082 - Behind the Scenes - Inside the Life After Teaching Facebook Group

This week, Sharon and Sarah lift the curtain on the community that started it all — Life After Teaching: Exit the Classroom and Thrive, the Facebook group now home to more than 177,000 members.

They share what really goes on behind the scenes: how posts are moderated, why certain rules exist, and what it takes to keep such a vast and vulnerable space safe, supportive, and scam-free. From anonymous posting to the rise of MLMs, self-promotion, and the emotional weight carried by moderators, nothing’s off-limits in this honest and heartfelt episode.

You’ll hear:

• How the group protects teachers from predatory marketing
• Why some posts are declined — and what happens behind the scenes
• The balance between boundaries and compassion
• Plans to fund the Silenced by Support campaign
• Why the group has quietly saved lives

It’s a powerful insight into the unseen emotional labour behind one of the UK’s most supportive teacher communities — and a reminder of why the Pit Pony team do what they do.

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Contribute to the 'Silenced by Support' Campaign

If you've been affected by any of the issues raised in our podcast there are organisations who can help:

• Education Support
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• Mind
• Andy's Man Club

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Thanks for listening 🙏

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

Transcript

Hello, listener, and welcome to another glorious episode of the Pit Pony podcast with myself, Sharon Cawley, and my dear friend, Sarah Dunwood. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're listening and what you're doing. Sarah, how are you? I'll be better once I've had this.

Well, I know, because just to put some context, it's nine o'clock on a Friday morning, Friday the 7th of November, because we're just cramming a few in, because I'm going away tomorrow, aren't I? I'm leaving you for a week. Deserting me, mortally wounded. Correct, I am.

Mortally wounded. I am off on a business slash spiritual retreat to Morocco. So, I'm going to be living my best, and you are going to be all on your own.

So, we decided to do a couple of special episodes before I left. So, you can play it in my absence, Sarah. Right, all right.

But what I am also going to be doing when I get back, I've not shared this with you yet. We are rambling already, because it's Friday morning. I have been listening recently to the podcasts, and I'm not happy with my accent at all.

So, I've got a plan, right? I'm going to phase in over the next couple of episodes a little bit posher. So, you might notice every now and then, I suddenly default a little bit more along these lines, and by episode 110, all of this should be gone, all right? So, that's my plan with that. Why? Honestly, it's jarring on me. 

It's really, really jarring now. I was listening in the car the other day to just one of the recent episodes, and I was wincing. Really? Yeah, because if you think about it, we are practically from the same neck of the woods, and my accent is deeply broader.

No, but we're not. We're not. I've lived up here for a long time, but I was brought up in leafy South Cheshire.

Yeah. But, I mean, granted, I'm a mongrel with Scouse grandparents, Mancunian grandparents. Yeah, but that's not where you were raised.

But I was raised in South Cheshire, and also was BT telephone operator trained, so they removed accents from us. They did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, back in the late 80s, early 90s.

They wanted us as clear as possible, so they tried to, they tried to, they weren't completely successful, but they tried to kind of soften your own accent. That was Director Enquiries, wasn't it? It was. Hello, BT Director Enquiries.

Which area, please? What was the number that you had to ring for Director Enquiries? 192. Thought it was 192. Yeah, right. 

So, welcome to the latest episode of the Pit Pony Podcast. No, I am. It is bothering me. 

I'll work through it. What's bothering me more is the fact that I'm going at five o'clock tomorrow morning. I've still not packed.

That's all right, isn't it? That's okay. I mean, I was leaving for Alaska, leaving the house for Alaska at six o'clock on a Wednesday evening, and at 5pm, I still hadn't packed. I know where I'm taking. 

Don't get me wrong. I've got my clothes together. I've just not put on the suit. 

All right. Okay. That makes me feel considerably better.

Literally scrambled in the last hour. That's all right. You'll be fine. 

You're super organised. You'll be golden. Have you got anything that weighs a case? Uh, I mean, I've got our bathroom scales, but let's not talk about that now.

