Retraining as a teacher? What are my options?

[KoreanBeauty]

Name changed. Posting here for high traffic. Short summary of my situation:
I will be 40 next year and am fed up with my work. I don’t hate it but the thought of doing the same thing for the next 25+ years depresses me. I work as a Talent Acquisition partner for an insurance firm.
I earn well (£70K plus bonus), live in London hence big mortgage, have a 5 year old DC and DH earns less than me and has limited career options.
I am trying to figure out what else I could do and sometimes teaching comes to mind. I hear a lot of negatives and horror stories about it though. What I am looking for is:

• a more rewarding career that isn’t just about meeting KPIs and pleasing entiled VPs at my business. Want to move away from office politics and pressure to climb a ladder at all costs
• job stability and a decent pay (although of course I know teaching would mean a big paycut)
• Something that gives me purpose and than can also be a bit fun

Now on to my qualifications. I am originally from Italy and studied languages and literature there, I hold a Masters degree. I have been in the UK for 16 years and have 15 years of corporate experience in HR/Talent Acquisition. That’s pretty much it. What could I teach and are those teachers training programs that also pay you whilst qualifying any good?

Sadly, as Italian isn't a mainstream modern foreign language to learn, I think you'd struggle to find a job as an Italian teacher. Do you speak any other European languages? What was your degree in?

The pay cut would be huge. Once qualified, you'd be on about half your current salary, rising to about £45K over the subsequent 6 years, but you'd also have to qualify. There are different routes to qualification. The traditional one is a PGCE year, followed by getting a job. In your first year of work you are still training, so you are on a 90% teaching timetable and correspondingly reduced pay. You get QTS at the end of your first year. There are in-work training programmes, but you'd be looking at a salary of not much more than minimum wage.

Big pay cut? Halve your current salary then try to pay your mortgage!
KPIs? Teachers have A LOT of targets.
Office politics will reappear as staff room politics.
You’ll need to climb the ladder to pay your bills in London.
Yes, teaching has purpose and can be quite fun but don’t underestimate the workload which is phenomenal.
Imo as a retired teacher reconsider a different avenue.

By the time you’ve put in the necessary hours you’re basically on NMW. Some teachers are working in appalling conditions. Is this what you dream of?

Italien isn't big subject to teach? Can you teach other subjects?
Can you take the pay cut?

Thanks all. Looks like I need to consider different options or just suck it up for the next 25 years if I am lucky to get there!?

On the positive side, you say you studied languages to Masters level in Italy, so hopefully you speak other languages which could be more in demand in schools than Italian? Your background as a recruiter could possibly also be appealing to potential employers, if you can sell yourself as potentially useful in supporting pupils in their career planning. There's not much if any funding for this sort of thing in schools these days, but it could be a nice-to-have perhaps.

On the negative side, I made a move into teaching and regretted it. After completing my NQT year I escaped again, and never looked back. The workload in teaching is really excessive in my opinion. Every half term was like a tunnel of unrelenting labour from which I would only emerge when the holidays came around again.

And don't focus too much on those holidays either: on paper you may have 13 weeks of them but you can discount the last week before the start of each new half term as you'll need the time for lesson planning and catching up on admin you couldn't get done during termtime. I honestly worked harder in each of those six weeks of the 'holidays' than I do in a given week of a full-time office job now.

That leaves seven weeks' real holiday. You could get similar in other sectors, e.g., the Civil Service, and teachers have the disadvantage of never being able to take holidays in termtime.

Unless you are incredibly organised and motivated, REALLY love kids and learning and are 100% committed to the idea of teaching, I would urge you to think again.

Perhaps look for a part time position doing something more similar to your current role, then use the non-working days for something which makes you feel really fulfilled. Volunteering, building your own business, travelling....

You could teach Italian, probably very successfully and profitability, just not in schools.
Consider offering small classes in conversational italian to groups of adults.
You could incorporate ' events ' like practicing going to restaurants / shops and even estate agents and ordering in Italian. You could involve local businesses.

How about classes in Italian for business.
And
Short courses offered to companies for their employees.

What about ones for student travel and people touring the country independently of a travel agent.

Once you work out what you can charge and how to limit your overheads teaching is going to look like a really poor return on your time.

Plus you could start this now! And even go part time with your current job whilst you get it off the ground as mostly it would be outside business hours.

Could you do some tutoring starting as a side hustle and then reducing your days at work as your tutoring business grows? Teaching is not rewarding due to a completely broken system. The bit with the children is great (unless there’s significant behaviour issues in the class) but the rest (meetings, politics, pointless paperwork, lack of flexibility, risible salary..) is so so awful. You can work 24/7 but you’ll always be spread too thinly to make the difference you would like to and your own family will suffer.

