the window so he saved my toddler from having a banged head but broke his ribs in the case but one for the teen but his heart rate did go down but I was so I was panicked I was broken on that drive home and we obviously got the good news and I was like okay well obviously I have no child care for tomorrow I'm also destroyed absolutely totally and utterly destroyed you can imagine someone who is suicidal anyway this has happened it took everything out of me I woke up the next day thinking okay well maybe I can get my mother-in-law to look after the girls and my husband was one who was like Jeanette you just stay in bed please because I think that was the night that I said to him about me feeling how I've been feeling I was like can you can you just please stay at home just stay at home they'll do without you for the day I know you don't want to but you can I emailed him 15 minutes later I got a head I got an email from my head teacher he said he said in the email that the students had had lots of time out of school he said that they deserve to have their teacher in school my department deserved to have their teacher their their head of department in with them supporting them and encouraged me strongly to come into school I have a word and I cannot use it maybe next Tuesday you could mention something like that yeah along that lines yeah wow let's just take a wow where's employment law where and I'll tell you something that could have gone very differently very very differently and can you imagine at your funeral because that that could have been the very very difference condolences you know this is a terrible loss to the profession for actual god's sake who in their right mind writes that email how did that land with you when you read it was it I sat did you cry I sat and cried and my husband was still very much like no you've got to know you've got to stay off and I said but I have you've read this I have to be in remember that fear still I have to go in I've been I've been told pretty much no uncertain terms that I really need to go in that is an email to go no you need to be in and I went in that day and I oh I cried all day I cried in front of the class I cried the whole time I was introducing I was getting the students in sat them down I said I'm going to cry for the whole lesson ignore me okay I'm still here I'm still teaching I'm still I'm still going and you know what happened my new assistant head brought in a complaint from a parent and the complaint was because I had been encouraging the children to wear masks still which was policy by the way from the whole school and there was one particular child who didn't want to wear it I was like fine that's okay but you can sit at the back of the class that's that's fine I'm you know that's your choice I can't physically make you and I'm not going to physically make you but we I can have you sit at the back of the class she didn't like it and the letter that he gave me popped on my temple just destroyed every part of my teacher personality and was really really horrible to read and the complaint wasn't actually that the complaint was was that she didn't want to wear her mask and I said okay but you can sit at the back of the class and she didn't like it that complaint should not have got near you because it was a school policy how dare a senior member of staff abdicate responsibility for something that they could have dealt with and actually what they should have done is it should have been bounced up to the head for the head to contact the parent and say this is school policy and off how dare they his view was that he was investigating things and part of his investigation was to get to my side of the story so he wanted to read it including the bits that you're not going to please every single parent unfortunately we know this as a teacher you know we try the best that we can do with the situations that we're given and I've never I've never had any other complaints from this parent in particular very rarely get well never get complaints from parents when I was a teacher and it was just the fact that he gave me this letter and he left he could have easily even scribbled out the paragraphs where she was obliterating me personally and just to give me the like the bits and pieces like yeah can I just clarify something because hmm it's it's not there's been a lot to tuck in when you when you sent that email in to say I don't I can't come in today my dad said an incident or whatever did you allude in that email to the state of your mental health yes right clarified for me what you said who was that head teacher before he sent the emotional blackmail what did you actually tell him about your mental state I said that I felt destroyed was my words I feel destroyed okay so you can read between the lines there so um he then emotionally blackmailed coming back in he knows you're vulnerable he knows your mental health is shaky you've sat all day and cried which will have got back by the way so it did because my technician went to find the deputy head at the time told him by the way you have a member of staff who's crying all of her lessons and he did oh my god so they're notified by another member of staff that the teacher is emailed in to say I feel destroyed my mental health is on the skids is crying in a classroom Mike Mike Roberts is gonna have to volume down on this and then that day they choose to give you a parental complaint about masks wow I go back to the word that I can't use it's appalling and imagine that in an inquiry if she'd have done something extreme imagine that yeah yeah I mean at a very simple level if if somebody divulges in whatever guarded or overt way that that their mental health is is on its backside and and I've had to do it four times in my life then then the the correct response regardless of whether you are a human or a robot or an absolute moron the correct response is stop everything what can I do to help so now the last thing you do is if somebody has disclosed that it's carry on regardless because you've got an agenda that you want to get through wow appalling god I'm so angry for you it was horrible it was it was a really really dark time really really dark time so I got that and the assistant head teacher very kindly made some time for me at the end of the day because I said to him I really need to see before we leave and I said I said I said to him did you really need to give me this which is why he was like well I do need I have to do a full investigation so what happened to your side so but did you actually need to give me the bit that was really personal to me did you have to do that well he kind of brushed it off and I said by the way I've been sat in this room crying all day but said I was really strongly encouraged to come to school by the head teacher at the time my dad I got a phone call yesterday to say that my dad was possibly having a heart attack I was in a statement around after school and quite frankly I want to be dead um I won't be in tomorrow and I'm getting signed off I'm not I'm don't know when I'm going to be back and I didn't go back for six months let's have a minute because that's hard that is hard let's let's have a minute it got you to the point where you had no choice you had to you didn't you didn't need your husband begging you you didn't need your friends your inner tuition went I cannot do this anymore I'm broken in my experience you go to the doctors and they go how long do you need yeah the doctor will meet you with compassion so you get six months what do those six months look like for you well what a perfect time to bring to a close what we're going to call part one and we look forward to seeing you at the start of our part two of this amazing pit pony story