Let's not talk about that now. Okay. We're doing a podcast. 

We're doing a podcast. We're doing a podcast. Right.

What I want to talk about today, if it's all right with you, are you ready for the curveball of the morning? I want to talk about something that we don't talk about often, but is actually the glue that I think holds us all together. The listener, the guests, us. I think it's our Facebook group, Life After Teaching, Exit the Classroom and Thrive.

We love our group. Amani's in it now, 7th of November, 2025. Get your stats up, nerd. 

Come on. Put me on the spot, why don't you? I'm looking at it on 100 and 177, just over 177,000 members. It bounces a bit because people, um, people's accounts disappear and things like that.

And, but yeah, it's, it's, it's around the 177 mark at the moment. Thousand. And to be fair, it would be considerably higher if we didn't gatekeep who comes in, because that's my main job. 

Everybody's got jobs in our group because there is a big, there's a big team actually that sits behind that group, the big moderating team. And my job in the first instance is to make sure that nobody joins unless they've agreed to the rules. And we've got this thing on, haven't we, called admin assist. 

And if you've not agreed to the rules, you just automatically get declined within an hour. And I think if we didn't have that on, we'd probably have quarter of a million members now. Yeah, me too.

Uh, but I think, I think what's happened as well from a, from a group membership point of view, I think groups on Facebook get to a certain tipping point in terms of size and then they become hugely attractive for, um, what people refer to as bots in some cases they are, or, um, fake accounts that are, that are in there to spam. Um, and, and that's, that's, we've got a number, you do a number of checks and measures before people come in. But what we, what we can't do because we haven't got the capacity, but we, we all work, um, or we've all got other things going on. 

And in terms of a moderation group for the size of the group that we are, it's actually a small moderation team in real terms. Um, so, so we can't go and check. We have not got the time.

That would be a full-time job to go and check the profile of every single person who joins, but there's a number of checks and measures that stops them, but people get through, people get through. So we have daily, probably about 10 of these ones that have started popping up with financial kind of fishing, you know, the choice. You went financial and I thought bullshit was going to come out of your mouth. 

It was, and then I checked myself and you said it for me. Um, so yeah, the, the group membership's interesting because it's been fairly consistent in terms of breakdown from the start. We're currently at, we're currently at 89% female, 11% male. 

That's according to what people have, have declared on their own profiles. So I'm not, I'm not deliberately missing any groups out. Um, but in terms of, of what people have self-declared on their own personal profiles and, and it's, and it's never really fluctuated far away from that.

The men are underrepresented in terms of their relative proportion compared to the, the, the, the proportion of men in teaching. I think it's currently in the, in the teaching population at the last census, it was 76% female, 24% male. So men are massively underrepresented in our group, which probably needs, needs an exploration to be quite honest. 

But I think I might just not do social media. They might just not do Facebook. Facebook might be more of a woman's thing than a fella's thing. 

So it's the platform and the medium on which they're expected to join the group is the barrier because they don't do it. I also think it is not, well, I've only got my own husband to go on and to be fair when he's on Facebook, he's, he's doing scrolling and looking for funny memes rather than anything that, that, that might be helpful to him. So yeah, the group membership's interesting in that regard.

And it's interesting in terms of where group members are. So it is a UK group. It absolutely is a UK group. 

It's a, it's currently at the moment, 85% of the membership is based in the UK. The next biggest proportion is in the US, then Australia, and then, and then, and then scattered around the world. And I think a lot of the, the scattering is expats who are, who are over in different countries. 

And what I see in terms of the post is that actually there's a lot of commonality between the problems here as there are in the US and Australia and elsewhere. Yeah. Other places. 

I think, I think what's, that's nice. It's nice to get a flavour of, of, of what the group is and the size of the group obviously is, is really significant. And, and what happens is we have, we have a separate messenger group. 

