To ask what is really so bad about a teaching career compared to other jobs? Does anyone actually enjoy it?

[yardstickss]

I earn reasonably highly in a career in finance. I manage the pressure ok and it’s quite competitive, which I don’t enjoy, but just try to focus and get the work done and go home/log off. I often work until mid evening and will usually but not always work Sunday evening for 4 ish hours to make the start of the week less stressful.

I have always considered working in teaching and very nearly did a week PGCE. I feel finance is such an empty job in comparison to teaching. I feel I would make more of a difference in teaching. I know it would be a pay cut but I’d also have longer holidays. I hear so much about the downsides to teaching though. Does anyone enjoy it? I know lesson planning takes up a lot of time but I think perhaps similar to how I work late now anyway? Just interested in whether I’m actually missing something (likely!) as I don’t know anyone personally in teaching other than one who really likes it but he works in the private sector.

Consider the fact that teaching is theoretically an enjoyable and fulfilling thing to do, and that teachers have long holidays, can theoretically leave work at 3 or 3:30 and have great job security and good pensions and can find jobs pretty much anywhere in the country they fancy living.

...And then consider the fact that 40,000 teachers quit teaching last year and schools cannot find teachers to replace them. Deciding to be a teacher at the moment must be a bit like watching people streaming out of a burning building and deciding to go in and have a look around.

I’ve been a teacher for 30 years. I'm very lucky to be in a girls' grammar school with virtually no behaviour issues. That's what makes it doable for me. If I end up leaving this school before retirement for whatever reason, I won't work in another school.

If schools in Ireland can teach children without all of the bollocks we are subjected to in England, what’s the point of it all?

I'd really, really like to know the answer to this question.

My uncle just retired from teaching. He was really passionate about it but disheartened by changes to his school that weren't in the kids interests. This was a private school. Not one of the best, but certainly decent.
My mum adored teaching, she taught adults English for business, then did ESOL and adult literacy. She worked inprivate colleges then public FE. You need to spend a lot of your own time preparing lessons and marking.
My DH got chucked under the bus when he was promoted to head of department when he'd only been a technician previously. They gave him a sheet of A4 paper with guidance on how to run the department and teach the kids!?
So I think it is very mixed. But massively rewarding to see the students progressing. Mostly you have to really care about them.

The pre-requisits for a potentially happy career in teaching are:

• cast-iron mental health, emotionally stable and resilient.
• Able to advocate for yourself and maintain your boundaries. Not a people pleaser.
• Not a perfectionist.
• Naturally calm and well-organised, even under pressure.
• Like children, especially the naughty ones.
• Sense of humour / appreciation for the absurd.

If you can tick these boxes you have a shot at being a great teacher and enjoying it!

I would like Gillian Keegan to go and investigate!

What do they do in Ireland when it comes to schemes of work/resources? Individual schools up and down the country in England are paying exorbitant amounts of money for schemes- White Rose Maths, Twinkl, Phonicsplay etc etc on annual subscriptions and making publishers somewhere huge sums of money.

Under Labour, there were free QCA schemes of work to use, we had a free government phonics scheme to use. It’s amazing that this current government have decided that the Letters and Sounds scheme is no longer good enough (we liked it and our pupils made good progress with us for what it’s worth) so have released a list of ‘state sanctioned’ schemes that cost thousands from which schools must now choose. These obviously have to 100% match your reading scheme and display fonts, otherwise Ofsted will clobber you about ‘fidelity’. We had to spend thousands replacing all of our reading books (and had to lose a TA to pay for it).

I don’t see any of this benefitting anyone except the people running educational resource companies. It certainly isn’t benefitting schools (by emptying their budget on unnecessary purchases or teachers (by making them learn new schemes, make and download/cut up new resources and replan whole schemes of work). Is there any evidence base to say the children are benefitting from this huge redeployment of cash? I suspect sticking with the existing scheme and keeping their TA would have been better. Or if that scheme needed amending, why didn’t the government make the changes and re-release it to school…FREE!

In your post you talk about getting work done. In teaching the work is never, ever done.

I will add that if you have a propensity for working in the evenings and at weekends in an effort to get ahead of yourself and feel less stressed… do not teach. That approach to work will see you working unsustainably long hours and burnt out within 3 years because you never ever get everything done and everything has to be done by yesterday.

