Considering moving into teaching aged 45, how realistic and salary projections?

[BritBratGrot]

Hi, I'm a chemistry graduate and PhD. I moved into data and currently have a reasonably senior job heading a data science type team, £80k salary.

On one hand I love many aspects of my job: the technical wrangling, the people including my team, the serving my stakeholders with useful data products.

However I'm also a) bored b) frustrated I am never resourced properly and c) feel undervalued and unappreciated by the top bods who I've not managed to convince of the value my team brings and how much of the team's output outs driven by me personally - my team are all lovely but have significant personal or capability issues so I'm getting nowhere near as much out of them as I'd ideally like to given the headcount.

Anyway I am sensing redundancy in the next few months and I'm beginning to daydream about changing my career. I've always fancied teaching science but it's never been the right time to move and take a paycut. However maybe the time has arrived.

I'm not sure which teaching scheme would fit me best, open to ideas. Also if my starting salary is around £32K, given all my management and senior leadership, strategy etc experience, how might my salary be expected to progress?

I used to tutor gcse while I was studying and loved it, and I'm also a volunteer teacher in my (outing 😂) hobby, so I've got a good amount of reason and confidence for thinking I'd be good at it and more importantly enjoy it.

I'm am energetic and very positive 45. I know everyone is leaving teaching at the moment but could I do this?

I'm also currently 4 days pw (on 80% of 80k, I just always think of it in FTE terms) and not sure I'd want to go back to 5 days pw which feels like a real showstopper, though currently mulling over whether all holidays off would make up for this.

I think you have easily answered your question here. It is NEVER just 5 days- every teacher I know (including myself) works a day each weekend. Assume holidays will be taking your children with you into school (not fun!) at least 1 day per half term and a few days during Easter and Xmas.
I am 25 years in and capped at just under £50,000. That includes many additional roles without TLR pay as I'm 'experienced ' and 'expensive ' already according to the SLT.
I am eagerly looking for alternatives as cannot face another 20 years of this.

you need to mention the ‘small, independent’ bit at the top of your post

But l think all teachers like these things. Thats why they went into teaching.

But realistically it’s about 10% of the job. It’s the rest of the shit and pressure which drives teachers out.

We’d all love it if the actual teaching was the only part of the job.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow

In the right school, the shit and the pressure that surrounds the job are manageable, though.

That's why I said, it's a privilege to be a teacher - but only in the right school.

That is the sad reality of our profession these days - it's a fantastic job, but only if you're in an environment where you're supported, and doing paperwork to prove you're teaching stuff isn't prioritised over the actual teaching itself.

I do recognise these schools are hard to find. However, they do exist. Not all of us have a miserable experience teaching in a feral comp, and I have many teacher friends all over the country who work in lovely schools - both state and private - and enjoy their work.

There is a lot of doom and gloom about teaching out there, but for many of us it is still a very fulfilling profession.

But l taught in a lovely school. Retained staff, used by the dept of education as an example of best practice in a well run school. Lots of meaningful attempts to reduce workload which had an effect. And of course, loads of teacher friends.

But the system is wrong.

I also teach in a lovely independent school.

Even in a school like mine though, I think op would be in store for a really rude awakening. She has gained a (well earned) self respect for her qualifications and experience but they'd be utterly overlooked if she started anew as a teacher.

As I said, no one cares about your "strategy experience" when you're a career changer into teaching. Your colleagues would have more ready-made respect for a TA on 22k switching into teaching than a senior data analyst-strategist on 80k switching to teaching. Rightly or wrongly.

If op does this she needs to be prepared to be treated Initially the same as a 22yo fresh graduate. It will feel very patronising indeed.

Yes it would be a aeries of right place right time most likely in a challenging school to get there in 5 years. I do know someone who did it. Took a second in dept job after 4 years then the HoD quit with no notice due to sickness stress and nobody else wanted the role. So he was made temp HoD, then HoD in 5 years.

And it wouldn't have been near £50k then.

Newly qualified teachers get incremental pay rises for the first few years until they reach the top of the salary scale. You will get exactly the same incremental pay rises as anyone else who is entering the profession. With your previous career experience, you may be more attractive for promotion as your career progresses, but you would be entering with the same level of teaching experience as your newly qualified peers and so will not get any preferential treatment because you have senior leadership and strategy experience.

For those telling me I wouldn't be on £80k any time soon / ever, or telling me it's the wrong job to go into for money... I'm very aware I'd never hit £80k again and that's fine. I wanted an understanding of how quickly I'd rise from the ~£30k start, how soon i could expect to be at £50k for example

I've got from the above that it varies wildly! From an unusual 5 years to never

The point about my ego finding it difficult to cope with mid 20s people treating me like the junior I would be is a very valid one and something I'm already toying with. I think I'd be an exceptional teacher, but I'm basing this largely on self confidence and a few anecdotes rather than anything with much basis.

Honestly op the best way is to get into a school for a couple of days and see what you think. It’s actually not as bad as some on here make out in terms of junior colleagues holding court! I work with colleagues of all ages and we all get on fine. There are a few dicks but it’s the same in any workplace. Most teachers are decent sorts and teenagers are hilarious. I’d get in touch with a couple of local high schools, take some annual leave and go and spend a couple of days in a school before you do anything else.

Or fill this in -even better!
https://schoolexperience.education.gov.uk/

@BritBratGrot

If you didn't think think that you would be an exceptional teacher you wouldn't want to do the job. And it is a job, not a vocation.

But expanding on this point no matter how good a teacher you are you will get critiqued from other teachers, often those that know very little about your subject and in some cases your grading as a teacher can and will be affected by those grading you, how much they like you and how much they want to big themselves up.