So Facebook messenger group, a chat, the Life After Teaching chat. And in there, that, that chat on our Facebook messenger is very, very active because even though we're a small group, we are discussing so many things about that group, about those posts, because what happens is in order to submit a post and believe me, being able to do it anonymously has made such a difference to people. The amount of people who used to message me and you would say, can you post on my behalf, please? And we'd have to say, I'm sorry. 

No, because we get all the notifications as if we are the poster. I'm not then acting as the conduit between you and people who want, I can't do it. And then they opened up the option to post anonymously and some people have a glitch and they can't, and then they'll message me and say, am I doing something wrong? It's, it's normally a Facebook issue and you just have to either. 

Well, it's, it's, it's not, it's not been rolled out to every user on Facebook. Right. So, so as with everything, I can't post anonymously in groups. 

I've not been and sometimes my ability to post anonymously in our group, not that I have ever have done, but sometimes it disappears. When Facebook roll out a new feature, it's, it goes through a testing process and then it has to roll out and then they find that there's problems. Then they take it off.

We've just had a notification today that literally about five minutes ago, that nicknames are no longer a thing that is available in our group. They've been available for a while. You know, where somebody gets like smashing pumpkin 1973. 

Um, well apparently they're not in use now and people have been using those. So I think with anonymous posting and it will be true in other groups. Um, yes, it is. 

There is a feature, but if it isn't there as a feature for you, then just check your phones, operating systems up to date, check your Facebook app is up to date. And then if it's not there, there's literally nothing that we can do about it. It's not a feature that we have switched off for you as an individual. 

It's something that's just not there for you and we've got no control over it. Yeah. I do think it's, but then I get the peak irony because what happens is somebody submits a post anonymously, but we can click on that word that says anonymous user, and then we can see who it is. 

So you are never anonymous to the moderating team. All right. So please don't ever post thinking you are because you're anonymous in the group members, but we will always know who you are.

And then that post that somebody's written goes into our pending pot and they all then get read by the moderating team. Now I don't admit posts in that's not my role. That's not my job, but the Sarah and the rest of the team, you do because you're very clear on the rules. 

Everybody's in this wonderful rhythm, aren't they? Where they, they will quickly spot. So let's imagine you put a post in, you're anonymous, but we know who you are. What will happen is someone will pop up in the chat and say, have a look at this pending post. 

We think there's too much information to post this. Should I decline it and message the member and tell them to take this information out and someone else will come in the chat and go, yeah, yeah, I agree. Or someone will go, no, no, it should be all right. 

Can you imagine with how many posts a day we have and that level of gatekeeping is taking place? Why else might a post be declined? What? It's got a link on it because, because links are inherently problematic unless they're, they're known approved links. So brilliant, there was a brilliant example the other week. Somebody posted a link and it was, it was a, a very, it was, it was quite a dangerous phishing link to be quite honest, but it looked so genuine in terms of the actual link and how it was structured and all the rest of it. 

But because I do this in work as well, that I'm constantly looking for the, for the, the financial scams and the bits that are going to catch us out. I saw it straight away and, and it looked like a Google share link, but it just wasn't quite in the right order of the words. So I spotted it and then didn't click on it, went and did a Google search to find out whether it might be. 

And that, that took about 15 minutes of my time to get to the point of without compromising my own device and doing that sort of thing. So unless it's, unless it's a definite government, UK government, not other governments, UK government, um, major unions will allow, will allow links, links to things like STPCD, Burgundy book, stuff like that. But anything else we don't allow partly because of, of the safety issue, but also back in the olden days, when we first started doing this, we did allow links and it was basically, um, used as an opportunity on a daily basis for people to self promote their own stuff. 

And, and that's not the purpose of our group. It isn't. And I think, I think I want to, I want us to talk about that. 

Um, so, so we just said, no, unless, unless it's a link that is, is, is okay, it's a safe link, um, or it's something that, that we as a team have approved or we as a team have posted. So for example, the, um, teachers shared paternity leave web website link gets shared frequently, and we allow that to stand because it's really, it's a really great resource. So we let that stand. 

David Fountain's teacher, teacher's pensions group gets linked regularly. We let that stand. Their, their, their group is a friend of our group. 