Teaching needs the sort of personality h that can say:
”I have 20 things on my to-do list. I will work until 5pm on the things that are top priority for the children (not necessarily the priority for senior leadership team) and then clock off and have a nice evening with my family. I can make peace with the fact that some things on my to do list will never get done, but my wellbeing and relationships are more important to me than the school’s OFSTED rating or being in the headteachers good books”.

And then look forward to being put on Capability and bullied out.

It happens.

Oh I know it does. Although hopefully a teacher with the traits I outlined previously, including strong boundaries, will not put up with bullying and will leave that sort of school of their own accord before being hounded out.

Unfortunately, there seems to be more and more of ‘those sorts’ of schools around :(

When teachers are stuck on a pay scale in a school because they’d lose it if they more, but they have to pay the mortgage, it’s even worse.

In your post you talk about getting work done. In teaching the work is never, ever done.

Yes. There are no projects completed or cases won. It just goes on. And you can work every evening and every weekend and still not feel like you're doing enough to stop you from getting in trouble with SLT, never mind doing your best for your students.

In my opinion teaching, the actual teaching part, is the best and easiest job in the world!

However…that’s maybe 10% of the job. It’s not so much “the stuff around the edges”, it’s that those things take up far and away the vast majority of your time. If I just got paid to teach it’d be money for old rope. I’d be laughing! As it is I work in a setting with next to no behaviour issues on the minute-by-minute scale, no issues with uniform or planners, no detentions or duties, so have lost a big chunk of the crap that takes up time in a school, but I still spend a LOT of my time chasing up students who’ve missed deadlines, doing admin, marking imposed assessments which always seem to come at the worst time, doing data stuff, parents evenings and open evenings and the random pointless stuff we get set for performance targets. I spend a couple of hours a week planning (I like that), another couple doing standard marking (marking) but then at some times of year have absolutely hours and hours and hours of coursework assessment which is a real killer and very stressful.

@Thepinkyponkc
Not a teacher anymore? Why did you stop?
So you never had to adapt your planning as they weren't getting it so they needed to go over it again a different way?
What about SEN paperwork? Planning interventions and adaptations?
Also you had a TA..... many of us don't anymore sadly, but even if I did they would be having to help in class / taking interventions etc every precious moment, not doing my photocopying!
Oh and having to work after school is not because I am fond of a chat!

I did but wasn't intending to teach again so didn't need a good reference. The references I got for a part-time job (invigilating) and a voluntary job did little more than confirm that I had worked there between the years stated.

I would say really think about this. Perhaps see if you can go into a school for a few days to get a feel. I went into teaching to “make a difference” and I started off feeling like I did. In recent years I’m not so sure. The job has got harder and the students, parents and SLT expect more and more of you. It can be a very thankless job. That said, there are still moments with lovely classes and students that make me stay in it for now.

Just don’t go into it with rose tinted glasses. Make sure you fully understand the pros and cons.

Mostly , being in the classroom 830-330 , is enjoyable . It’s hard , and I’m always exhausted , but I do enjoy it . Even with behaviour issues . I love my class .

However, aside from that I hate it. I want to get out and would bite someone’s hand off for a job that’s Mon - Fri , with annual leave , that I can forget about the second I finish . It’s constant scrutiny. It’s always on my mind . The to do list never ends . I leave around 445/5 and all I’ve done in that time is teach and mark . Planning , data , training , reports , resourcing ….. that’s all extra .

Personally , I would advise anyone not to go into it and I wish I hadn’t . If I had known what I know now I most certainly would have chose a different career . I can’t bear the thought of doing this for another year let alone another 30. That’s just my opinion but I know a lot of others who feel the same.

Also- I’ve not even been doing it for 2 years .

24 years in and I still enjoy teaching. The highs are high but the lows are very low. Arrange to visit a couple of schools before you make a career change decision.

I'd like to add that I enjoyed teaching for 27 years despite ups and downs but everything changed with a new Head Teacher and the school becoming an Academy. The management of the school is everything.

I’m also an Irish primary teacher and while I don’t disagree that we’re in a much better position than English teachers seem to be, I don't want you to think all is rosy here either.

