Working in Education
If you've decided to pursue a career in teaching. The first step is to plan to achieve your qualified teacher status (QTS), enabling you to teach across state-maintained schools across England and Wales.
Become a Teacher:
Initial Teacher Training (ITT) helps you develop the skills to become an effective teacher. There are many different types of ITT course – specific to the age group and, if you want to teach at secondary level, the subject that you want to teach. All courses cover the principles of teaching along with practical experience in the classroom.
You can complete your ITT: alongside a degree, straight after a degree, as a part-time course alongside work or as a full-time course. The option that is right for you will depend on your circumstances. You will need a degree and qualified teacher status (QTS) to become a teacher for the primary or secondary sector. For more information click here.
If you want to be a primary teacher, you will train to teach all the national curriculum subjects.
If you choose to teach at secondary level, you may teach one or more of the national curriculum subjects in depth, or one of an increasing number of vocational subjects on offer.
Become a Teaching Assistant
Teaching assistants support teachers with their everyday work in the classroom, so that they can concentrate on teaching. Teaching assistants are also known as classroom assistants or learning support assistants.
Your duties would typically include:
- preparing the classroom for lessons
- listening to children read and reading back to them
- helping children who need extra support to complete tasks
- helping teachers to plan activities
- supervising group activities
- playing educational games with children
- helping with outings and sports events
- carrying out routine administrative tasks.
In some schools you could have a specialism, such as literacy, numeracy, Special Educational Needs or music. Bilingual teaching assistants are often employed in schools with a lot of children whose first language is not English.
Qualifications and experience:
It is up to local education authorities and individual schools to decide what qualifications or experience they expect you to have when you apply for a teaching assistant job. You can get an idea of what you are likely to need by looking at jobs advertised locally or checking with your local education authority.
Nursery nursing, childcare, playwork or youth work qualifications could be useful, but are not essential – if you have enough experience of working with children, you may be able to start work without qualifications and complete teaching assistant qualifications on the job.
Become a Cover Supervior:
What is a Cover Supervisor?
The job title of ‘Cover Supervisor’ is very new in UK schools and it has come about as a result of the governments ‘Remodelling of the School Workforce’ agenda ‘Cover Supervisor’, is the job title given to non teaching staff who have been chosen by the headteacher of a school to look after a whole class of children. However, it is also possible for other non teaching staff, such as Higher Level Teaching Assistants to look after whole classes too.
Cover supervisors are usually deemed suitable if they have the necessary training and skills to fulfil the task of whole class supervision. The headteacher of the school will normally be the person who decides if, in their professional judgement that an individual is suitable to be a cover supervisor.
As the role of the ‘cover supervisor’ is relatively new, there are still some elements of uncertainty as to how they are best deployed in schools. Current guidance seems to indicate that cover supervisors should only cover classes for ‘short term absences’ (eg 3 days), however this can change depending upon the specific circumstances. More guidance is given via the ‘Documents’ available for downloading on this site.
Typically, a cover supervisor will work during school hours and in addition to supervising the class, they will also oversee the completion of set work and manage the behaviour of pupils.
What is the work like?
Working as a cover supervisor can be extremely rewarding but also very demanding. There is a high level of responsibility and although there is always a teacher close at hand if needed, there is a large amount of autonomy.
A cover supervisor is likely to be used for short-term absences of a teacher. These might be known in advance (for example, where a teacher has a medical appointment or is undergoing professional development) or unexpected (for example, absence due to illness.
On a daily basis, cover supervision is more than likely to include:
- supervising work that has been set in accordance with the school policy
- managing the behaviour of pupils whilst they are undertaking this work to ensure a constructive environment;
- responding to any questions from pupils about process and procedures;
- dealing with any immediate problems or emergencies according to the school’s policies and procedures;
- collecting any completed work after the lesson and returning it to the appropriate teacher
- reporting back as appropriate using the school’s agreed referral procedures on the behaviour of pupils during the class, and any issues arising.
However, schools may wish to employ staff for cover supervision but on occasions where they are not needed for cover, they might also be released to provide additional support to teachers in classrooms, or to carry out administrative tasks for example. Thus it is easy to see how the role of cover supervisor and teaching assistant can become interchangeable.
The working day is usually during school hours and often, term time only. Salaries are set locally by schools, usually with guidance from local education authorities