The janitor is named after a Roman god
JANITOR comes from the Latin ianitor, meaning doorkeeper, from ianua, a door — the same root as Janus, the two-faced god of doorways and beginnings who turns up in our Roman mythology puzzle. The job has been defined by who holds the keys for two thousand years.
It still is. The CARETAKER or JANITOR opens the building before anybody else arrives, knows which radiator needs a thump, and is generally the only person in the place who could find the stopcock in under an hour.
A quarter of a million volunteers
Every state school in England has a governing board, and each GOVERNOR on it is an unpaid volunteer: parents, staff and local people who approve budgets, appoint head teachers and hold the school to account. There are roughly a quarter of a million of them nationally, which makes it one of the largest volunteer forces in the country.
Most parents have no idea the role exists. It is a serious job, done in the evenings, by people who already have day jobs.
Lunch is a logistics operation
The COOK and the kitchen team turn out hundreds of meals inside a ninety-minute window, to nutritional standards set in law, for children with allergies, medical diets and religious requirements, at a cost per plate that would not buy a coffee in town.
Schools across England serve millions of lunches every day between them. Anybody who has attempted to feed thirty children at a birthday party has a rough sense of the achievement involved.
Most of the adults are not teachers
Walk round a primary school and a good half of the adults are doing something other than teaching. A teaching ASSISTANT works alongside the class, often with the children who need the most support. There is a SECRETARY who knows where every child is at any moment, a BURSAR watching the money, a CLEANER, a COOK, a CARETAKER, a school NURSE, a COUNSELOR and a sports COACH.
Support staff make up around half the workforce in English schools. They are the reason a TEACHER can spend the day teaching rather than answering the phone and mopping the hall.
The office is the nerve centre of the whole operation. It holds the emergency contact numbers, the medical forms, the spare jumpers and the plasters, and it is where a child who has been sick, lost a tooth or simply had enough of the morning ends up. Every school runs on somebody knowing where everything and everybody is.
For a child, working out who does what is quietly reassuring. The CROSSING patrol will see you over the road. The office will ring your mum. The CARETAKER can open a jammed locker, the COUNSELOR will listen, and the LIBRARIAN will find you something about dinosaurs.
It is also a first lesson in the value of everyone's work. A school cannot open without the CLEANER any more than it can without the HEADTEACHER, which is a useful thing to have understood by the age of seven.