‘I’m a teacher – read this if you think it’s all holidays and 3pm finishes’
Each Monday, our Money teams speaks to someone from a different profession to discover what it’s really like. This week teachers are in the spotlight, as we hear from Helen Frank-Keyes, 60, an English teacher at Icknield Community College in Oxfordshire…
People think teaching is all lovely long holidays… particularly in the summer, short days – going home when the children finish at 3pm – and organising engaging and educational trips to the theatre and local museums. Or they think it’s an impossible and stressful job spent in crowded, dilapidated buildings dealing with troubled and challenging young people, while trying to deliver lessons that might or might not have any relevance for their futures. Neither description comes close to capturing the reality of what, for me, is the most exciting and rewarding career I can imagine.
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You start on a minimum of £31,650… if you have QTS (qualified teacher status), as a primary or secondary teacher. Salaries in London are higher. Salaries are reviewed every year with most teachers moving up the pay range annually.
If you think teachers have it easy… let me describe how demanding it really is, especially for the lengthier written subjects like English, History and RE. I genuinely enjoy marking student work, but to give careful, considered and relevant feedback that students can act upon takes thought and time. Couple this with planning for four to five lessons a day that will successfully engage students, as well as setting homework, monitoring reading, attending department and staff meetings – known as briefings – and answering student and parent emails and you can see that teaching is not a 9-5 job.
I work for a couple of hours most evenings during term time… except Fridays, which are sacrosanct. While I have the time for this – my family are grown up and have left home now – I am completely in awe of many of my colleagues with young families, who are sometimes teaching after a broken night’s sleep.
After two years of greeting one teenage boy every day with “Good morning, Liam” and never receiving a reply… I was so utterly delighted the day he answered gruffly “Morning, miss!” As a colleague once said to me, in the rush of the morning, in busy homes, or with parents leaving the house for work sometimes even before their child gets up, a young person sadly may not have that much experience of a positive greeting, in which case, it is up to us.
If you’re thinking about going into teaching… there are a couple of very important things to consider. One, while it is a bit of a cliche to say that teaching is vocational, you do need to be passionate – passionate about your subject and communicating that passion to students. You must also like, respect and want to spend your day helping young people to realise their potential, whatever that looks like.
The very best teachers I have worked with are fit… They make as much time as they can for exercise and fitness, whether it be running, hiking, the gym or yoga. To be a good teacher, particularly to be able to provide support for those students who have or are currently experiencing difficult circumstances, you need to be reliable and positive, welcoming them, day after day, into your classroom and ensuring that your lessons are accessible and interesting for them. You will only be able to do this if you are strong and healthy yourself.
You make powerful connections with both students and colleagues… A strong and successful school is a close-knit community, in which (almost all) students and teachers alike are striving to be the best they can be on a daily basis – which although cliched, is demonstrably true!
Parents and grandparents inspire children but… in introducing students to your subject, be that food technology, biology, art, computer science or maths, it may be that you unlock a student’s potential that then leads to their choice of apprenticeship or A-levels, college, university and ultimately their career. How powerful is the thought that you are helping to inspire the next generation of engineers, mathematicians, artists, lawyers, journalists, actors and accountants, to name but a few!?
Teachers are usually required to have a bachelor’s degree… in the subject they plan to teach. They will also need GCSEs at grade 4 or above in English and maths for secondary teaching. (add science at grade 4 for primary teachers.) Potential teachers then need to achieve QTS – qualified teacher status – and there are a number of routes available here. The main one is through ITT – initial teacher training – provided by universities, schools and academy trusts across the country.
But… my route was slightly unusual, in that I qualified by the Assessment Only route, through the University of Reading. This is because, like a significant number of teachers today, this is not my first career – I was a journalist.
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