Alice Gwinnell - South Hampstead High 1982 - 1995

A Career in Secondary School Teaching

Teaching is a very satisfying career that would be ideal for those with a strong academic background and an interest in people.  It definitely helps to like and understand teenagers, as the majority of your working day will be spent with them.  You will also need to have strong enthusiasm for your subject and a desire to inspire others.

There are two main routes into teaching: an academic degree followed by a PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate of Education) or a three-year university degree in teaching (B.Ed.)  I left school in 1995 unsure of what career to pursue.  As my main academic interest was English Literature, I took a degree course in the subject.  After three years of study and with my degree under my belt, I felt that I wanted a break from anything mentally demanding and spent two years working as a bookseller, firstly for Blackwell’s and then for Borders.  The job required little mental input, no commitment outside of working hours and entailed no responsibility, leaving me free to get on with the important business of growing up and working out what I really wanted to do.  It was good to work around books, but I became increasingly frustrated and bored by the repetitive nature of the work.  (Those who think that a job in a bookshop equals hours of reading time are sadly mistaken!)

In 1999, I finally but the bullet and applied for a one-year full time teacher-training course (PGCE) at a London University.  Due to the present recruitment crisis in the profession it is relatively easy to find a place on such a course and the government will even pay you for your trouble – I received £6000 tax free just for training and another £4000 when I started my first teaching job.  The PGCS Course is very demanding as you have to juggle college work with teaching placements.  There were definitely times when I considered giving up and quite a few of my fellow trainees decided that teaching wasn’t for them after all.  However, I am extremely glad that I stuck with it as I now find my career very rewarding.  I never have a chance to become bored and the best thing about the job is the students who can be charming, cheeky, challenging or all of the above and are certainly always full of energy.  I also love being paid to enthuse about my subject and having the opportunity to introduce your enquiring minds to great works of literature.

There is a lot of bad press about the teaching profession at the moment – scandals over exam-fixing, spiralling standards of behaviour and low pay being just a few of the common complaints.  Certainly you need a sense of humour to survive the bureaucracy and a lot depends on the school that you teach in and how supportive your colleagues are.  Also, although there are management fast track schemes it is probably not the right career for those who are highly motivated by money.  However, on the plus side, the school day is shorter that the average working day (I am regularly home by 4.30pm, though I still have work to do, of course) and you will get approximately 14 weeks holiday a year.  There is a lot of autonomy in this profession despite the fact that you will be working in a subject department and as part of a pastoral team – once in the classroom it is very much up to you how you deliver the curriculum and keeping lessons fresh and exciting is a constant challenge.

Finally, many young people trying to settle on the right career for  them reject teaching without due consideration because of their pre-conceptions about the kind of people who become teachers (often based on their own experiences at school).  I know that my attitude at seventeen was that anyone who wanted to teach must be sad and boring with no life.  I am pleased eight years later to have proved myself wrong.  Some of the best teachers I know had difficult or challenging experiences when they were at school and this is precisely why they are good teachers now – they understand hot it feels to be a dispossessed teenager and they are aware of the potential dangers if their lessons are deemed boring, stuffy or irrelevant.  Teaching, to my mind, is the best possible way to lay the ghosts of your own school days to rest – become the brilliant teacher that you never had yourself and you can inspire a whole new generation!

I would be happy to be shadowed for a day by any GDST students who would like to see what the job entails. I can be contacted via the Minerva Network.