Im a few decades younger than the other poster (haven’t got your name to hand, sorry) and teachers in my age bracket have a very different outlook on things. We are on an entirely different (much worse!) pay scale than older staff and our pensions are pure crap in comparison to theirs. When assessing the last few years and planned upcoming changes to the system, it’s clear that we are following the English approach in many ways. Nonsense initiatives and workloads are continuing to increase.

There is a recruitment crisis in Irish primary schools, just like in England (probably not as extreme tbf). It’s regularly in the news here and there are solid reasons for it. I have left myself and gone into an industry where the pay and progression opportunities are far better. Took a bit of a pay cut initially but already leaping back up again. I would not advise anyone with a long working life ahead of them to get into teaching here.

I hated it. I went from a professional career to a secondary PGCE because I wanted to make a difference and liked the academic side of it. The reality was that everything was a battle—kids not listening/on their phones, parents accusing you of ‘picking on their DC’ if you gave them a detention for something you gave them three warnings about, the pressure of Ofsted, etc. I spent more time breaking up fights and sorting out behaviour than I did ‘changing lives’ or spreading knowledge.

It's a tough job, OP. I trained at 40 and am still here in my mid-50s but hanging by a thread. I would have been long gone if it wasn't for the fact I found a bit of a niche role in an independent and I am (largely) exam-stress free. It is enjoyable but it takes over your life and there is always that nagging feeling that other people's children are somehow more important than your own.

The holidays are good and work well with a family (although you can't be sure if your children are young that your holidays will always be aligned) but they don't make up for the madness that is term time, in my opinion. Many of us are frequently unwell during holidays and trying to re-jig schemes of work to get everything in, doing general tidying up and in my case, cleaning because our cleaners are now so few and far between that I see them a couple of times a week for a quick hoover and rarely anything else.. The demands are huge - particularly with exam classes - and the job is relentless as a whole. Parental and societal expectation is huge - we are the people who spend huge amounts of time with children therefore everything is our responsibility - potty training to exam revision and everything in between.

I would contact some local schools, take a couple of weeks off work and spend some time following teachers around, asking questions. It may help cement in your mind that it's worthwhile or put you off all together. Neither of these is a bad option.

I'm in my 11th year of teaching having come from an engineering background.

I still love the teaching but it is exhausting. I have 3 kids so teach 3 days a week, and spend the other 2 days doing all my planning and marking so I can have evenings and weekends free. I'd never manage full time teaching and parenting. I have an excellent work life balance but at a huge pay cut for 60% salary.

Behaviour management is a huge problem. Abuse from parents who think ADHD is an excuse for their child being able to do what they want and it not being their fault. Find a school who are consistent with Behaviour management.

And then there's the constant threat of Ofsted who can ruin careers and school reputation based on a few lesson obs. I know an ofsted inspector personally and ironically his lessons were soooo dreary. Ofsted need scrapping but that's another story...

But overall it's a superb career. Just make sure you have thick skin, don't take things personally when a kid is having a bad day! It's so sad some of the stuff kids are subjected to.

Twinkl, Accelerated Reader and that kind of thing are very popular here also, they make sure they get their Irish Euros!

Irish primaries use textbooks, that makes a big difference. I might be wrong but threads on here have made me think that this is not common in English primaries, the teachers gather/make a lot of the resources themselves? Seems mad to me to do that, it must be a huge timesink. We were always made to teach like that on college placements and it’s ridiculous when a perfectly good textbook is right there in the room.

This, plus because you don’t have the capacity to support the SEN kids despite trying your hardest and doing everything you possibly can do, then seeing posts like ‘the school have done nothing to support my DC’ despite the fact that you’ve bent over backwards to do everything the system allows you to do!

have been in teaching for 20 years myself (4 of those were training) and I’m pretty much at the point of exhaustion. When I started my teaching career it wasn’t as hard as it is now and there was definitely more support, funding etc in place. Had a conversation with a colleague a few days ago who asked me if I wanted to move schools, I said NOPE! I cannot see myself working in education much longer because of the reasons stated in this thread! One of the main reasons is pupil behaviour and accountability. There just isn’t any from them, or their parents…

gave my TAS stuff to photocopy a week ahead etc I managed it like I did In Business

Goodness.

TAs are not our admin assistants...