Thinking of switching careers to become a teacher - thoughts?

[Bettymum]

I have a science degree but I'm an accountant, so I get well paid but I have a long commute, long hours, and I've been doing this for 16 years [old emoticon] and frankly I've had enough and I miss my children.
DD will be starting school next September, DS will only be 30 months.
So...am I mad to consider jacking in my job and retraining as a primary teacher? I want to do something that adds value to society, and other than being a good parent, surely being a good teacher is adding huge value. I know I will take a massive paycut but I think we could manage.
Opinions from primary teachers please! Am I insane or do you love your job?

Another teacher here (ex primary senior leader) and I agree with Custard and Merry Magdalene.

Some more important things to note:

• Teaching is very physically demanding. You are performing a lot of the time, you are on your feet a lot of the day and if you teach younger children you are bending and stooping quite a bit. You speak most of the time, you have hundreds of interactions per day and the noise level can be very wearing. The out-of-hours work is a real drag. I didn't mind it for the first few years, then it slowly, slowly began to eat away at my motivation.
  You always have to be prepared. If you have a bad night's sleep, a row with your spouse or even just want to go out for the evening, you still have to be prepared for the next day's teaching before the start of the working day. In many jobs you can arrive at 8.30 or 9.00, take a breath, look around then get started on your working day, in teaching you have a lot of work to do before your day begins. *More and more is being demanded of teachers as time goes on. Yet the criticism you get in the press, from random people you meet, on places like MN...it can get you down.

Have you thought of going into training as a chartered accountant? eg. working for BPP or FT.

Oh tosh. Do it.

Yes I definitely work 16 hour days, marking actually makes me cry and it is so emotionally draining that I sometimes can't sleep, BUT I can leave at 4.00 if I want to (and do the work after baby has gone to bed) and I do get school holidays.

Also, I can't imagine any way in which I could give more back to society on a regular basis. Today I have belly-laughed and snorted on several occasions due to the comedy of working with kids* and feel so fulfilled I'm struggling to focus right now (admittedly, things'll probably go tits-up tomorrow and I'll be sobbing).

I'd echo other people in saying that going for Secondary Maths or Chemistry might be a better idea in terms of getting jobs.

*was looking at the 'forest boy' story with a low ability group of 16 year olds today. We'd looked at a clip from The Jungle Book and Tarzan as context and were discussing these. And the question comes: 'What did they eat as babies?', so I explained that they'd probably suckled wolves/ monkeys depending on the situation. Cue a super hard boy miming sucking from a dog, with it running away from him:' No miss, it wouldn't work'. And the whole class tried, but sadly all of them found that their fictional dogs/ wolves/ monkeys ran away before they could feed from them. Thus it was proved, incontrovertably, that I was incorrect. I was unable to reply due to the image of 20 16 year olds earnestly trying to breastfeed fictional animals.

I'm with tortu. I've only been qualified as a teacher for 3 years - teach secondary science, A level biol and health and social. i love it. It is beyond fab - you can gave a real blast with the kids, and do something useful. Results day is something else
I have to say, unlike previous posters that i find it fairly family friendly. i drop dcs off at 7.45 am and am at school for 8am, some folk are there before me but the vast majority of staff arrive between 8 and 8.15.
Apart form parents eves and meeting you have total flexibility after school - if the dcs need picking up then i can be at their school by 4 pm, if they have clubs then i stay at school and work. Compared to my previous job where a 6 pm leave was early - at school anything goes, and nearly everything can be brought home with you to do later - I do work every evening during the week, but tend to work only sun afternoon at weekends.
And i get all the holidays off with my own kids!
TBH thought the real reason i'd say go for it is that it is such fun, and so fulfilling, and the kids are great. I genuinely can't believe what a great job i've ended up in

Working hours (Primary): 7:45-5, home, kids to bed, dinner, work 10-12
Saturday: 10-5 (60 hr week) Report writing time, both Saturday and Sunday. I went part time to cut it to 40 hrs / week, and I never felt that I got it all done.
However, it is never ever ever boring - no matter how tired you are, you never fall asleep. It is (mostly) lovely to be with such interesting little people, and you can get the real sense of helping someone and making a difference.
If you were thinking of being able to cope with a pay cut, why not reduce your present hours and try to spend a day a week volunteering in a school?

