Should I train to be a teacher or move for a £60K paid job?

[Arthurlager]

I have a dilemma and would welcome opinions.

I am 39, have 3 DC, 11, 9, 6. I have a place on a teacher training course in September. It will mean no income for a year then a starting salary of £21K. And fab holidays of course. Things are already very tight financially. Just to keep my options open I have applied for, and got through to the last stage for, a job paying a starting salary of £60K, final salary pension, bonus scheme etc.

If I am offered the job, it would mean moving house to a part of the country I have always liked, moving schools etc, something I have never done before. But of course it is F/T so I would need a childminder or nanny as we have no family there.

So...what would you choose?

Coconutty , I am like you......a TA in a great school, leave at 4pm and go home to be with the children.

My HT asked me to consider teaching but I would not touch it with a barge pole.

The stress and misery heaped on teachers is shocking! Attitudes of parents and children to school and teachers is staggering. So many social issues to address.

If teaching was about being passionate about learning with keen bright students, it would be a joy. Often, however, it is about managing behaviour, levels, pupil tracker and lovely gifted teachers on their knees in despair.

Go for the 60k OP.

As a GP I sign off lots of teachers: stress, anxiety, depression. I believe them 100%. I'm sure I could say that fir every profession but teachers are the ones that still take me by surprise as it shouldn't be like this. Also self-employed gardeners, another job I wouldn't have thought associated with so much ill health.

The 60K job: may have a shit boss, the promise of the final salary pension forgotten or ignored, stressful holidays on your Blackberry, redundancy.

My dh has a phd, but was treated like a moron (and I do not use that word lightly) by everyone even slightly senior to him during his teacher training and nqt year. He nearly jas a breakdown, his physical health has been irreparably damaged after he was made asked to sign a contact promising he would take no more sick days that year (this was after having swine flu and daring to take 2 weeks off).

Luckily for him his industry recovered from the recessional dip and he left teaching as fast as he could for a job which pays more, had fewer hours, no take home work, no threat of physical violence and treated him like a responsible adult who could be trusted.

Teaching nearly ended our marriage. I have so much pity and respect for anyone doing that job

BTW I thought the over-reacting and interfering parents were a figment of MN's collective imagination. Till we moved schools and realised these petty politics are very real and a HT can be hounded out of his job by the braying parents. Who has the time to get so involved and how can anyone think their opinion will be more informed than teachers'? Get a life, get a job, let the teachers do theirs.

' I've worked in education for 13 years and would never choose to leave it.'

That's a lovely comment, but are you a ft classroom teacher HoneyBee?

I'm absolutely horrified. Are there any satisfaction surveys carried out nationally? Are any measures of teacher satisfaction taken into account in any planning? The obvious ones would be the % of NQTs who are still teaching 5 years later.

One thing I noticed was that all the teachers in the school suffered from extreme paranoia and for good reason too. It was a nasty, bitchy, undermining place. I think I would have been destroyed by it so I got out PDQ.

This.

At one point, a colleague told me they thought their staffroom had been bugged because SMT would pull them up on private conversations.

Colleagues have been pulled in to the heads office and told off because of typing errors in their plans and been downgraded on their assessments because they referred to a child as 'they' instead of 'he/she' on their plans.

When I told people that I planned to be a teacher, my family and friends who already worked in education told me not too. I thought it was what had been mentioned up thread - anti-propoganda and that it would be different for me.

It isn't.

SPB as part of the NQT folder I was given, there is a quality assurance section for the school, but who in their right mind, given the state of the job market at the moment, is going to put anything less than yes it is wonderful down? Especially given the penchant for fixed term contracts "with the potential to become permanent."

I'm sure I read upthread that 50% of teachers don't make it over five years.

Pointless if it's not properly anonymous I agree

The attrition rate is huge, SPB.
There is a % who never begin their NQT year after doing the training, another % who drop out completely after 5 years, another % who work pt... it's a mess.

Yes, I'm sure. But why is nothing being done? Given these are the people who are teaching children. And it sounds like they're all one small lottery win away from packing it all in.

As someone who retrained 10 years older than you OP, and 4 years on is seriously regretting it , I would ask whether you are prepared for the emotional drain of being treated like a child by those above you in what is the most rigidly hierarchical workplace I have come across. My prior experience counts for nothing (even though it is from a field closely related to education). I am expected to implement new schemes without question: there is never any reason given, no evidence presented, but questioning is seen as dissent and disrespect. Performance management is a sick joke. I have had no problems, but have seen colleagues broken by subjective, irrational, inconsistent bullying observations masquerading as PM and "support". Worryingly, I know that although dire, the leadership team at my school is much less unreasonable than at many others. The sad truth is that HTs are treated like naughty children themselves by Gove and Wilshaw and having been comprehensively disempowered and threatened over the years, few have the imagination or strength to do anything other than funnel the crapstorm downwards.

I would go into teaching, I left a job paying far in excess of 60k to go to into teaching and am glad that I have.

I have moments when I am knackered and think about leaving but they never last and whenever I am thinking I just can't do this a holiday pops along.

With relative speed as a secondary school teacher I am earning in the region of 50k a year so not a bad wage. The holidays to me are utterly priceless as I get to be an almost SAHM for 13 weeks a year but with a good wage coming in. I don't work in the holidays.

