What would you think if your adult child wanted to become a primary school teacher ?

[SwanWings]

Really smart, still in uni, it's that adult dc life and their choice, but I probably worry it could lead to a hard life, low pay, too many demanding parents, unrealistic expectations from the schools, being inspected alot.

Just wondering what you'd think if was adult child considering this
Of course we will support dc regardless and of course its a valuable job indeed

I’d discourage but ultimately their choice.

If it’s something they really want to do I’d suggest volunteering first. Experience it from the shop floor, so to speak.

I work in primary (not my first career) and you need to be able to ‘perform’ for at least 6hrs a day to 30-odd young people, support their emotional regulation (incl violence/verbal abuse), deal with their parents whom many will see you as the enemy (just look at the posts in MN about teachers), deal with the pressure of Ofsted inspections, knowing that your evenings and weekends will be used to plan/prep/asess and fill out paperwork or reply to parents who 100% believe their child wouldn’t do whatever they missed 15mins of lunch for.

Yes, the best bit is supporting the child who managed to add fractions for the first time and seeing their utter delight that they can do it, just as you said when you encouraged them to keep going. It’s a brilliant feeling when you’ve planned an interactive lesson on something dry in RE and the kids tell you it was the best lesson ever. There are great moments. But they are slowly getting drowned out by the negative aspects and the stress can and does take its toll on many staff in primary.

Oh I wondered how long it would take for a comment like this….🙄 For your information, I was able to ‘retire’ from teaching on a much reduced pension due to my husband being 10
years older and with a good police and state pension. And FYI, I’m still working in a school, just not as a teacher as it nearly broke me.

Certainly not low pay, but does have a ceiling unless you go into leadership. First year teachers will be on just over £34k in September which isn’t bad for a 22 year old. Increasing to £47k in 6 years (but will be more likely be over £50k by then). I’ve been in primary teaching for 30 years and my daughter wants to teach-I won’t put her off, it’s given us a great life however you do have to be able to manage your workload and be in a school that doesn’t bow to pushy parents!!

I was coming on to say this too. I’ve been teaching for 30 years and having tried leadership roles, know that I love the classroom job. Pay does not progress well if you want to stay in the classroom with the children.
you can go onto UPS but it’s more work and very rare for different schools to honour it if you move.

That said, I’m still here 30 years later (early years) because the children are wonderful.

Given that there are next to no jobs up here I would worry about their career opportunities. The pay is good though - £54.5K after 5 years on the main scale.

@Greenfingers37So two early retirements funded by the state! You have both had a great deal and teaching, and the state funding your pension, has given you this. Teaching is not easy - but what professional job is? What good well paid job is not demanding? They don’t exist. Teachers are reasonably well paid when you take pensions into account. Plus the bonus of early retirement if you want out. If you were self employed you would be lucky to retire so early and the state will have made no contribution to your pension, even if you think it’s not great.

My DD has just completed her PGCE and has a job as a SEN teacher from September. She’s incredibly passionate about her work and I’m thrilled for her.

I’d be really proud

So why don’t more people become teachers then if it’s so desirable?
And where did the two early retirements come from? My husband did 35 years in the police then went straight into Trading Standards for another 8 years.
My son who is 23 earns more than I did when I retired. Thank God he didn’t go into teaching. Seeing me at the dining table working until
11pm most nights probably put him off.

https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/teacher-pay-scales-how-much-are-teachers-paid-england

It's not exactly minimum wage and you get 13 weeks holiday.

@Greenfingers37 I know lots of teachers and they don’t work to 11 every night. Poor time management is an issue in any professional job and there’s no need for those hours at all. Teachers are not poorly paid and there are opportunities for promotion which bumps up pay considerably. There are decent holidays and less teacher shortages now as other careers are more difficult to access. Few jobs pay over £50,000 at 23 and most dc won’t get this. The highly paid careers in London will but many teachers won’t get these jobs and don’t want them anyway. A perfectly good teaching job in a less expensive housing area is a very good job. I’d be happy for any dc wanting to do this.

I don’t know any primary teachers that actually enjoy their job. The pay is crap for the amount of student debt you end up with. If I had my time again I would choose an industry that interests me and work
my way up. So many private sector workers earn better salaries by showing dedication and having the desire to progress and putting the hours in. No other sector that I can think of has a culture where they are allowed to observe you doing your job and state whether you did a good enough job based on their own opinion, oh and if you didn’t you’re on a capability plan that will be disclosed to any other potential employers. I cannot stress how much I would discourage it.