Am I the only teacher on here that feels a bit sad that it is so difficult for people? I am not against being committed, and do not have a problem with working hard, but it seems that something is not right in the teaching profession to have people quitting when they have a family.

Reading the replies it looks like those who put in the longest hours are teaching Primary. I would recommend Secondary for more fun, more challenging subject matter, slightly more sensible hours and interesting days.

Surely if a teacher is putting in a 60 hour week normally there is a problem with the management of the school. This should not be necessary. I have never known Secondary teachers who have had to put this much time in regularly. I do ten hour days at school but rarely take any work home.

I teach in a middle school with a secondary set up.

I love teaching but since having DD is has become harder. I can no longer get in early to set up (due to nursery run) or stay as long as I might have done in the past.

Having the holidays with her is fab but my output is much lower because I can't ear Mark a solid couple of weeks for work.

Training is hard as a 20 something with no dependants, I personally can't see how I could do it in my present situation.

Having said that, would I do anything else? No way!

My DH is Head of Key Stage 3 plus he mentors other teachers and also does outreach to primary, plus several other responsibilities and teaches Science. He leaves home at 7am and gets home at 7pm. He puts the kids to bed and then sits down and has dinner. He then does a couple of hours work before bedtime. At weekends he does his work in the evenings.

He has never been to any of the kids sports day or other activities and trying to get to parents evenings is very hit and miss. If he is ill for more than a fortnight in a year then he is cautioned and it goes on his record. The year when swine flu was prevelant was awful as he contracted it and then had to take the time off as per the schools guidelines and then he caught the flu which was sweeping the school and went back far to early and it took it's toll on him.

Teaching is not easy.

You see, I think in my second or third year of primary teaching I probably would have been with Tortu - hard work but fabulous. Some of my best moments, my most emotional connections, my most rewarding days have been in teaching.

On an ordinary week my working hours were generally 8 - 6pm with a working lunch, then another 1.5 hours Monday - Thursday evenings plus 5 or 6 hours on a Sunday. So 60 + hours. But I never, ever managed to get it all done, so constantly felt inadequate and as if I wasn't doing enough. Then working hours would go up significantly around busy times such as report writing.

But by year 7 - 8 I was slowly but surely getting burnt out. Planning was taking me longer and longer, I found that my ideas were taking longer to come and my creativity seemed to be exhausted.

I have now been away from the classroom for two years (1 year mat leave, 1 year career break) and haven't found myself wanting to go back. I have just been offered a non-teaching job and am hoping that spells the end of my days in the classroom.

Just returning to say thank you all again for your posts, have had a couple of horrendous days at work so haven't been able to get on to MN to reply. I have a lot to think about, and I'm going to talk to a couple of teachers this weekend to get some more thoughts.
Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

It is a great job in that it is always interesting and never boring. It is just such a shame that you never really get away from it-even on holiday you are thinking 'I might buy that, it could be useful'.

I have been teaching for just over 10 years now. I still regularly have to work until 11pm or later (at least once a week) and spend several hours (4-6) getting ready on a Sunday. But I wouldn't swap it for anything. And the pay is really not that bad if you take on additional responsibilities over time. You do have to love it. It is not a job for the faint-hearted.

In response to one of the posts, I am a secondary school teacher. The management of my school is excellent (I am part of it, not that there is necessarily a causal link). I would expect staff to be doing some work at home to produce excellent lessons day in day out. It is possible to do it all without taking any work home but only if you are prepared to just teach the same lessons year in, year out.

Think that a while back several very detailed teachers' workload surveys were done, teachers filled in a diary of what they did. May be useful in getting information on average working hours etc.

I would say that average working day is -get to school at 7.30am-def by 8am, leaving is up to you but the work needs to be done whether at work or school and takes most of the evening, outside cooking and putting DCs to bed. It takes one day at the weekend, and chunks of the holidays.

Also with teaching there is always something else to do, you can never do everything so have to learn to prioritise quickly.

Inspection time is a frigging nightmare.

