Am a psychologist...wanting to retrain as a teacher. Advice needed please!

[raindropsonroses5]

Hi everyone, just wanted some advice from MNers who are experienced in this field.

I'm 36, living in London, a psychologist & a relatively new mum (I have a 1 year old). I am about to finish a PhD which has to do with child psychology- also have an MSc in the field. Have done a few jobs in between mainly in nursery school settings & research settings. Also jobs as seminar teacher at university level.

I've always known I want to work with young children & was planning to go into clinical psychology, educational psychology or psychotherapy (working with children). However, I'm more & more realizing the negatives in those fields- and am thinking of possibly retraining as a primary school teacher, as that is something that will provide (I hope) a more happy everyday life & a more balanced working year (regarding holidays etc). I also feel I don't really want to work with extremely difficult problems- such as working in child therapy involves- nor do I want to go into a lengthy training (again such as educational or child therapy involve).

As I said, am about to finish my PhD (probably in december) and am planning to get a part-time job this year (maybe in january, but could be earlier).

What do you think are my options in order to explore getting into teaching (or finding the right career path for me)? Where can I get advice? What I definitely want to do is to work at the same time as doing any teaching training (or other training).

Thanks in advance.

Soulbury salary scales for Educational Psychologists from 1 September 2008
Educational Psychologists ? Scale A
Spine point1
Salary from 1.9.08
£32,163
33,243
34,327
35,49236,588 37,688 38,787 39,899 40,998 42,129 43,219*
44,308
45,395
46,482
47,578
48,664
49,741

• Minimum age 35 fully qualified ** Extension to main scale to accommodate discretionary scale points and structured professional assessments

Hi raindrops - I presume you are a member of the BPS?

There is an article on becoming an ed psych in this month's copy of The Psychologist. Haven't read it myself yet but it might be worth a look.

I intend to read it as I would love to be an EP but don't have any teaching experience and getting several year's worth of relevant experience would leave me pushing 50 before I could get started on becoming chartered. You are younger than me though so it would be easier for you.

I am pondering teaching psychology to 14 to 19 yr olds but don't have any core subjects so not sure anybody would want to train me!

Sorry if you have already looked at this on the BPS website but interesting if you haven't.

Fully agree with dogofpoints and I teach part time........don't do it.

cat64 - EPs don't have to be teachers any more. You do however, have to have considerable experience (yrs rather than mths) of working with children eg SALT, TA, play worker, early years worker etc.

They (the BPS) have made the training more rigourous to compensate for less direct teaching experience.

If you want to get into teaching here is the website that explains all the options.

One word of warning- there is a glut of primary school teacher graduates at the moment and jobs cna be fairly hard to come by.