I still remember, with absolute clarity, the night in May 2015 when I awoke to the postgraduate teaching students’ group chat alight with notifications: we had been assigned our local authorities for the probation year - officially known as the induction year - that is part of the path to becoming a teacher in Scotland.

When I first read “Orkney Islands Council”, I laughed. I spent the entirety of the following day compulsively checking the General Teaching Council for Scotland website to make sure it was real and not something I’d dreamed in the haze of final placement exhaustion.

Stepping off the ferry a few hundred miles away from home, I felt utterly transported. The buzz of the Edinburgh festival had been exchanged for the gentle lapping of waves against the Stromness harbour (see below) a view from Stromness to the island of Hoy); I’d swapped the usual student noise of shared walls in old tenement buildings for the gentle mooing of grazing cows (which, I’m told, outnumber people by four to one in Orkney).

Background: New teachers could plug staffing gaps in rural schools

Mucking in: Teacher quits England to take job on Scottish island after social media appeal

Scottish school leadership: The head in charge of six island primaries

I found myself at Kirkwall Grammar School, home to around 750 pupils in Orkney’s largest town. I realised nothing about my placements in busy and diverse city schools had prepared me for what I was suddenly faced with: classes of silent, unquestioning, and polite teenagers.

Your student placements condition you to expect all sorts of challenging scenarios - often manifesting in classroom related dreams (or nightmares) about struggling with behaviour - but the unexpected challenge of Orkney was not knowing what to do when pupils were simply too quiet. Their shy and reserved nature meant a lot of my first lessons fell flat. I quickly had to learn how to adapt, and build trust with pupils, quickly finding that once they knew me, they were as lively, as funny, and as curious as any other teenagers.

While I was excited to move to Orkney, I also worried a lot. I worried about being far away, not knowing anyone, and having nothing to do. I think the key to living in places like Orkney is not trying to replicate the life you had in a city, but instead creating something new where you are. Embrace the local culture and explore the history. Join local clubs in the community and in school. Connect with the other NQTs and build yourself a support network. You can flourish in any place is survivable if you’ve got friends around you.

The other probationer teachers in Orkney became a second family while I was getting used to being hundreds of miles from home. Together we rode out the wave of starting a new career and living the island life, revelling in nights out at the local “nightclub”, banding together to rank our favourite bits of Orkney dialect (“buey”, “peedie” and “swadge”) and sharing the stresses of applying for our first permanent jobs. Six years later and they are still friends for life, spread across the world, still laughing at the same in-jokes as outsiders on a tiny island.

Although I’ve found myself back in Edinburgh, no teaching job has had a bigger impact on my career than my time in Orkney. Scotland has something called the “preference waiver” box which, if you tick it, effectively means you could be sent anywhere in the country for your probation year, in return for a payment of several thousand ponds. Surrendering my fate to “ticking the box” has made me less afraid to try new things in new places and new types of schools. It has undoubtedly made me more flexible and adaptable than I would’ve been if I’d never left the Central Belt.

The kind, welcoming nature of people who I worked with in Orkney gave me the autonomy to try different things and work out what kind of teaching was for me and what wasn’t. It would’ve been easy and comfortable to have stayed in Edinburgh forever. That was the reason I felt should leave - and I’m so glad I did.

Heather Leonard is a teacher of English, based in Edinburgh