To me the crucial question would be whether you would have to work full-time as a teacher? I have 3 youngish children and teach Secondary 2 days a week. I really like and I would recommend it. In my experience it is pretty family-friendly as a part-time job but would be tough as a full-time job with young children. In terms of hours I do 7.30 til roughly 4.30, then some prep at home while children at school/nursery on days at home. You would be doing a lot more than that your first year but prep time does get less as you get more experienced. But do research the job market. Where I live you would have much better prospects as a Secondary Maths teacher than as in Prmiary

My genuine advice would be to think long and hard about this. I love having the holidays off with my 2 dds but term times are very difficult. In the past, I left the house very early and usually got home at about 5:30pm. After the usual domestic stuff / dd's homework supervision etc, I then started my own planning/marking etc. This was completely unsustainable and incompatible with a happy family life. I now teach 2 days a week - 'float' teacher covering colleagues' PPA time - which involves less evening and weekend work. I will not be advising either of my dds to enter the profession!!!

PPA cover or job shares are best-then you can work on your 'days off' and have evenings and weekends free.

messalina why do you say you expect teachers to be doing work at home in the evening?

Our head doesn't mind where/when teachers do their work- some prefer to get home quickly after school (esp if have young children) and then work at home in the evening while others prefer to stay at school to get things done and go home later.

Little note from a non teacher. DH leaves the house at 7.00 every morning - has to travel on public transport for an hour and tends to return at 8.30 - 9.30 in the evening. He is away on business over this weekend. He will regularly get up in the night to jot down a note for business reasons, he usually spends at least 6 hours working at weekends and when the dc were very small I recall a year when he went into work every weekend except for five. He takes about three to four weeks of holiday each year and always in the school holidays because we have children.

I work locally (at a large educational establishment) as a professional manager. I am in work by about 9.15 each day (yes I do have the flexibility to drive ds to school in the morning) but rarely leave before 5.45 and usually do at least 8 hours work a week at home week in and week out and much more in a crisis. I am so lucky because I get just over 7 weeks of holiday each year and this is very very generous. I have to take them in school holidays because we have children - much like other parents so teachers really can't complain about lack of flexibility here in my opinion. I work manically all the time I am there, I rarely take a lunch, I cannot shout at my customers or be rude to stakeholders - have lost count of the number of times a teacher has been exceptionally rude to me over the years. I have to manage adults and get them to co-operate to keep a happy office. Aspects of my work are very stressful and I am not allowed to return a 25% failure rate in what I do.

Just wanted to give a little perspective to those teachers who think that nobody else in the world works as hard as they do - all working people work hard. Do you teachers know how irritating it is when you tell parents in a very complaining way that you have been working all day before parents evening and that your staff are very tired at the end of term. We all are but we wouldn't dream of complaining about it to our customers or external stakeholders and some of us don't get 14 weeks of holiday to spend with our dc or very much flexibility either.

Where has anyone said that teachers are the only ones that work hard?

I work long hours - about 11 in school and a few hours at home every evening. I then do about 4 hours at the weekend.

I know some colleagues work less so it is possible. I would not let the hours put you off a job that is very rewarding. I think it helps though if you have a partner who has a less intensive job.

Bettymum I am retraining as a secondary teacher and it is a lot of work.

I am seriously wondering what I have done! I am doing a GTP which is a really good route but the ironing basket is looking ominous (a sure sign that I am busy)

I think you need to do a couple of things; firstly, as others have said, research the employment prospects locally - anecdotally in my area it is hard to find a full-time, permanent primary teaching job. This is also the first year for a while that there is no £6k bursary for PGCE primary students, which suggests that there are enough qualified teachers out there (ie they don't want to encourage more with the cash!).

A secondary job teaching maths might offer more opportunities I imagine.

Secondly, do you have some experience in teaching or working with children? That's essential - it's not so easy to get a training place to teach. I have gone into my role with about five years of weekly helping in primary (one morning a week on my day off), plus some relief TA work in primary and cover supervisor work in secondary, plus a year as a cover supervisor in a secondary school. That's not dissimilar to most of the people on my GTP course - a lot of them have worked for years in schools, as TAs and in other roles.

BTW re long in the tooth, I am 47, and there are certainly at least 5 others on my course who are over 40.

HTH and good luck whatever you decide to do.

Great post Custardcake