Teaching is surely one of the most rewarding careers you could possibly get involved in. Once you have completed your Initial Teacher Training (ITT) and achieved Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), there are many benefits and opportunities open to you.
Schools in England provide four key stages of education. You will have decided by now which age group – and therefore which key stage – you want to teach: primary (aged 4-11), secondary (aged 11-18) or further education colleges (mainly 16-18, but many colleges now take students from the 14-16 age group).
Primary and secondary schools work to a national curriculum of core subjects (for example, Maths and English) as well as with a range of other popular subjects (Economics, History, Psychology). In the latter stages of secondary school you may be teaching on ‘A’ level programmes and/or their equivalent vocational programmes.
Primary school teachers teach the same class in the same classroom throughout the day. In secondary schools, you will normally have your own classroom and various groups of students will come to you as determined by the timetable.
In college, you will move around different classrooms and different groups. You are likely to have a tutor group for a year, where you will provide pastoral support. This latter area, apart from subject knowledge and delivery skills, is where some teachers find their talents most useful and rewarding.
What are the benefits of pursing a teaching career?
The average salary for a new teacher, based on a national pay scale, is high compared to the average graduate starting salary in other professions. You will have the opportunity to gain rapid promotion to deputy head or head of your department, or head of year. Your ambitions may take you forward to a headship, where salaries can start from £42,000 upwards. Throughout schools and colleges, there are indeed many different pay scales, depending on your roles and responsibilitie.
Your pension is based one of the largest schemes for public sector workers in the UK.
Then there is the question of holidays. Although you will have preparation and marking to do outside of your classroom, and some of this may take up large chunks of your evenings, weekends and holiday periods, you will certainly have more holidays than many other professional occupations. Schools and colleges are usually open for 36 weeks of the academic year, so you can see the implications of that.
You will need to be full of energy, imaginative and creative when it comes to motivating your students in the classroom, good at verbal and written communication. You will need to be a good organiser, since you will constantly be thinking of your teaching materials, the resources available to you (including online), and how you are going to manage your time, perhaps the most precious resource of all.
If you can do all of this, you will surprise yourself about not only what you can achieve in your teaching career but how much you can help your students to achieve.