Has anyone gone into training or consultancy?

[Caticorn]

Just wondering about a change in direction.
I've had a wide range of different roles within teaching, so have knowledge and experience in a lot of areas.
I've always enjoyed leading inset sessions within school settings.

I'd love to go into some kind of training work. I don't mean university stuff, training nqts, but more specific courses based on my areas of specialism.

Either working for a company or setting up as freelance.

Just wondered if anyone has any experience in this area?

No experience as such but used to tutor before PGCE and one of the Mums worked for a big international bank and said there was loads of demand for teaching and learning professionals there.

I think the questions are: what can you offer schools that is worth them spending money on that they can't provide themselves in house; how many people do you know in education - personal contacts go a very long way; what are your specialisms?

My long term plan for some years has been to reduce my days in the classroom to 2 or 3 and then freelance for the rest of the week. However, my specialism is primary maths, and I'm one of the first cohort of Teaching for Mastery specialists NCETM trained. This means that I have good contacts at my local Maths Hub who put work my way and I'm also an SLE, running the primary maths network for my local authority and picking up SLE work with other schools too. This means that I'm gradually building up my experience and also getting my name known. I've been working on it for a good three years now and I'm still not quite ready to walk away from the security of my full time salary.

I don't ever intend to completely stop working in a school as it would be too easy to get disconnected from the reality of being in the classroom day in day out - I'm sure we've all come across consultants who have lost their grasp of what it's like to actually teach children. And there appears to be money out there (especially through the maths hubs) for maths as many schools realise they don't have the expertise in house to help tackle issues of teacher subject and pedagogical knowledge. An amazing colleague who is a primary English SLE and runs fabulous inset in-house, does hardly any external work compared to me - it seems like schools feel more confident to tackle issues with English teaching themselves. So my experience suggests there is work there and money to pay for consultants in the right subjects, if you have the experience, reputation and credentials.

For me, my major reservation about consultants is what can they offer that can't be achieved by existing in house or school to school support arrangements?

And as a front line teacher, most people I know (me included) are fairly sceptical about sitting in the hall whilst someone who doesn't even teach does a session where (usually) 75% of it is stuff everyone already does, 5% was interesting and 10% wasn't relevant to our context.

I have, but it has taken quite a long time and two non-teaching jobs to build up the contacts and relevant experience. I also think the market out there is very slim: school budgets are tight and many LAs are cut back to the bone. I freelance alongside a pt job.

I also think the idea of teaching skills being useful in corporate training is a bit of a myth. I explored this but got nowhere: corporate enterprises seem to want people from a corporate background, unsurprisingly!