So we allow that to stand, but anything else, no. And I think I want to go back to the origin. Year, years ago, we, we started a collaboration with somebody who had a group. 

Okay. And we were adding loads of value. We were, we were involved in that, but it was that person's group originally. 

And that person was so fiercely protected of the group and didn't trust me. Did they just did not trust me because what I am true to form is I have a business that would be ripe for the picking for vulnerable people in that group. So I want to just want to, while we talk about self-promotion for one minute, I'm a franchisor in the world of tuition.

My ideal client is an ex-teacher looking to, or coming out of the classroom. Tell me when, when do I ever use that group? 177,000 people. When have I ever monetised that group than me? I think that's, that's really important. 

So we have the flog, we have the flog it Friday thread. Oh, if I just may. So just, sorry, Sarah, because I'm just a bit bandwagoning at the moment with this. 

Yeah. So I then get the messages of people who've had their promotion declined. Can I just ask why, why you've removed my comment? You mean the comment where you were clearly directing people to your business? Well, my business could really help somebody. 

Okay. Let me just explain this. Myself, Sarah Dunwood, and one of our other moderators are in our business and we have never, ever crossed the line. 

Can you imagine those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of phone calls I've had with vulnerable members and guess what I've never done? Yeah. Do you know what your solution might be? You know, are you really unhappy in the classroom? Why don't you come into business with me and we'll build a tuition business together. So I get really cross when people who don't contribute anything, anything at all, no advice, no value. 

They're up like a on a Friday to post in the one area we do let people self-promote. And ironically, we just put one poster and connects us on there anyway. But we have managed to keep that group safe from people who are told on courses to go in that they are safe on courses.

They're told on courses to infiltrate groups like ours and promote their stuff. Okay. I don't do it. 

So I'm damned if I'm going to let anybody and bagel themselves into the group and start flogging their stuff to sitting ducks. It's as simple as that. I completely agree. 

And an interest in you can you can sometimes see a pattern as well. So and it's one extreme or the other. There isn't a middle ground with this. 

You either get somebody who comes in and straight away they're weaving through comments and on lots of different posts and they're doing what we refer to as fishing comments in terms that you can you can message me. I experience this. I've got a side hustle. 

If you want to find out more, the phrase side hustle is an alert. It is an alert because it's really commonly used by multilevel marketing. And you might be doing multilevel marketing and that's absolutely okay. 

And there's a lot of people who do do stuff like that. And it makes them some nice money on the side. And they are working with companies that are ethical and and all the rest of it. 

But I have to say there are a lot of very unethical multilevel marketing. And that's why we have the stance we have. We've not got the time or the capacity to figure out whether you're ethical or not. 

It is a one size fits all blanket. No, if it's MLM, no, it's not for our group. And rightly so, because at the end of the day, what's happening is people trust our group. 

They trust us and they think if we are allowing that in the group, therefore we are endorsing what's going on. And the same applies to coaching and therapists with the greatest of respect. Any man and his dog can pop up and call themselves a therapist. 

It is a completely unregulated, completely unregulated service provision in the UK. Now, I know you have to have qualifications to call yourself a therapist. Ethical. 

No, you don't. Psychologist, psychologist. But it is a murky and unregulated world.

So, again, shooting fish in the barrel, life coaches, therapists, transformation, whatever people could be direct messaging our vulnerable people. You know me, it's always about the balance. We know some exceptional people who have moved into that world. 

We've also benefited from some exceptional people. But we also know that there are a lot of people masquerading as that who actually end up doing more harm than good. And we've had direct and indirect experience of that. 

So for me, it is about keeping the group safe. And going back to that, you're either going to get the newbies who come in and just immediately start spamming. And they they never last more than 24 hours because we spot them and we we generally get them out. 

Or you have somebody who's been in the group for three and a half years, but then has suddenly been pulled into that sort of world. Some MLM. I'm going to give an example. 

