Give it to me straight, DP is considering training as a primary school teacher

[OlfactoryFresh]

DP is 40, and has been on the periphery of education for most of his career, facilitating youth workshops, teaching after school clubs, lecturing in FE, being brought in to secondary schools to deliver specific modules that the school can't, that sort of thing.

He (and I) are fed up with the freelance lifestyle and, as he is particularly enjoying the primary school after school clubs he is teaching, the obvious thing to consider is training as a primary school teacher.

So, my question is, is teaching in a school really as hellish as we hear? The whole point of this would be to get a more 9 - 5 (ish) existence, with a decent reliable salary. There's no point making the change if he'll be working evenings and weekends.

Yout thoughts please!

I'm a primary teacher with over ten years experience. I work part time 3 days a week. I'm in school by 7.45, work through breaks and leave at 5.45. I then do about 3/4 hours prep on one of my days off. I've managed to stream line much of the paperwork and my school has a reasonable expectation regarding marking workload.

I work maybe 1/2 days from home each holiday. Possibly more in the summer.

With parents evenings, extra curricular stuff and evening/weekend events I reckon I average 40 hours a week during term time. I'm paid for 20.

I love my job, but do wish I'd chosen a different career path as 15 years down the line I'm only qualified for one, very specific thing and it's not flexible in terms of family time during term time. Schools are very data driven nowadays and workload in some is horrendous with bullying by senior leadership rife.

Despite all this, nothing beats knowing you've made a difference to a child. If this is not what floats your boat then teaching would be a bad choice. Your husband would resent it very quickly in terms of the effect the job has on your personal life.

for noblegiraffe - that sounds totally crap and why dh wouldn't work part time. As you're already doing full time hours for a part time wage.

Genuinely no idea how my friends managing it then. Just a totally different school - no homework/no marking. Very challenging inner city school.

NQTs go into it because they don't realise what it's going to be like. Old hands (like me) stay in it because it's all we know, we aren't qualified to do anything else and we are far enough up the pay scale that starting a new career would mean much less holiday and much less money. Schools are haemorrhaging teachers. I'd be horrified if my children wanted to become teachers... And yet I've just today handed in an application for my first full time teaching job since I had the dc . But we need the money.

I was a late career changer. I do supply as I love being in the classroom but no desire to do all the other stuff. My life is probably what people from the outside think teaching hours are - 8.30-3 Mon-Fri. Nothing like what a FT teacher does. From what I have seen, secondary FT teachers work insane hours, but primary is far, far worse.
I used to work in senior mgmt in industry, and mine was a much more family friendly environment than teaching.

primary workload is brutal. The planning and differentiation and data and shifting goal posts just make it hellish. I teach music, so have very little marking, but have a crazy workload in other areas (planning all school plays - 4 per year, concerts - 2 per term, all schemes of work from nursery to GCSE, managing all our peripatetic staff, providing all music for assemblies, open mornings etc)
But it's not as bad as the class teachers. However the teaching is lovely!

I am a primary teacher - nearly 25 years experience.

I really would not encourage anyone to go into it. The hours, workload and stress is just getting worse imo.

I only stick with it because I don't know what else I could do and earn the same money. Plus I am now part time. I cannot imagine how anyone has the energy to do it fulltime these days. Indeed I have noticed full timers look rather knackered...

If I had my time again I would go into something else.

I generally have my evenings free and weekends free, but that's a result of being in school for a 6:30am start to my day, and leaving at 6:30pm when the caretaker kicks me out. I also work through lunch. I can still end up taking books home after a day that length too.

I prefer the early starts and staging until close and generally going 'hard' in the week, as it means I can switch off and rot on a weekend- but as a parent, your partner won't have the luxury of doing that.

I'm full time primary and I work 7am-10pm most days except Friday

When I taught full time, I tried the 'get in at 7am and work til 6pm' and no work at home approach. In reality, it made me absolutely knackered. I couldn't sustain getting up at 6am, doing a full-on day teaching 200 kids a day, straight into a meeting, then marking, by the time I got home, I just wanted to crawl into bed so there was no point.

It is an all-consuming job. You give so, so much of yourself. It becomes your life.

I would't recommend it.

I teach in a prep school.

Teaching hours are 8-5, plus til 1 on Saturdays, 6 finish 2 night a week. I usually do an hour or two in the evenings, and a few hours on the weekends. We get slightly longer holidays than state schools, but I usually use about 1/5 of each holiday working. I barely see my family, to be honest, and I'm exhausted all the time. As are my colleagues.

