To return to teaching when I found it so stressful.

[Glitterpantsarebestinpurple]

I left teaching after 2 small children a few years ago and felt instant relief and a sense of calm . Mental health hugely improved.

All I had done was teach . So I found it hard to get a new role . My current job pays 30k . Been there 2 years . Every job I look at is a similar salary . I feel super stuck . I need more money.

My teaching salary was 39k. That is now 47k. When I looked at take home for 47k it is £900 more than I earn a month !’ That is once moreeverything has been taken out ( pension /tax)

£900 pcm is over 10k a year ! It would be massive to my family . Teaching pay is going up and my role has gone up £500 in the last two years !

Plus obviously I’d have the holidays which would be useful when my children go to
l school!

Am I crazy to go back to a carer which I found so stressful ?

Thank you.
For the most part I am happy and enjoy work! Flexible role and can manage my diary and work it so I can drop children and occasionally even whizz to the supermarket , clean the house on my lunch breaks! If I need time off for an appointment I pop it in my diary. It all works. I suppose I just feel like I’m failing as I earn a lot less. There isn’t scope in this role to progress but it works . You are right. Why not just accept it works for me while my children are young and then I will have to start the steps to the next carer. You are so right that out of teaching alot of role on 30k plus require management ! Thanks for this post. .

It sounds like we are in similar roles, I left teaching two years ago and it took me about a year to fully decompress and I love the flexibility of my current role and the benefits of working at home. But I also find it isolating going from talking to 150+ people a day to just DD and whoever is on my screen, I feel I've lost my 'spark' a bit and miss the atmosphere of a school. My ideal job would be a pastoral role, I loved TAing for more than actual teaching but they pay so little it's just not an option and DD is a teen so I don't even have the excuse of needing the holidays.
I'm on £33k the next step is line management at £42k which would be nice but also my current role is easy and no pressure.

Some things to bear in mind:

• could you go back part time? I only know one teacher who stayed full time after having kids and it was her DH who went part time (also a teacher, lower down the pay scale)

• AFAIK schools are starting to ask teachers on UPS to take on a whole school responsibility to stay on UPS. And as others have said, is there a guarantee you'd get the same role / UPS if you went back?

• Definitely only worth attempting it in a school with supportive SLT, do you know any teachers in the area who could advise?

I also think more experienced staff especially those who join a new school can be treated particularly terribly, IME. They seem to be treated like their experience is worth less or nothing and that they're a nuisance, and I think leadership are more keen to get them off the payroll. I say that as a teacher in my 5th year - schools facing budget constraints seem to pick keen ECTs especially ones with no sense of work-life balance and appropriate demands and boundaries over more experienced teachers.

This! ⬆️ Plus you now have 2 small children. How do you foresee it being any less impactful on your mental health than it was when you left?

I say this as a Primary School Teaching Partner, looking to get out!!

Do you mind me asking what you do now? Considering leaving the job myself!

OP, do your research before you go back into teaching. I agree with others that the job feels harder than it did 5 few years ago. Covid has had a massive impact on kids' behaviour and motivation- it does feel like a hard slog each day!

I left to work for an arms-length body of DEFRA, very flexible, still science based, great working conditions. Downsides are whilst WFH is great it is also isolating I can travel to an office but my team is dispersed so would be working on Teams anyway so it doesn't make sense to do a 90min commute and pay for parking to sit and look at the screen I could at home.

@Usernamenope To avoid being too outing I will say I did one of those training schemes that is like Teach First but not for teaching (Frontline, Think Ahead, Unlocked etc). It meant getting paid to retrain in a new profession (albeit with an initial huge paycut). I was qualified within a year. Within 3 years of making the change I was at a similar salary to UPS 3 after getting a promotion. Now on a bit more. I will admit the first year was financially painful and it felt scary to start afresh as a novice in a new area; however the teaching experience did help and I'm now so glad I made the change.

Fuck no. Wouldn’t go back for 1 minute.

All of my nightmares are teaching related. I occasionally wake up panicking that I can’t find the classroom, or I’m teaching a class and can’t get any names right. Or none of the kids will follow instructions. Sometimes I’m naked and my teeth fall out while I’m teaching. Sometimes I’ve got to teach a class I know nothing about and no one has left a lesson plan.
None of these things ever happened in real life (well, except the last one, more than once!) and I’m always so relieved when I wake up and realise I don’t teach any more.

I never ever have nightmares about my current job. I don’t wake up at 3 worrying about how I’m going to get Rupert, who was born missing part of his brain and can’t remember what a comma is for, or what school he goes to, or when his birthday is, up to his target grade C in English (also comes up in my bad dreams occasionally!) as does the time there was a full scale riot, and another time where all the windows in my classroom were smashed by kids trying to get to another kid hiding in there.

Or colour coded marking.

Or the time my colleague was stabbed.

I worked in pretty nice schools, for the most part.

so Fuck no. Not for anything. Especially now I have 2 kids I actually want to spend time with.