I’d like to say it gets easier the further into manglement you get … the first lesson observation I did was brilliant though and I am so thankful for that teacher for being so inclusive of me in other ways too. You can only be as good as the staff you work with. Other times it is a battle to get the balance.

Good luck to all who try.

That said, some criticism is justified. I’ve seen my fair share of technicians who aren’t that great at their job. In many schools, the technician’s pay is only 60-70% of what they pay the teachers, and so can’t hope to attract the same caliber of person, despite the two jobs needing equal levels of education and intelligence to perform on par with each other. This leads either to an actual skills imbalance, or a perceived one, where teachers assume that the job can’t be that hard because the technician isn’t paid very much to do it. In both scenarios, the end result is someone being talked down to. While there are schools out there that value their technicians, and have great staff, their good work doesn’t balance out the negativity in the bigger picture because a system running normally is unremarkable by definition.

Technicians – even the good ones – tend to dig at teachers because many of them have forgotten (or have never realised) that good technicians often have a natural aptitude for technology (I call them ‘tinkerers’) that most people don’t have. They forget that it’s easy to understand how a computer works when your job is to spend all day figuring out how it works. And yes, there is a larger-than-is-comfortable proportion of teachers who are shockingly bad with computers when compared to their peers.

Additionally, both sides dig at each other in retaliation for everything above. In short, there are enough morons on both sides of the fence to perpetuate this ridiculous animosity, and there probably always will be.