My time management wasn’t poor.
I was Assistant Head, Senco and had a nearly full time class responsibility so there weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Unless you’ve done it, you have no idea what’s involved. Safeguarding issues were also ridiculous where I worked.
Wish I hadn’t commented on this. OP asked for opinions and I gave an honest assessment having been in the job for more than 30 years.

To be fair, up here there are far more people applying for teaching courses at universities than there are actual places, and far more applying for teaching positions than there are jobs - there's no shortage of people trying to get into the profession.

Not in most of England and Wales. 50k maybe in London as an M5 and about 42k everywhere else.

I actually do have an adult child currently doing a masters in education. I encouraged her as it's probably her real 'calling' (she has lots of para professional experience). We are in the US where pay is not low in most areas she would eventually consoder working in, especially for those with a masters. She can do a PhD in curriculum development when she gets sick of the classroom, and make megabucks.

But I don't live in England or Wales - I said up here ( Scotland).

Theyre an adult making their own decision. None of your business.

I think this is a huge issue @Greenfingers37 in that some people base their info on working in school as being a pupil in one and possibly a parent of a child attending school.

In my previous career, I thought too that being a teacher would be brilliant. Lots of holidays around the kids, a reasonable working day. And having had a lovely experience in my own primary years I had the feeling that being a part of that would be great after spending years working to tight deadline, often into late evenings/nights in the office in the City.

The reality is somewhat different and I laugh at how I once thought about teaching, because really I had no idea of the reality.

@Greenfingers37 I have every idea of what’s involved. In a senior role there’s a need to be fully involved but 11 pm
at night is not needed or normal. I’ve known heads trying to turn around poor schools work in the holidays but even they have a life in the later evenings. It’s also very wrong to suggest all teachers do this and put others off the career. There are good salaries for many and teachers can step back from responsibility if they are not suited to it. Being negative is not helpful to young people who probably won’t work in the way you did.

I’m a teacher and teachers (myself included) are chronic for complaining about working conditions! The amount of work you get changes drastically from school to school - my head is very good at not making work for works sake but I know of schools where teachers have to write a class newsletter every Friday and send weekly learning overviews home for each subject. Compared to other graduate careers the pay isn’t great however it is on a scale so you know exactly what you’ll be getting and it’s decent. It’s a fairly secure job, although redundancy pay is crap if you’re in an area with falling numbers and you get a lot of holidays - you do have to spend some of it sorting out your classroom but not the whole holiday. Once you have kids, depending on your head you’re unlikely to get to their sports days etc but holiday childcare will never be a concern. And there’s usually plenty of opportunities for career progression and development - especially if you’re into maths or computing. It’s very heavily unionised which I think is a bonus. The days are never boring and kids are amazing to work with but you have to put up with successive governments shaking things up and promoting the latest fad while totally ignoring evidence based research on how children actually learn. In all my years of teaching teaching I’ve dealt with really lovely parents who really appreciate what you’re doing I’ve only had two arsey ones - one that shouted at me outside of school and one that informed me I wasn’t to say no to their child. Both were almost 20 years ago now though!

In a nutshell I suppose it’s just like any other career in that there’s pros and cons. It’s just a case of your child weighing up if that is the life balance that they want.

Primary school teacher is a respectable job.

The only person I know who enjoys her primary role works in a very affluent prep school with small classes, lots of support workers, free lunches and long holidays -one of the few still operating the Teachers Pensuin scheme.
However Labour are trying to tax prep schools out of business, and with failing pupil rolls and high earners leaving the country, this may not be an option.

I think this is more the issue when teachers talk about negative workloads, individual members taking on multiple roles. This is why I say no to roles / extra curricular things that would seriously impact my wellbeing and work life balance. As teachers we must start fighting for our personal wellbeing - why aren’t you fighting to drop the class based role? It is physically impossible for 1 person to do the job of 3 people without killing yourself and utterly selfish of your head to expect you to. This kind of expectation sets all teachers out to have their personal time exploited. JUST SAY NO!

As a bog standard class based teacher on UPS who works 4 days a week all my work is done either during school hours or my PPA time - we also get termly subject leader time so that helps too - I might do 1 day during school holidays, 2/3 in the summer, a bit more for report writing but this year we moved to online reports which seriously saved massive amounts of time.