Term time only jobs?

[GinnyBee]

My work and life situation is changing in the next year, and like everyone and their dog I’d ideally get a term time only job as my LO is about to start school in two years. But I’m not sure what jobs I should be keeping an eye out for. I’ve been a bookkeeper for 8 years, both in house and practice, and before that I was a start up loan advisor, checking applications and helping applicants to improve them before passing to the loan panel for final approval.

I’m not a teacher nor do I really want to become one. But I’m good at admin type jobs and I like helping people.

I have at least a year, maybe two, so if there’s any study I could do (evenings) to help my prospects I’d love to hear suggestions! I can’t afford expensive courses or have time for a full qualification.

Finance officer, business manager etc, there are loads advertised.

Anything zero hours

Could you not do bookkeeping self employed? If you worked for smaller places where maybe you could just do a couple of catch up days or a week in the summer to keep the urgent things ticking over then pick it up with some longer days in September?

I have considered this but I really miss having coworkers! For the past 5 years I’ve mostly worked from home and I’m pretty tired of it. Combined with living rurally (we are moving but don’t know where yet) and having a toddler at home I feel like I never talk to anyone I don’t live with.

Thank you!

If you have some time and a bit of money to invest in yourself train to become an access arrangements assessor, assessing students for reasonable adjustments in exams

Maybe look out for Student Services roles in sixth form colleges? Or I saw some Achievement Coach roles around last year.

Look on school academy trust websites. I have an office based role in a trust head office and really enjoy it. Start by looking up which academy trust/ chains your local schools are in then find the main trust webpage to check for vacancies.

Saw your last para- offering to volunteer in a school office if possible for a couple of hours a week would help with an application as would show you have an understanding of how school admin works. A colleague got her job due to exactly this, even though she got the role of PA to the CEO.

Places to find school and trust based jobs: the trust website, many do advertise these on linked in, gov.uk has a teacher/education jobs page, and the TES.

finance, exams officer, admin and business manager type jobs
if you can do some days experience in schools, pta or governor type role that’ll be super helpful. They each need slightly different things so depends really what you’re interested in - I’d recommend looking at ads and seeing what courses/qualifications regularly come up as required

School business manager - it's better money than general admin in a school. I don't think you would get all school hols but would probably need to go in for exam results days - or if primary be there to let contractors in over summer. But I reckon you would be able to do some days from home.

Also civil service jobs seem to have really good annual leave allowance. So you might find something decent with them.

Civil Service AL will cover about half of school holidays if you're lucky. You might be able to get a TTO only contract but only if it's doing something that's not time critical or has a large staff pool to absorb the lack of effort available in the holidays. Many roles it would be a complete non starter.

Thanks everyone, great suggestions! I like the idea of student services, I’ll need to find out what they might want. Business manager sounds cool too, but I’m not sure I have the required experience.

You don't have to go in at business manager level. If you start at finance officer level in a larger school, then the pay won't be as good of course, but you're likely to get the large majority of school holidays off, and you can then work your way up once you have the experience and feel ready. I did this. I actually changed the type of role as well (away from finance) - once you're in the education system, there are lots of opportunities to go sideways as well as up. I'm now full time all year round in the private school sector (because my kids are older so I have the flexibility) - it's challenging, well paid and interesting, and I love my job. All started with a voluntary PTA position and then a no-experience, term time only office and finance role a few years ago.