It's not true of all of them, but there are a number of independent travel agent MLMs and they are brutal in terms of the expectations about coming into places like this and looking for people who might be primed for the picking. And so it's a hard no. It's a hard no. 

And it's a hard no from personal experience for me. I was preyed upon when I came out of school by by a number of different people who were sat in MLMs who it was it was relentless. Fundamentally, now would be a really good time. 

I like literally on my backside on the sofa, taking antidepressants, desperate and getting messages going on. Now would be a really good time for you to think about investing in this. So no. 

And here's here's the peak irony. I'm speaking to people who I know in the right in the right frame of mind would be brilliant as franchisees for me. I never ever mention it. 

In fact, I know that there have been people who I have spoken to who I have specifically said, I am not going to engage you as a franchisee until you have at least six months gap behind where you are now. And he won't mind me shouting him out. It's Kevin Wren. 

Kevin Wren is one of our best franchisees who I met through Life After Teaching when he wasn't in a great place. And he's like, I'd be really interested. Sharon, this is I'm like, you are coming nowhere near me until there is a and I sent him off and helped him set up his own tuition business to begin with in the first place. 

And only when I could see what it was. So then to know that the multilevel marketeers, the MLM business structure, which is very, very different to franchising. I mean, Christ, the sponsor of our podcast, Jane James, is a franchisor in the same space as me. 

I do collaboration, not competition. I can't do anything. But and I certainly wouldn't monetise a Facebook group for my own needs at the expense of people who have set up and said, I'm going to help. 

It's just not who I am. Don't need to do it more than anything. I think that's the main thing.

Now, if you've got this multilevel marketing structure going on, let me just with a great unwashed explain what that means in the world of business. If you have bought a product, multilevel marketing in the main, you buy a product. So let's assume my product is the ballpoint pen. 

OK, it's a brilliant ballpoint pen. And normally, multilevel marketing is different than any other ballpoint pen you can ever have. All right, because it writes upside down. 

So my product is a ballpoint pen life changing. I have invested in a load of ballpoint pens because the majority of my money from the multilevel marketing. Partnership that I have involves buying a tonne of their stock. 

OK, that's the first income stream from me. I have to buy the pens. Then when I sell their pens, they then take a commission on the pens I'm selling. 

OK. But here's where I can really make my money. I can build a team of pen sellers around me who are my pipeline. 

So I then recruit because I'm selling all of these pens and it's brilliant. I recruit my friend. And I tell her about all the amazing opportunities, because if I want to go up the ladder in this company and become a diamond seller, I've got to recruit a team of five people around me who are also selling these pens. 

OK, and when my team sell the pens, I make a commission from the pens that they've sold. And then the commission goes, oh, can you can you see the shape I'm building here in my head, a three sided shape? And basically, it starts to become a sales funnel from the bottom. And then the latest member of my team can recruit their team and all the commission gets paid up to the top.

It's your upline. It's your upline. And then what happens is.

We have a position where no bugger wants to buy a pen because everybody's got one. The garages are filled with stocks of these pens. The company at the top sitting pretty.

But it is the people who are recruited around. They are the vulnerable ones. But what the people at the top will say is work out who your ideal client is, is looking for a side hustle. 

So it might be somebody like a teacher or a nurse or a single parent or somebody who's on maternity leave. So join Mumsnet type groups, join teaching groups. And they join, they pop up and they suddenly start to message and put in the comments. 

Have you ever thought about my great opportunities, a side hustle for the pen company I work for? And then here's the peak irony. They've been so brainwashed by the pen company that they genuinely don't see it as a problem. They say it's a great opportunity.

That we are robbing people. Oh, I've ended up toe to toe in messages. Do you remember? You're affecting my mental health because you're telling me I'm trying to scam people.

No, I'm just saying you can't post your shit in my group. Jeans and trainers. There's a sign on the door that says we don't accept jeans and trainers.

And you're now arguing with me that you want to come in in your jeans and your trainers. Go somewhere else. Yeah. 

And I think that's it for me. Very early days in the group. Actually, not that early. 

