Is it worth buying my own classroom supplies?

[sweetnsuga123]

I am doing my PGCE in my alternate placement. Obviously I am in different classrooms all the time and some of them don't have a lot of glues or highlighters which I need for lessons. I'm very tempted to just order a lot of glues and highlighters from Amazon and use them when I'm teaching. Is this a stupid idea?

Nope. I bought a load of stuff when I was on my PGCE, and paid for my own photocopying at the corner shop.

Easier than trying to get the school to kit you out, and you can take it with you to your next placement (be super diligent about collecting it in at the end of each lesson or there won’t be anything to take).

Fab @noblegiraffe thankyou I'll get ordering!

Do it.
Anything to make life easier for yourself - PGCE's are tough enough. Kit yourself out with good storage (clear boxes with lids) and even perhaps think about a trolly (pushable storage box with handle).

Definitely. The only thing is that you can be very easily suckered into buying a whole classroom if you're not careful.

I'd add rulers and a set of whiteboard pens for you (I prefer Steadler chisel tip).

The cheapie ones are a false economy though. I buy my own whiteboard pens for my class because the school issued ones are crap. I get the Show Me Board brand ones, it's a bit of an outlay but I normally buy a set in October when the school ones run out and it lasts me through to the spring.

Might as well get used to it, every teacher I've ever met has bought their own supplies as school budgets are never enough. And things are made so much harder when you teach in different rooms, at my previous school I had a pull along trolley full of my own supplies I dragged from room to room, as an art teacher equipment was very important and classrooms and kids had nothing.

Oh yes I need to add whiteboard pens to the list. So whiteboard pens, highlighters, rulers and glues I think are the main ones and somewhere to store them?

Why on earth are clearly experienced teachers advising a pgce student to fund equipment they should have already been given? Go to the head of dept and say you need these things op. Pens and highlighters are for the kids thus they should be provided by the school for those lessons. You wouldn't see a nurse buying their own bandages This article says it much better than me www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.tes.com/news/teachers-stop-forking-out-classroom-supplies%3famp

This one also makes a very important point about teachers buying their own equipment www.tes.com/news/why-do-we-all-work-overtime-because-other-teachers-do
All the teachers here are making somebody new to the profession think that she should be buying just because they did

Don't do it - when budget cuts don't appear to have an effect (as teacher's pay for equipment from their own wages) it encourages further cuts! You shouldn't have to buy anything for you to carry out your responsibilities properly - and prepare to be inundated with requests to borrow items from lots of other teachers if you do!

It’s about the frustration levels really, rather than any attempt at martyrdom or virtue-signaling.
You can ask for resources, in primary that has meant two pencils and a glue stuck per child for the year. Or refusal, as there’s no money. So you either do without and scrabble around, or you become a mobile resource centre. It depends which annoys you most.
I started in 1984, nothing much has changed in this respect since then.

Why on earth are clearly experienced teachers advising a pgce student to fund equipment they should have already been given?

Why do you think it isn’t already in the classrooms given that experienced teachers will need to use it too?

As a pp said, the PGCE is hard enough as it is without nobly making a stand to not buy equipment because the state should provide.

I'm a TA and but my own glue sticks, felt tips, ruler, etc,. It's the only way to guarantee that I'll have all the things I need from day to day. My colleagues do the same. We all but various resources to use with the children, otherwise they'd go witnout.

It would be nice if we could just stamp our feet and insist we were given resources...and they suddenly appeared in triplicate. But it doesn’t happen.Rather like the mythical MN chicken, stuff is supposed to last forever.

Teachers are not paid enough to spend money on resources! Luckily my subject does not depend on gluesticks, so I do without. Sorry, but I am not spending my hard earned pennies on school supplies. Nurses who bring their own bandages is a good analogy!

If a nurse said I’m not going to buy my own bandages and did without, there’d be patient uproar, articles about how the NHS is in dire straits etc.

If there was an article about how a teacher went without glue sticks the comments would be ‘we never used glue back in my day’, ‘could teachers please stop using scrappy worksheets and teach properly’ and ‘god they get paid enough and they go home at 3:30, can’t they buy glue sticks with some of their gold-plated pension fund?’

I actually think there's more sympathy for teachers these days. And this goes beyond glue sticks. Lack of glue sticks you can work around. In lots of depts there's not even paper or exercise books for the children to write on and no pens for students to write with. In secondary schools you might have 130 plus kids passing through your door each day, each of them needing a piece of paper to write on. Teachers are encouraged to use whiteboards assess learning, cut down marking and save on paper. Brilliant idea only there's no whiteboard pens unless teacher goes and buys them and it won't be a case of buying one set, it'll be multiple sets because you're lucky if they last a week

If you want your lessons to run smoothly you provide the stationary these days. I (when teaching) preferred to give a pen rather than a detention to a child without one.

It's galling to be honest but if you want your PGCE or NQT year to go smoothly, buying your own resources is the way forward.

I teach in a deprived area with
high disposable income parents who seem
able to provide their offspring with the latest mobile phone but no pencil case and no pens - now THAT pisses me off but, a whole different thread altogether. Sorry for detailing OP.

The one big bit of advice I was given from a mentor on my first teaching practice was "buy yourself a good pair of adult sized scissors, label them everywhere you can, and guard them jealously" - because cutting things out with school scissors is a bloody pain in the arse.

If you buy stuff though - guard it, keep it with you and take it with you - and only do it if it's benefiting YOU to make YOUR life easier. That was always my perspective on it. Apart from pretty pens to write with myself... that was always a justifiable expenditure and school was a handy as hell excuse to justify doing it (I'm picky about what pens I like to write with).

Aldi sell highlighters. I always buy a few packs whenever they're in. Also glue, which I buy from TTS, which our school don't use. That way I can tell if kids have nicked my glue. I know I shouldn't do it for the reasons outlined in the article, but it's better for my mental health if kids' books look neat and have sheets glued in, and the resources provided by school simply do not go far enough.

Absolutely not! Ask the department to provide you with a little box of supplies you can carry round with you. You should not spend your own money on this as it would get very expensive and you're not even earning a wage!

I am in the dont do it camp. I did all that. Bought my own supplies, bought children equipment, even an alarm clock for a child who had no competent parent to wake him in a morning. Dont do it.

Ask the hod or do without. When im travelling around the school i take one glue stick and just do it myself while they are writing.

Ask the department to provide you with a little box of supplies you can carry round with you

This is so out of touch with reality it's funny.

No way!! We get a classroom allowance for that kind of stuff!! Why does the classroom not already have glue sticks and whiteboard pens??!!

Scissors! And a few spare writing pens to hand out.

I don’t think you should have to buy your own resources at all. I don’t because I resent spending my wages to work BUT if the resources aren’t being provided, I would view it as an investment in making the PGCE go a bit more smoothly.