Entering education as a mature student

It’s never too late to decide you want to change your career, there are so many options available to help assist you with your new venture.

The education system has made it easy for mature adults to jump back into education should they wish to change their career or just want to broaden their knowledge.

Colleges hold evening courses making it easy to attend lessons out of work hours, this means you don’t have to worry about quitting your current job to go back to college. Have a steady income will help fund your course and allow you to purchase any materials recommended for the course.

Following college, you may wish to continue into higher education and attend university to obtain a degree. This may seem like a daunting aspect and many are put off by the fear of attending a university, but attending university as a mature student is not uncommon.

The NHS and staffing: Forever on the agenda

There are huge staffing issues within the NHS; we all know this and we’ve probably all experienced it first hand at some point in our lives. The problem is, whoever is in charge of the country, it always sits there and remains a problem.

The Tories say they will put lots of money into the NHS but that’s yet to happen and if anything staffing issues have got a lot worse over the last few years. Nurses and doctors struggle to get breaks and some have said they go 13 hours without food or drink because they don’t have time to stop as there’s nobody to cover for them. Labour say they can provide a solution and at least they talk about staffing numbers, whereas the Tories talk more about injecting money, but here we are nearly entering 2017 and we’re talking about the same thing all over again. Will there ever be a solution?

Creating your CV – Have fun with it

As a teacher, you’re almost expected to have a fantastic CV. It needs to be nicely laid out, organised, easy to read and there certainly can’t be any mistakes. That said, we’ve now reached the stage where basic text on a plain white background isn’t enough. As a teacher, try to use your imagination to design (or have a designer create you) a CV that looks spectacular. Make it connect the type of teaching you do, have a professional head shot taken, use stars or percentage bars to demonstrate your skills. Teaching is such a competitive industry that it’s important to make an impression any way you can. By sprucing up your CV you’ll significantly improve your chances of getting that teaching job that you crave, you just need to take the time to plan it out first. Don’t rush it; let it evolve.

The importance of lesson planning

It’s always been important for teachers to be organised and thoroughly prepared for their lessons, but with more students per class, larger schools and stricter requirements from Ofsted, it’s more important today than ever before. Having a lesson plan, whether it be via an app on your tablet or an excel spreadsheet will save you and keep you organised going forward. With a lesson plan you can include reminder notes so you know where to pick up next week, whilst you can plan out the stages you’d like to run though before half term. You can break the subject down as you wish, but as long as you maintain and update your lesson plan, you can keep organised and on top of your students. We recommend you update this after every lesson, but of course you may have multiple periods meaning you’ll need to update the document or app at break time or lunchtime.

Going Digital as a Teacher

Today many teachers hand out tablets rather than textbooks but it’s not just the students who are almost entirely digital, the teachers are too. Every teacher is likely to have their own dedicated laptop, tablet and phone, and this is where they store all of their work. Being IT literate is not just a job for IT teachers nowadays, it’s a job for all teachers, and it’s important that they maintain their organisation levels on their devices, not just their desk. One way to really get digitally organised is to use different apps for different organisational purposes. There are apps which double up as diaries and mark books, can take simple registers and be used to record planning and assessment data. Don’t be a desktop saver, keep your important documents in specific folders, and make use of digital calendars to plan out your tasks and lessons each week.