Aren't teachers almost universally hated though? The steady stream of "but you only work from 9 - 3, yes but think of all the all holidays, yeah but you just get to sit and draw all day, yes but come on they are children etc etc etc" has had an effect on the way teachers are viewed by the public, I think.

Plus, teachers are blamed for producing badly mannered, illiterate children but on the other hand, parents are up in arms about teachers disciplining children (not all, or even the majority, obviously.)

And there has been a concerted effort IMO by the government recently to turn the general public against teachers (and nurses and police etc) so no one cares enough to take it seriously. When teachers really are being attacked bythe government, like now, people are saying "well it's about time, they've had it easy for a really long time - I don't even have a pension scheme" I kid you not. My own father and (ex) DP said this to me.

It's the same with nurses. It's got a lot to do with the 'vocation' thing I think. Teaching and nursing are vocational, therefore you have no right to complain about lack of support, lack of money etc because you are there for your Vocation.

I'm not even sure if any of the above makes sense, I'm still trying to form opinions about it all myself. I do know that if I could find a job on a similar or even slightly less wage atm then I would be tempted to take it. If I was offered a better paid job I would grab it and volunteer with children some other way. Because I would have spare time that was actually mine.

Interesting points. But tbh its in no ones interests to have trained teachers leaving within the first few years. Or teachers only doing the job for a decade (understand why the person who said it did so, but feel it is not ideal). Children are not going to thrive being taught by people who hate their jobs and are either actively looking to leave or fantasisijg about sticking two fingers up. Who is this serving and how?

I certainly do not feel universally hated, in fact when people find out what I do they all seem to hold my job in some kind of awe that it does not deserve, as if I am lion training or raising the dead. The only place I see negativity is on here.

SPB unless people are saying one thing to me and thinking something else, I do not as a rule work with people who hate their job. No one works in fear , my FB feed is full if teachers about to go on holiday for most of the holiday . No one I saw left school with lots of work and most are declaring this holiday as a work free one, which is as it should be.

your post makes perfect sense to me, Twllbach!!

"Winging it and not being able to mark since Ocober isn't good though"."

Well, obviously not nfk but it's the reality. Admittedly, my situation has been complicated by being off for a few weeks which means I've been playing catch up all term. But I came straight back in to a huge pile of urgent senior exam marking waiting for me on my first day back (nobody else could do it) as well as the chaos of picking up the threads of whatever the supply teachers had been managing to do.

But even without this, I certainly wouldn't be on top of things for all classes in the way I would like to be.I have 3.5 hours of non-contact a week that is meant to cover everything, including all the time-consuming whole-school admin, liasion with pastoral care, development of a whole new junior curriculum and senior exams as well as run of the mill marking, prep and reports and chasing kids for homeworks, missed assessments, etc.

So I prioritise the most urgent of these things on a weekly basis and see what I can do within that time. Obviously I still have to find huge chunks of my own time when exam/internal assessment marking/reports, etc. come up though as that would really sink the ship if I tried to do that only in the time I was paid for.

In Scotland, it is also now the norm to be working within a multi-subject department where the head doesn't even teach your subject so tasks that previously would have been been the preserve of a specialist promoted Principal Teacher of Subject with less class contact to enable them to do these things (e.g. set/oversee exams and exam board issues, curriculum development, chair subject staff meetings, feedback to student teachers)have to be undertaken by the rest of us in our non-contact time. So, with well over a hundred pupils a week to see in 3 days, you do the maths to see how much time I can actually spend on them!

The reality of teaching is that everything is cobbled together and half-arsed.Nothing is ever done properly. Curriculum for Excellence is being shuffled together on the hoof using stuff we already have because there is no money or time to do anything else, and the teacher training days are wasted because we have to sit through endless presentations and then are sent off to pontificate in mixed subject groups e.g. on how to assess pupils work generally, which does not result in anything concrete we can actually use for our classes .

Personally, I have made my peace with all this for now because I love actually teaching and I'm only p-t at the moment. I have earned my stripes working long 6 day weeks for years with a 10 hour a week commute thrown in but I simply do not have any time at home to do the job as well as I used to because I now have children.I Do What I Can In The Time Available and repeat ad infinitum....

Aris, do you work in a state school

I haven't read the whole thread but good god take the £60k job.
I retrained at 27 to be a doctor. Truly love the job but the long hours are breaking me and my family and now at nearly 38 I earn £34k full time. That doesn't pay my bills and childcare and to be honest I'm thinking of looking for that £60k job.
Medicine is not dissimilar to teaching in terms of long hours and poor pay (despite what everyone thinks- I have the pay slips to prove it!), TAKE THE 60k JOB!

Yes, state school.

My old job: 3.2K/month
My first year (part time) teaching salary: £890/month

Old job: Arrive 8.30am, leave at 5pm, no working at home
Teaching: Arrive 8am, leave 5pm, work 2-3hours a night and at least one day at the weekend.

Yes, we (in theory!) get lots of holidays but there is work to be done in half terms and data to be analysed Christmas and Easter.

I love working with the children, but all the crap that comes with it is terrible. I never switch off. I am planning on 3 more years and then I am OUTTA HERE!

Thanks aris. Wonder what makes your place different.