I got a lot of abusive messages from group members for a variety of things, declining posts because there was, ironically, to protect them because there was that much information in it that you did not need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who they were, what school they worked at. The stuff to do with MLM, all sorts of stuff. A few random, very inappropriate images as well. 

I don't think I've ever told you that. And so I locked my messenger down because it took me such a long time to recover my mental health that I wasn't prepared to allow my mental health to be damaged by complete strangers on the Internet. And so you tend to get those those messages about why more than me. 

And then you'll come into our into our moderators chat and ask. And usually it's me or go, well, they've done this. They've done this. 

There was this on this day. There was this on because we've got a lot. Everything's locked. 

But I think the point for me is I you and I and our team and so many people in the group will help people willingly and without question and give up as much as that of our time as is practical to do so whilst also working and living our lives. But I'm not going to get into an argument with a complete stranger on the Internet over something that is very clearly stated in my rules in my group, excuse me for saying my because the Internet is a very big place. Go find somewhere that will allow it. 

But it's just not happening here. And it's OK for us to say that. Have a nice day. 

But what I will tell you is and I'll be completely transparent. We are starting the silenced by support campaign properly. We had a great meeting this week. 

I know you and Nick might do a separate podcast about that next week, possibly while I'm sunning myself, finding myself. And one of my ideas, because we need money in the campaign coffers because, you know, things are costing money like printing, not time, because we volunteer our time website hosting the whole nine yards and we need a campaign fund because I'm planning on doing probably a big event next year. For life after teaching, not sure, but what our members are going to probably notice in the next couple of weeks and next couple of months, there will be monetization of our Facebook group in order to put it into the silenced by support campaign pot. 

So, for example. I might allow the opportunity for businesses to pay on a weekly basis. You know, the banner at the top of our group, how it says life after teaching, it's silenced by support at the moment that might say, hey, it's recruitment services. 

The next week it might say fountain pens by such and such a body dog walking dog. I don't care. That is prime advertising space with a group of one hundred and seventy six thousand people. 

So, therefore, I'm going to sell that space. I am going to sell that space because it is going into a pot of money to support teachers opportunities for sponsoring the Pit Pony podcast. I mean, we do have a couple of sponsors, low level, who are great friends of ours who've helped us out when we've needed it. 

But this podcast cost us money ourselves and it will become our vehicle for delivering the message for silenced by support. So do you know what, kids? You are going to see some monetization of our Facebook group networking events that we charge ticket prices for and we make a profit on to go into the funds. There are going to be just giving pages and crowdfunding pages popping up all over the place. 

So it might start to feel a bit unsavoury in the next couple of months that every time you see me, I'm asking for money. I'm not asking for money for the kids Christmas clothes. I'm asking for money to start a national campaign and support teachers who are absolutely at the end of their careers as a result of the misuse of support plans. 

So that's a bit of a breaking news that, you know, we are going to change the nature of the group in that respect, but it won't be to line our pockets. Yeah, right. I'm just going to reframe that slightly.

You're not changing the nature of the group. I mean, when monetization is concerned, it's going to feel different. Even that, we are. 

So the the group, the context on any given day can have between 100 and 200 posts on the timeline, depending on on what time of the year is how busy it is, whether it's coming up to a resignation day. Not every group member sees every one of those 200 or 100 posts and posts drop down the timeline so quickly. So silence by support as the example, when I went out originally for testimony from people, which is the correct term, it is the testimony of their experience.

And when I went out for testimony in the first few days, we had a handful of submissions and then and we had to keep posting it a couple of times a day, a couple of times a day. And then a couple of other group members also started posting it and started being a bit harsher than I'm prepared to be in terms of people. You're always complaining about this now.

Now that they want to do something about it and you're not contributing. I'm always a bit. That's that's that's not me. 

But but the number of people who said on those posts, oh, this is the first time I've seen it. And it had been on heavy rotation for two weeks. So I think, yes, some people will sense that there is a shift and it's a shift for the right reason. 

