Supply Teachers, can you help me?

[Mowgli1970]

I'm considering giving up my p/t teaching job and doing supply work. I'd only want a couple of days a week, nothing long term. I'd join an agency.

Could I stipulate when I join that I can only cover planned absence? Can I specify an area within which I'm able to work?

What are the pros and cons of supply teaching if you're doing it (I know the theory but want first hand experience)?

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

Yes you can stipulate when/what age/where/how often you would like to work. However, in my experience the Agencies would often call, saying they were 'desperate' etc and could I cover xxxx. The worst kind of calls were at 8.45am asking me to cover a Y6 class (Infant trained), half an hour away, in a city I wasn't familiar with, with no work set. I only got 'talked' around a couple of times as I didn't like the feeling of being out of my depth and not doing the best job I could. If you can stand your ground, you will be fine though.

Your best bet is to get out to as many schools as possible and get your face known. If you work in a school you like, give the office your number so they can contact you directly with work (but still work through the agency). I got lots of work in nice schools doing this. In the end, I had a few 'core' schools that used me and it was nice to build some kind of relationship with the staff and children.

Pros? Flexibilty, none of the paper work/meetings/parents evenings/report writing. The ability to leave it all behind at 3.30, getting to work in a variety of schools. As a recently qualified teacher, it was excellent experience for me.

Cons? Not always a steady stream of work, 'bad' schools, not beig able to build up proper relationships with the children and not having the sese of achivement of seeing them through the year.

On the whole, I enjoyed supply teaching but ultimately, I wanted a permanent position (which I ended up getting through doing supply). Some days I didn't feel I earnt my money at all...one day I was asked to spend the afteroon wrapping Christmas presesnts for the Christmas party!! I didn't feel tooo guilty as other days, I earnt it three times over.......

Good luck.

Why limit yourself to agency work? If you contact your county council, get on their list, then go around all your local schools where you would like to work. Introduce yourself face to face, leave contact details, cv etc. Then you can choose where you go, what days, year groups etc when they contact you. You will get paid through the council dependent on the normal pay spine, whereas agencies charge the schools more, take a great lump out of it for themselves and you get a vastly reduced amount for a harder days work. I also found that most 'decent' schools (easier day!) don't use agencies, they like to have more autonomy over who teaches in the school. Most have a bank of people they use, which you could join. Agencies will rip you off and always try to hassle you to go to schools, year groups, days that you'd rather not do. That was my experience anyway.
But supply is great. Just go in SAS style, do the job, mark it, then go home and forget about it!
The only thing is the CRB checks. It might take longer to get established as it used to be that each school had to do their own check. Total waste of money, hopefully they have changed the system now. The agency obviously only do the one check, but they will charge you for it (used to be about £40), whereas the schools do it themselves if going through the council, so that slowed the whole process up. Good luck!

It's getting increasingly grim - if you've got a decent full-time post right now I'd hang onto it to be honest - with TAs/HLTAs/Cover Supervisors starting to kick into primary a lot more covering classes - the work's getting thinner on the ground, especially if you want to be picky about what you take (I am!). Once you get known to an agency (no LEA lists anymore around lots of places) and build up a bit of a history of working well in schools it gets easier - you get repeat bookings so you learn faces and names etc, but that takes time, and the staff turnover in some agencies is such that you're always faced with the possibility that the consultant you get on well with may move on and you'll get another who, to put it bluntly, just doesn't like you - I've been through it, it hammered my work down to the ground and thankfully the one who didn't like me moved to a different desk fairly quickly!

Pros:
I leave problems at the school gates, if it's a cruddy day in a grot school - I never have to go back there! I get the fun stuff of being in front of a class teaching, without the extra stuff that drags the life out of you. I get endless variety - can be chalking numbers on the playground with reception one day, and learning about India at the other end of the school the next (or even one in the morning, one in the afternoon). Once you get a group of schools you tend to bounce between - it gets really nice as you know the kids (but without all the paperwork) and you've got some status as being a regular face in the school.

Cons:
Not knowing where the loos are and the politics of staffroom chairs/coffee! It can be quite a lonely existence - there are days where no one apart from the kids calls you by a name other than "the supply".

Morning calls - I hate them - I don't do them, the agencies know by now that I'm utterly shite at them and liable to ignore my phone at 7am - they try to give me the option, but it's taken a long while for them to get to the level with me where they'll accept that. I'm picky about ages/areas I'll work at - it cuts down on the work I get (but Y6 post-Sats are NOT fun to do supply cover with!), but I'd rather do the stuff I do well, than stuff I'm not as good at.

Behaviour - you're constantly having to push harder with class management to resist the testing of boundaries that they get out of the way the start of September with their full-time teacher.

Mind-reading... apparently this is something you acquire the day you start on supply. You can get negative feedback for the most ridiculous reasons (my most noteable one was not knowing that reception had to do PE in utter silence... how was I meant to know that telepathically?). You often don't get told that assembly, despite being 9.10 on the timetable, is actually at 11.03 am on the second Monday in the thirteenth month of the year - or whatever... you're just expected to KNOW!

September... it's dire, it never isn't dire - budget accordingly. July's a bit of a dead loss as well. I mark SATs and tutor - it keeps us partially afloat but we do rely on my husband's income a lot. You CAN sign on for contribution-based JSA during the summer - but it's usually a collossal pain in the rear getting them to accept the claim (see the TES supply forum if you're wanting the low-down on that can of worms - about the start of July is generally a good time to find about 30 threads on it).

The incredibly stalking lesson. That one that every school in an age group is doing on a particular week - Katie Morag I'm looking at YOU! - you end up teaching it five times, to five classes over the course of the week. PE and Music have the peculiar habit of stalking me in a similar way too - as has yard duty!

Agencies - good, bad and downright awful. From the not taking CRB portability saga that means I get landed with the best part of a hundred-quid bill for them all expiring at once! You can get agencies and consultants that are very very arm-twisty about you doing stuff that you're not comfortable with, who ignore your requests for work preferences - and you can get some utter gems. There are some right bullshit merchants out there though and if you're in the game for any length of time you see the same fibs repeating themselves - the phonecall in the second week of July telling me they were "about to get really busy" had me nearly wetting myself with laughter!

Oh and add in that you'll be blamed for everything, that quite often full-time teachers seem to rabidly hate you (I love the "overpaid crossword addict" insult someone threw at supplies), you get schools that seem to deliberately TRY to trip you up in order to complain about you to the agency, and the odd double/cancelled-booking wild goose chase.

I'd look into it very carefully these days - I love doing supply, but it seems to be getting more financially perilous each year, and I lose more and more of my regular schools to getting in-house on the cheap cover.

If you're doing it - buy a sat-nav... seriously - it beats the 7.30am magical mystery tour with an A-Z balanced on your knees no end!