I teach secondary where the workload is much lighter than primary. I believe most recent Union survey calculated the average primary school teacher works 60 hours in a school work. Remember they are only paid for 32.5 hours and a new teacher will probably need to work longer hours.

As an NQT in a primary school, I was doing about 70 hours pw average.

At one point I was wondering whether it was because I was new to the job, big learning curve etc, but most of the experienced teachers I know are in school by 7.30, work through break and lunch ( often no time to go to the loo) and are there till 6 or so. They all take work home as well, and do at least half a day at weekends, or can be the whole weekend if there are assessments or reports to do. I used to get up at 6am, and would come home, sort out the kids, then work from about 8pm- 1 am. Not sustainable.
I don't do it anymore!

I was never able to plan to go out, even at the weekend, because there would often be some new requirement of something to be done by Monday morning ( silly things, like " we have decided that all reports should now be printed in x font rather than y font") - after I had already written and printed off 30 reports. And emails on Sunday evening - being faced with the choice of do I open it now and deal with whatever the demand is, thus wrecking any chance of an early night, or risk not having done something suddenly deemed vital for Monday morning. It was a nightmare. Totally unreasonable working conditions - can't imagine how the unions let it get so bad. I'm feeling sick just remembering it - don't do it.

I'm a primary teacher. I leave the house at 7.25am to arrive ten minutes later (I'm by no means the first in!) and leave at 6pm, I then do the dinner, put the kids to bed and start 'work' -I'm marking/planning till at least 10pm when I collapse into bed ready to get up again at 6.30 the next day.

I work for several hours on a Sunday and have just done two hours' work tonight as well.

I've been teaching for nearly twenty years so am experienced, with plenty of lessons up my sleeve and I know lots of short cuts, but it still takes hours. Add to that assessment weeks, learning walks, observations, book scrutinies, data analysis, parents evening etc etc- it's all consuming and can be pretty miserable. If you're much over 45, you are also not popular with SMT!!

If you're going to make an informed decision, look on the TES forums and search for recent threads on here about why people are leaving and why there's a recruitment and retention crisis. Sorry-I struggle to link to threads on my phone but maybe someone else can; there have been some really good ones!

FWIW - a friend who was a primary teacher for 12 years -great teacher, lots of accolades from parents etc - left without a job to go to in Dec because her DH said it was the job or the marriage. He is NOT a LTB type person, just in complete despair. Their DC were utterly fed up they never saw her, and her DH was beyond able to cope with their constant disappointment at her always being too busy for them all

Just a point on pay... An NQT earns approx 22k outside London. Not awful for a 22yo, straight out of uni, but not a great salary for a 40year old with a family. And very poor indeed when calculated across per hour including the huge amount of time Solent prepping and marking outside lesson hours.

That said, I love the job.

My twin daughters, aged 27, are both flourishing and progressing in their fifth year of challenging front-line social work (inner & outer city). The (excellent, dedicated, ambitious, caring & resilient) teaching NQTs of their age with whom I've worked have either quit or are planning to get out of teaching ASAP.

It's a generally toxic environment, past unreasonable, with huge workload inequality between overloaded frontline staff, increasingly needy, deserving children and 'management' which is utterly unfit for purpose. I'm very grateful that my girls didn't go into it. I would advise your DH to look for an alternative job.

80-100 hours a week term time, but not always spread out, so you might have to miss one or more nights sleep

Tell him not to do it. I am in my 6th year of primary teaching and feel totally trapped. The workload is insane and the pay just about covers childcare but wouldn't if I was in my first year. SLT are constantly micro managing and breathing down our necks - I get physically stressed when I have to check my work emails several times a day because there will always be yet another email piling on yet another task or berating us for something or other not done to their ridiculous target driven standards. There are children who I barely see because they are in so many support groups. I never get 2 minutes to feedback with my TA so half the time I don't know how those children are getting on.
It has got so much worse just over the last few years. I used to love my job and felt like I was good at it. Now I still love the teaching part but feel like we don't have enough to time really plan properly and the extra stuff is becoming more and more intense.
Around 90% of the teachers in my school would like to leave but don't know what else to do. The other 10% are on the SLT...

This might be a really stupid question, but why, as a GCSE maths teacher (for example) can't you just buy a set of lesson plans that covers the entire curriculum you need to cover, streamed into 6 different ability options or something. Is that a thing? If not why doesn't it work?