I’m not saying don’t retrain, but you would be bonkers to go into teaching in your shoes!

Honestly if you think you won't have constant targets to meet you know little about teaching. You will need to do a pgve and then you do your nqt year which you also have to pass. It's an endurance test frankly that doesn't get much better after you qualify

Teaching is not for the faint hearted

I think any career change is expensive in mid-life snd particularly difficult if you are the main earner. Have you thought of other ways of finding fulfilment? Eg a weekly volunteering slot or art class?

Oh my god, are you mad? Why on earth would you want to switch? Also I can't imagine teaching in a London school, you'd have to be really careful which one you got in.

Also, fun? Teaching hasn't had any space for fun for about twenty years. And you think you'd be escaping targets and stress????

For £70,000 a year plus bonuses you just need to stick with your current job.

Thanks all! I clearly know nothing about teaching and had a romanticised idea of it all!

Ex-teacher here. DO NOT DO THIS!

It’s your husband who needs to rethink his career, not you (and not as a teacher).

I think honestly it might just be a case of switching companies. Whether it’s the best market right now to do that is another story, but is it the job you dislike or the company. Could more of a partnering role work better or even a role elevation which gets you more involved in strategy & stretches you beyond talent a bit be appealing? Maybe somewhere with good perks.

Absolutely this. Ex teacher and live with a Senco. Do not enter it if you are on 70K now. The targets are unrelenting. People think it’s either going to be like Dead Poet’s Society or Dangerous Minds depending on their outlook.

I’m a cleaner now 🙃.

I retrained as a primary school teacher in my early 40s with two young children. I found a school which offered a salaried training year and had my own class straight away. Subsequently I completed the two year ECT programme (NQT hasn’t been a thing for a while now) and am now on my 5th year of teaching.

Yes, it’s very hard work and obviously not flexible in term time. There are very few weekends and holidays where I don’t have some work I need to do. The holidays however do make up for it and my children are now used to that rhythm. It does help that my DH has flexible working so he and my DMum support in practical ways with pickup and dropoff so that my children don’t have to spend too much time in breakfast/after school clubs.

Previously I worked in arts management so only the first few years were a pay cut for me. It would be nice to be paid more but I don’t find the pay terrible and if I needed to I could take extra holiday work on as some other teachers do.

Some things to consider - there are still “office” politics and not just at school - everyone you meet has a view on education and you can feel worn down by negative coverage in the media or online. Some school leaders have worked in education all their careers so they don’t have management experience which can feel frustrating at times. Many schools are in multi-academy trusts so you do find that you have to please them as well as Ofsted of course and sometimes you have to carry things out in a way you personally don’t agree with.

Most new teachers are young so there can be something of a divide or assumptions made about older teachers. I haven’t really made any friends other than superficially. The flip side is that some of the younger teachers ask my advice and it can be nice to fulfil a mentoring role.

There is also an expectation that you take on extra responsibility. So far I’ve led two subjects, been year head, mentored students and taken an additional qualification. Only one of those paid me any extra! Moving from main to upper pay scale comes quicker than you think so at least those extra strings to my bow should help with that.

In terms of what you are looking for, I’ve found primary teaching to be rewarding and purposeful, with the benefits of stability and school holidays. I’ve also found it quite fun! The children are great and you build fantastic relationships with them that seem impossible in September. You become a family for the year - and with all the parents too.

The pay, politics and ladder-climbing may still be sticking points, but I would think more deeply before discounting it as a career and consider primary teaching as an option. Presumably your 5yo has just started primary so could you gain some experience there or look around your local area? Good luck whatever you decide.

Most schools are looking for Spanish and possibly French, rather than Italian. (Spanish has taken over from French - probably because of the popularity of Spanish holidays and the fact that monolingual anglophones find it easier to learn than French.)

Wages and conditions in Scotland are a bit better than those in England, but...You'd only reach 70k again if you managed to gain promotion. A probationer here gets 33.5k. The pay scale then goes from 40k to 50.5k over 5 years.

I'm 65. Last did a bit of supply last year. I was hit twice.

Once it was possibly my own fault - I stepped between two boys to stop a fight and the punch hit the back of my hand. The other time, two boys came running into my classroom as my class was leaving at the end of the period. I was slightly hurt getting the attacker out of my room. (It also gave me deja vu - I had a more serious incident of the same nature 20 years ago.)

In Scotland, you would need to go through a PGDE for a year in order to be allowed into a private school where you might have more opportunity to teach Italian. I'm not sure about England. (You used to be able to teach in a private school here without teacher training.)

Can anyone here with experience working in the English private sector advise?