Teacher changing subject specialism

[Al232]

Hello, can anyone advise me on how to change subject specialism. I am a secondary school science teacher, with 4 years experience and would like to teach art.
I enjoy working at a secondary school age group, and science is an area I love helping pupils learn, but I feel I would make a better art teacher as it is what I practice outside of school and thoroughly enjoy more.
Do you need to train again at university to teach this subject or as I have a PGdipEd and diploma in art and design, can I apply for a teacher of art vacancy?
Any replies would be greatly appreciated.

I trained in one subject at PGCE but never taught it after that and did my NQT year teaching a completely different subject, and applied for roles teaching yet another different subject. You will need to be able to demonstrate capability. Can you join some art lessons at your current school?

Or possibly arrange a split timetable?

I changed mine - from maths to Special Needs. I left my school, for a child-rearing career break and was contacted by my headteacher a couple of years later and offered a short term contract to cover a maternity leave. I stayed in SEN for the rest of my teaching life.

Could you, perhaps, request that any cover lessons you do are within the Art department, if possible.
Could you ask the school time-table person to give you a Key Stage 3 art group in September?

Thank you for your replies I could ask to cover an art group, I have thought about SEN too previously working as an SEN TA and I loved it.

Sadly, SEN teaching posts are rare these days (too expensive!) Many more Art teaching jobs available.

Best of luck to you OP.

Once qualified you can technically teach anything.

Given you're a science teacher and art jobs are far and few between, the main thing would be convincing a school that you're as good or better than an art specialist who has a degree in a relevant area. I know some people have done supply to build their skills in different areas, though that's mainly people moving to primary or SEN.

You could make it known to SLT that if they needed someone to teach out of subject due to timetabling that you'd happily offer art as a second subject. Whether you get taken up on the offer will depend on timetabling as in my experience as a fellow core subject teacher, we tend to be very much needed in our departments.

You can actually teach any subject as a qualified teacher (SEN as a main area being the only exception) but you'll have a far harder job finding a job as an art teacher than a science teacher obviously. Not only will you be competing against people with art degrees, but maybe even more importantly most schools only have one full time art teacher or several teachers who teach art and something else, but five or six full time science teachers.

Perhaps you need to look at a split timetable - teaching art and science - as another poster suggested.

Definitely talk to the school about the possibility of teaching both. Much depends on the size of the school (and its art department), but there may sometimes be a need for someone who could pick up a few hours of art. You never know, you might be the solution to a problem, if they have more people wanting to do GCSE than they can timetable with the existing art teacher(s). That at least starts to get you some experience.

If no chance of any timetabled teaching, talk to the art department about whether you can get involved out of hours. They may well allow GCSE students to work in the art rooms at lunchtime or after school, and be very glad of offers to help supervise that.

The problem with applying for jobs is that you've got to show you're going to be better than the other people applying, who may have more training and experience in teaching art than you do. Frankly, your best selling point might be "and I could also teach some science", because usually there are plenty of applicants for the art posts and fewer for science.