Its not every observer but enough.

I was really excited about this but there are no schools with ten miles signed up! I live relatively centrally in a city and can think of about 15 schools within 3 miles, most primary but 5 secondary I think - shame none have registered. But plenty of places I can ask

@BritBratGrot

Just ask schools you have a connection with directly. It's the simplest way to do it.

Re: the comments about your ego, I think anyone who goes into teaching has to be prepared to leave their ego at the door, whether they be a fresh grad or someone with plenty of work experience. Teaching is a whole new ball game requiring a lot of new skills development, and while you will have a lot of transferable skills you can bring with you, you will need to be prepared for feeling wholly out of your depth for quite some time. No group of people can make you feel quite so small as a class of bored teenagers.

I don't entirely agree with people who have said that you'll be a nobody and you won't be appreciated or respected for what you've done before - you will certainly get credit for your industry and management experience in terms of your professionalism, people skills and organisational skills, and all of us recognise the importance for the students of having teachers who can bring industry experience into the classroom. Some schools - many of them inner city academies - are such dire places to work that all the experienced teachers have left, leaving them solely staffed by 25 year olds. In these environments, the depressingly inexperienced SLT will be easily threatened by experienced colleagues they will try and put in their place - but you wouldn't be silly enough to get a job in such a place.

That being said, having gone into teaching after only 5 years of working in the Arts, where I had already been promoted to a management position (I was 26 when I trained), I found the shift between being a respected and experienced professional who could hold their own in meetings and had genuine expertise to share, to being an absolutely clueless newbie teacher, a real headfuck. You don't realise how skilled teaching is until you try and do it. And you will be useless at the start, because it's not just about teaching your subject well or getting on with kids - it's the finesse of planning and sequencing learning at just the right pace for the children in front of you, it's being able to diagnose and differentiate for learning needs on the hop, it's the ability to have a constant awareness of what's going on everywhere in the room and being always ready to intervene or change direction when attention is slipping, it's the ability to know your subject and the skills required to learn it so well that you can scaffold learning and tasks accordingly for children aged anywhere between 11 and 18, and if someone doesn't understand, find a new way to explain it off the top of your head at the drop of a hat. Watching a skilled teacher at work is like watching a magician. You will have no appreciation of all of that until you are in front of a class yourself, when you find yourself not knowing any of the tricks and fooling nobody. Every day you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back out there, knowing you're going to mess it all up again in some new way the next day. It's a steep learning curve and a very humbling one. And I found that to be true after only 5 years in the workforce - so I can't imagine how much worse it will feel for someone with more like 20 years' experience!

@BritBratGrot I am a teacher and work in a difficult school and I would go for it. Good science teachers are worth their weight in gold at the moment and after you trained there is no reason why you couldn’t rise up the ranks fairly quickly.

maybe look at local cover with an agency. You don’t need to be qualified and you could get some experience.

Some Schools have introduced their own pay bands so M1 has a-c and then M2 has three pay increases a-c don’t would take you 18 years to progress to top of M6. You won’t get back to £50k very quickly. Schools are getting rid of expensive teachers at top of the pay scales by using support plans and bullying to make them resign.

the holidays don’t make up for anything as you will be exhausted!

I went into teaching aged 38 and moved from an entry level "unqualified" salary to about £50k in about 5 years (although most of the time I've chosen to be less than full time to reduce the workload from brutal to just about ok). I moved from main scale to outer London to inner London though so benefitted from London weightings.

I teach Economics, which minimises the under 16 teaching I do (KS3 can be fun but the behaviour management and general noise can be a bore).

I did find I had a lot to learn of course, but I also found I had a lot of transferable skills from my previous career. Teachers are also very generous to other teachers with time and resources, often. I'm trying to pay it forward now by training newbies myself.

I spent most of my early career in grammar and independent schools and the kind of London academies that are state funded but might as well be independent, and only moved to a comprehensive once I had the skills to cope (this is unusual - most teachers pick a sector and stick with it). I got interested in SEND and you can do more of that in state.

If your mental and physical health hold up and you don't accidentally lumber yourself with a sociopathic SLT or awful parents then it's a fab job on the whole! You'll have to be patient though as recruitment and training processes make glaciers look speedy...

You can negotiate on pay if they need you. Schools pretend you can't but of course you can. I mean, I'm an Economics teacher. I'm going to ask if that's the best they can do!

I do work evenings, weekends but not EVERY evening and weekend, and I rarely do more than the occasional day in a school holiday (generally for a specific reason like the exam results just came out).

Teaching can be amazing, but it takes a lot of determination and the first few years are extremely hard work. I have very little work life balance (have worked past midnight every evening this weekend to fit around DD, starting Monday absolutely exhausted!).
I do think a lot of your frustrations in your current job apply to teaching as well, unless you find the right school. Its really important that you look at schools when you are applying to see if you like it and to see the atmosphere. I've done tours of school to prospective candidates, so make sure you ask lots of questions.
If you are planning on training using the salaried route, then there are extremely high expectations from the start and not as much support through lesson observations
Have you been to observe in a local school to see if you like it? You usually have to have a couple of weeks experience when applying for ITT.

Sorry but this is not the experience of a lot of teachers, myself included. I admit I left teaching because I felt I could do better salary-wise and that I had skills that were being underutilised, but there are lots of schools out there where you can actually teach and have a personal life. If you find yourself in one where that's not the case, then leave and apply elsewhere.

OP, you could probably easily make Head of Department in around 5 years (probably quicker if you are flexible in the type of school you go to). Heads of science earn normally 9-17k extra (depending on the size of department and school) on top of the standard teacher salary scale - in general you could probably expect around 12-14k for a reasonably large school with a sixth form.