Early Career Teachers: Finding the Best Teaching Job for You

Securing a role

Once you have applied and had your interview you will potentially be offered a role which you may end up accepting even if you aren’t certain about the school, just in case it’s the only job you are offered.

If you take the job, congratulations! It is an exciting time, but it is also well documented that Early Career Teachers experience something known as “practice shock” when they first start teaching in their new school.

In a study commissioned by the DfE (Department for Education) UK Government in 2018, one ECT summarized: “When you go through your Initial Teacher Training (ITT) placements, you can’t truly understand how much work there is to do, or how much responsibility comes with the job. So, I think that kind of hit me hard in the NQT year.”

School culture

New Teachers commonly experience “practice shock” when beginning to teach and need collegial support to help them adapt to the reality of work in schools. A supportive school culture is critical to the success of Early Career Teachers professional development.

Avoiding the impact of practice shock is possible when the degree of responsibility is reduced. Working as a Supply Teacher offers Early Career Teachers the perfect way to refine skills and grow in confidence without the added responsibilities of building longer term relationships with parents and pupils, let alone living up to the high standards expected from day one. If the assigned teaching job is not preferable to you for whatever reason it is possible to change schools with little notice, as a Supply Teacher. This is not possible when you are employed directly by a school.

Supply Teaching

Apart from the flexibility that supply work offers, one of the greatest advantages of working as a Supply Teacher is that you will have support from your personal Education Consultant here at Career Teachers who will help you to deal with any situations that come up in your teaching jobs. We will act as a mediator where necessary to resolve conflicts or ask for more support from the school staff if you feel uncertain about how you will be perceived if you ask for help. Our job is to make your job as successful as it can be.

Ms McCoy, now an Assistant Head Teacher in a secondary academy was a supply teacher in 1998/99 before finding her ideal job shares:

“Supply Teaching gave me an amazing opportunity to work in a wide range of schools whether that was for a day, a week or up to a full term. Working as a supply teacher helped me to recognise the right type of school for me and when I found it, I stayed in my role and progressed to a leadership position – I can’t recommend this route highly enough. You really do have the time to make the right decision, so don’t rush into a permanent teaching job just for the sake of it a year or two of supply work could help you find exactly what you are looking for to get the best start to your teaching career”.