We've gone out and had conversations with a number of group members about what do you think about this? Do you think this is reasonable? And we had a meeting on Tuesday night that Nick and I will talk about where a significant number of people said we would be happy to let's use let's ask in the group. So so I just it's it's it's just I don't think it's suddenly going to feel like the group is being we might feel like we are, but I don't think group members are going to going to feel like they are. But ultimately, that thing about that is still we are not selling anything as such. 

And if we are selling something, an event, there might be a Pit Pony Live recording. But then the money from that after the costs have been paid will be going into the campaign pot. Nick and I have already spent.

A reasonable amount of money, Nick, more so than me on on getting the reports printed, Nick pays for all the postage, Nick is Nick is doing X, Y and Z. If the campaign is going to work, it has to have money behind it. Oh, well, you know, I've already got a small team who volunteer to work with me and we are going to spearhead that. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to.

I have the last piece I want to talk about where our group is concerned. Because our visitors have already arrived at head office. Oh, have they? Yes, they have.

So because we do work in between all of this. Yes, you know, and there's only so many hours in the day we've got to walk into the village to go to Sexton's bakery and some days we only get there once. And that's all I say. 

So this is the last thing I want to talk about where our group's concerned, and I don't know if this would apply to. Very many groups, not necessarily the groups I'm in, the big ones that I'm in. Whatever you want to say about our groups, Flog It Friday, the campaign, the monetisation, MLMs, people who recognise each other in groups, people, people when I walk into schools as part of my day to day business suddenly avert the gaze because they think I'm going to recognise them as a group member and they've not told people in the staff room. 

And I think the Life After Teaching Facebook group is a secret club in some schools. Are you in that group? Are you in that group? But it is very, very rare that a group that's grassroots, that's organic, that has got no formality in its structure has, and I know for a fact, saved the amount of lives that our group has saved. And I don't just mean changed lives. 

I mean, we have been involved in people who've been sectioned, hospitalised. We have lost a couple of group members. Welfare calls.

Fair calls. Welfare calls. Sorry, welfare calls. 

And I think people forget that when they're arguing with us about asking them to remove their link and the stuff that doesn't even get onto the timeline because we've intercepted it as a pending post and it's been directed straight to me. So even though there's a lot going on, and I know people that when they're in the darkest hour, they've told me they've become addicted to that group. They get on it. 

They just read for hours and hours and hours so that they don't feel alone. Some people have had to leave the group because it still deeply, deeply hurts them what's going on in the world of our teaching. But I think more than anything, it is an incredibly important space.

It is a really, really important space for people who need it at certain times in their lives. And also the support for the wider family, because I know many members go to their spouses or to their parents and say, look, it's not just me. Look at this group. 

And we've said for quite some time, I think we're going to get some purchase with the unions. I think we will get purchased with DFA because whether you like it or not, we are an independent Facebook group that just holds space for people to say what their experiences are in teaching at the moment. And to people who say it's all bloody doom and gloom, that it's all teachers moaning of two words.

Don't join. It's the second one off. Don't join.

It's been polite. All three words, you can leave. Yeah, because it is a space where people who have been silenced in many ways in their schools, silenced by support, has got to chat. 

And long may it continue, because it is something, it's our life's work that we're incredibly proud of, incredibly proud of. So that was a lovely one for a Friday morning, wasn't it? It was. Just a little insight into what we do. 

We're both going to jump in the car now and go over to that work. And then I'm going to come home and pack and get going and get going. Aurelie's bringing me something. 

She's just messaged now that I can weigh my case with. OK. Brandon, we're still on a podcast.

We're still on a podcast, listeners. Thank you so much for listening to our episode today. And I hope it was a lovely, it felt luxurious and a little insight into the world of what we do in a group that I know you love and contribute to a great deal. 

So until we speak again, on behalf of myself and Sarah, thank you very much for your time. And you, Lady Dunwood, I'll see you in about 15 minutes on the other side of the M6. All right, led foot. 

I'll be 25.