When you’ve spent a year or several moths travelling and you’re now feeling refreshed and ready for work, you may find that work isn’t ready for you. Opportunities can be heard to come by when you’re returning from travelling and as the saying goes “it’s always easier to find a job when you’re already in one”. That said, just because you decided to do a spot of travelling doesn’t mean every employer will look down on you like you’re satin. Some business owners will like that you’re a seasoned travelling with lots of life experience under your belt, whilst others may think you’re a bit of a waster but it’s up to your to prove them wrong. So long as you can prove traveling has helped you build skills or helped you develop in some way, you’ll be able to get the job you’ve always dreamed of. You may just need to be a bit patient to start with though.

Teachers are renowned for having organisational skills with no parallel – however, there is always room for improvement! Have a read through these tips for some ideas on streamlining your time management for a busy teaching day.

Firstly, the dreaded paperwork mountain. One way to really refine your time spent on paperwork is to have a rule of touching a piece of paper only once. As soon as it hits your hand, decide whether it is important enough to keep (and file away straight away!) or read and recycle. If you get into the habit of dealing with paperwork quickly, you will find that it piles up less.

Another key idea is to attempt to go paperless as much as possible. There are myriad apps available for organisational purposes, including several designed with teachers in mind. Lots of schools use iPads, so why not see if there is an app to help you out. There are apps which double up as diaries and markbooks, can take simple registers and be used to record planning and assessment data. All of this can easily reduce the pile of papers on a desk!

When it comes to assessment, we all think of tests and exams. But this is just scratching the surface of the assessment glacier. There are more than type of assessment!

Summative assessment is the type we all think of – end of unit tests, national exams and other formal written tests. The idea here is that summative assessments are assessment OF learning. It checks that students have learnt what you intended them to learn, and can be compared against one another to assess general progress. This data can also be reported to parents and other relevant bodies.

Formative assessment on the other hand, is all about assessment FOR learning. This involves all the dialogue had with a class, when you the teacher checks the progress during the lesson. Think carefully about the way you phrase questions in order to allow students time to think and respond. This assessment helps the teacher to plan further lessons and assess immediate progress.

Most people, including Ed Miliband himself, will know that he made monumental error in his election speech. He failed to speak about the ‘deficit’ and that’s mainly due to the fact that he opted to not use notes, and instead try to remember the entire speech and deliver it more powerfully, much like David Cameron does.

Some argue though, that it’s been blown out of proportion, and the fact is, it was a mistake. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Labour will completely ignore the deficit if they get voted in. That just isn’t the case and the whole of the UK knows it. But this mistake has given conservatives plenty of materials for their own camping. For example, they’ve launched an advert mocking Miliband for forgetting about the deficit, while they make it the top priority.

Whether you feel the mocking is unfair or not, you do have to admit that the election debates are heating up, and it will be interesting to see what happens when Miliband and Cameron go head to head.