Getting into Teaching

What is teaching?

Teacher

Teaching is about caring, nurturing, and developing minds and talents. It is about devoting time, often invisible, to every student. Every Teacher will believe every child matters and will be prepared to devote the unseen and often thankless hours of Planning, Preparation and Assessment in order to create an effective learning environment. Teaching jobs are as much about passion as they are about reason. It's about not only motivating students to learn, but teaching them how to learn, and doing so in a manner that is relevant, meaningful, and memorable. It's about caring for your craft, having a passion for it, and conveying that passion to everyone, most importantly to your students.

Teaching Assistant

The teaching assistant takes on tasks that allow the teacher to concentrate on teaching (e.g., by preparing the classroom for lessons and clearing up afterwards). To support pupils with particular individual needs, some teaching assistants work one-to-one, while others work in small groups.

Many schools employ teaching assistants with particular specialisms, including literacy, numeracy, Special Educational Needs, music, creative arts and bilingual TAs (where the first language of significant numbers of children is not English).

Experienced and specially-trained teaching assistants can be expected to supervise a class for a teacher who's off sick or undertaking training. While every class must be allocated a qualified teacher, higher level teaching assistants (HLTAs) would be expected occasionally to lead a lesson.

Building a career in teaching

So you've decided to pursue a career in teaching. The next step is to plan for the best way to achieve your qualified teacher status (QTS), enabling you to teach across state-maintained schools across England and Wales. This almost always means completing a programme of initial teacher training (ITT):

Initial teacher training helps you develop the skills you need to become an effective teacher.
Undergraduate teacher training (Train to be a teacher while completing a degree)
Postgraduate teacher training (Already have a degree? Train to be a teacher in one to two years)
Employment-based teacher training (Train and qualify as a teacher while working in a school)
Assessment-based teacher training (If you have substantial teaching experience but do not hold QTS in the UK, you could consider taking this route)

Becoming a Teaching Assistant is a great way to gain experience working with children before you start a teaching training course. You could also gain experience working with a youth group, church groups, cubs, brownies, volunteering in local schools – these would all assist in giving you an understanding and show that you have a keen interest in the sector.

How does supply teaching work?

Teaching via an agency takes two main formats:

Long term supply teaching

These roles tend to be to cover either an unfilled vacancy, a maternity or secondment period, long term sickness cover or extended leave of absence.

The teacher would only ever teach within their own specialist subject or age range, most of these vacancies are full time roles although occasionally there will be part time roles available.

The teacher would be expected to pick up the full role of the class teacher that they are replacing and this would include amongst others planning, preparation, marking, staff meetings, parents evenings and quite possibly many other extra curricular activities. The advantage of this kind of work is that it gives the teacher stability in terms of earnings and budgeting it also allows a teacher to actually deliver to learning objectives across a period of time and the satisfaction watching pupil development creates.

Day to Day supply teaching

These roles tend to be to cover short term vacancies i.e. absence for Illness, training days or PPA release time. The work is usually left for the teacher to deliver so you would be teaching to someone else’s short term plan. However a well prepared daily cover teacher would always have a well stocked armoury of simple lesson plans to be delivered in an emergency.

In many ways to be successful as a daily supply teacher the school will expect you to be able to deliver the left materials, maintain a level of class management conducive to a learning environment and maintain a sense of flexibility in what you are asked to during your day in the School. The advantage of this type of work is that it gives the Teacher the flexibility to pick and choose where and when they work perfectly fitting around people who have existing or alternative commitments.

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