It’s been a while now since I said goodbye to my stained coffee mug in the staffroom and a desk perpetually groaning under the weight of unmarked books and incomprehensible Excel spreadsheets, swapping them for the ephemeral existence of the supply teacher. I’ve just finished a longish stint at a lovely school, and, as my time there was drawing to a close, I got chatting with a colleague who asked me what I missed about having a permanent job. The short answer was “not much”. But it got me thinking about the pros and cons of my new working life.
The drawbacks of being a supply teacher
Day-to-day supply teaching, it would be fair to say, is a battle. It’s not for the faint-hearted and, to be honest, it could barely be described as teaching at all. You are the outsider, the easy mark, the noob who doesn’t know how the school’s 18-step disciplinary procedure works, so it’s no surprise that some kids are going to take advantage. ‘Twas ever thus. So you just have to suck it up and get through the day. That said, it’s by no means all students who act this way and there are some schools where you will be welcomed, even when you’re only in for the day. What I’ve learned is that you just require a different mindset: set the bar low, try not to let anyone get injured and any teaching you manage is a bonus.
I miss building relationships, with colleagues and with students. During my career, I’ve met some super-smart, enthusiastic kids who really enjoyed learning, and I had the pleasure and privilege to help them along on their "learning journey" (one thing I definitely don’t miss is that kind of irritating educational newspeak). I even made the odd friend amongst the staff over the years. For the most part, that’s all absent from the world of supply teaching. But I have my own kids now to keep me amused, and, to be honest, I’m at a stage of life where I don’t mind streamlining the friendship circle a little. Who can manage more than one night out a week?
The benefits
No marking, no observations. No carrier bags of books to take home, no stack of identikit essays to read, and no new marking policy to get to grips with (or guiltily ignore). This changes slightly if you take a job for anything beyond a week or two, but not a huge amount. I’ve come to recognise, having stepped away from the madness of the profession, that a lot of what teachers do is in the service of other masters than the kids. One of the scourges in education over the past decade has undoubtedly been the invidious notion that it’s no longer enough to teach; teachers must continually provide evidence that they’re teaching. Ask any teacher and I bet they’ll be able to recount an observation where an earnest member of SLT said something along the lines of, “That was a wonderful lesson, and I’m sure the kids learned a lot, but I couldn’t actually see evidence of the learning.” Open your eyes, numbnuts! It used to drive me mad. Let teachers teach, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we’ll assume they’re doing it just fine.
No meetings, no CPD. These also felt for the most part like a massive waste of everyone’s time. Most meetings could have been just as effectively conducted with an email. Meetings, in my experience, were predominately taken up with one member of staff (you’ll all know the one in your own team, and if you don’t, it’s probably you!) using it as a platform to moan about a particular class they’re having difficulty with. No problem with moaning, of course: it’s an integral and cathartic part of teaching. Just don’t do it when everyone else has work to get on with. When I was a HoD I tried to introduce the "no seats meeting"; having everyone standing up tends to make people get to the point a lot quicker. It’s similar with training. Of course, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest pedagogic trends, but if you got one useful Inset session per year you were doing well. And it’s usually completely undifferentiated, with the NQTs in the same sessions as the old timers. It’s the last thing we’d do with the students, so why do it with the staff?
No politics. This is the big one. Not having to get wrapped up in the endless internecine battles that inevitably develop in such a high-stress environment is a huge, huge bonus. The member of SLT who for some unknown reason has it in for you, the colleague on your team who skives off and gets everyone else to write the new schemes of work, the anxiety caused by having to ask for the afternoon off to go and see your four-year old in their school play… all gone. You are there but you are not there. You are the ghost in the machine. You are the reed that bends but does not break. And like they don’t say at Ofsted, not everything we measure is worth learning and not everything worth learning can be measured.
The writer has recently taken up supply teaching after 20 years in a full-time teaching job
