At 41, journalist and author Nell Frizzell has returned to the secondary school she attended 25 years ago — this time as a trainee teacher rather than a pupil. What began as a practical response to family responsibilities has become a broader reflection on why so many experienced professionals from the arts and media are finding fresh purpose in education.
Frizzell’s journey is rooted in a recurring dream: sitting an unfamiliar GCSE paper in a classroom where no one is recognisable. The dream has now acquired an unsettlingly literal setting. She cycles to the same concrete corridors and carpeted rooms she knew as a teenager, although she can finally enter the staffroom.
“I am genuinely as excited about reading Macbeth with a group of teenagers on plastic chairs as I ever was about speaking to a bookshop full of paying attenders.”
Back to the school that shaped her
The move was partly dictated by logistics. Frizzell has never learned to drive after an early encounter with her driving instructor became so awkward — he asked her mother on a date — that she largely avoided the steering wheel thereafter. With young children at nursery and primary school close to home, she asked her training scheme to find her a placement she could reach by bicycle.
Yet the return also feels almost fated. Frizzell was raised by a teacher, is married to another teacher who was himself raised by one, and has long loved school. She compares her pull towards the profession with an eel leaving an Essex river for the Sargasso Sea, before its larvae travel roughly 10,000km back towards home.
Walking through familiar grounds produces a strange overlap between past and present. The playground is where she first tasted Um Bongo and heard the Strokes. Today, she hurries along the same route to a safeguarding meeting or follows her mentor to collect a printing code. At 15, she travelled those passages in a skirt sewn from wetsuit material, having stretched the meaning of the school uniform to its limits.
Her enthusiasm is not simply nostalgia. She is drawn to the chance to explore literature slowly, teach ideas to a group and witness young people develop their thinking. The familiar assembly hall now holds her training notes, her grey hairs and the lived experience of two children and two decades.
A reversal of the traditional career path
Frizzell says she is not alone. She knows several people who have entered teaching after long periods in journalism, writing, music, broadcasting or other creative roles. Within her own training group, she can count at least four former journalists becoming English teachers.
The career changes extend beyond education. One former colleague is training as a plumber, a DJ is moving towards midwifery, and writers, poets and journalists are preparing for careers as therapists. Frizzell sees these moves as part of a wider shift away from the familiar pattern in which aspiring teachers spent a few years in the profession before moving into publishing, performance or the media.
She cites Romesh Ranganathan, Philip Pullman, Joanne Harris and Greg Davies as examples of people who followed that older route. Now, she suggests, creative industries are losing considerable numbers of mid-career practitioners to schools and other public services. The appeal is not necessarily an escape from ambition, but a desire to help the next generation build its own capabilities.
What experienced creatives bring to classrooms
For Frizzell, the most rewarding element is the depth that teaching makes possible. A novel can be examined over several weeks in a classroom rather than discussed for a few minutes on radio. Reading Macbeth with teenagers seated on plastic chairs can feel as energising as addressing a crowded bookshop.
This shift recognises that creative work cultivates skills valuable in education. Storytelling, research, clear communication and the ability to hold an audience’s attention can all be translated into classroom practice. So can discipline under pressure, openness to feedback and experience explaining complicated subjects to non-specialists.
That does not make teacher training easy or remove the need for formal preparation. Frizzell’s days now include safeguarding sessions, mentoring and the practical codes required to operate school equipment. Her previous career does not replace that training; it provides another layer