Seems to me that there is a huge amount of duplication of effor wth teachers all working away at home late into the night planning their own lessons.

Obviously you would still need to be familiar with the plan, but that would be less effort than coming up with it and the timings and differentiation etc?

whois, you have to have your own class profile, you have to have your own individual and reviewed targets for each child ( normally three each) you need to plan to show what each child is doing in each part of the lesson, including how you are going to assess that individual child during the lesson, and record the assessment and react to it there and then. etc etc etc etc

so yes, there are commercial schemes of work, they cost thousands, and save no time at all, as you have to adapt each one for each individual in your class.

All this planning and assessing and recording is of no value to anyone, it is just the ofsted requirements.

Teaching is surprisingly enough what gets pupils taught, but its a dirty word, and we are not supposed to do it, we are supposed to be facilitating learning, so what tends to happen is we all make a big show of all that, then on top of that, we secretly teach as much as we can get away with without being caught.

Of course, the secret teaching takes planning too.

And I haven't started on the "deep marking" yet, nor the recording that requires. Marking a piece of work easily takes a teacher three times longer than it takes a student to produce it.

And the marking policies are often a waste of time too. My cousin once spent two full days of half term searching Nottingham for a pen the exact colour she was allowed to mark in, after her new one ran out unexpectedly. This was a bit of a bugger, as half term is only 9 days long, and she had something like 12 full days of marking to do.

still, whois, get the material to teach, then teach it....? well, as an idea, it really is pretty way out, but who knows??? One day in the dim and distant future, maybe this radical approach may be considered in British schools

I'm a maths teacher, I've been teaching for 10 years, and, tbh, I don't have time to lesson plan any more. My planner will say 'adding and subtracting fractions' and I'll walk into the classroom and teach it off the top of my head. I've got a filing cabinet of worksheets and a pile of textbooks. I can't teach off someone else's lesson plan, although I'll happily steal their resources. Every class is different though, something that would work with one class would definitely not work with another. You need to know your classes.

But despite spending very little time lesson planning, I'm still utterly snowed under with work. Marking, mainly. Dealing with emails 'Johnny has a meeting with CAMHS next week, can you feed back on how he is in your lessons'. A big pain in the arse over the last few years has been spreadsheets where you have to manually enter every single score for every single question for every single child on every single exam, to generate a profile of where they went wrong. Intervention plans for kids who just need to pull their finger out. Trying to keep up with all the curriculum changes.

I teach English. I probably do a 50 hour week and could do a lot more but as a single parent need to be there for DS. I take Sunday off but work all day Saturday and every evening.
The bought lesson plans are never dynamic and are clearly developed by people who don't know how children learn.

I'm currently on maternity leave, I'm a primary school teacher. When I was working as a full time teacher I got into school for 0730 worked before the kids arrived at 0830, worked through my break/was on break duty, worked through my lunch/sat with children with behavioural problems/chased SLT/SENCO to talk about children with behavioural problems, after school met with parents of children who had personalised behaviour charts to feed back least bad good and bad bits of their learning/day, went to meetings, marked books, planned lessons, discussed strategies to help child x, left school at 1800, went home, marked books, planned lessons for another 2-3 hours. If it was assessment week I would pretty much work 0730-2200 with breaks only to drive home and go to the loo, I'd eat while I worked. Weekends I'd work at least 2 hours a day. Holidays would be mostly planning and assessment except the summer holiday, only about 1/5 of that was taken up with work.

I returned to work as a supply teacher after my first year of maternity leave but that was just as bad, I took a maternity cover and although I was literally paid 0800-1530 I was expected to be a part time teacher and take marking home, do planning outside of school hours etc when I wasn't being paid. And after three months that school dropped me because contractually they were going to have to pay me more.

I recently told my DH that I couldn't see me returning to teaching. It is crippling work and you get paid for less than half of the work hours you actually do. Not to mention the stress, and that's if all the children in your class are angels, if they aren't then that's another whole load of a different kind of stress.

I would not recommend anyone go into teaching.

I was a secondary school teacher for 4 years. The worst years of my life. I didn't sleep.properly, was stressed all the time. The workload was horrific. I worked in the evenings Mon-Thurs, definitely one day of every weekend. I was exhausted and moody and miserable. In the holidays I was often ill as my body was worn out.

I retrained as a lawyer. I work in the City in a corporate department. It is a million times better than teaching.

My FP teaches in a HE college. He works for an hour or two most evenings, after getting home at 6.

If my DCs said they wanted to teach, I'd try to discourage them.