If teaching job adverts were honest

What follows is the job advert schools would run if the law required honesty. It does not. So here is ours.

About us

We are a school. We have values. They are on the wall in reception. We genuinely believe them. We employ gladiators for the greater good of Britain.

The role

Following four years of university, and somewhere between £45,000 and £60,000 in tuition, you will be qualified to tell thirty young people to sit down, take their hats off, tuck in their shirts and, for the love of god, pull up their trousers.

You will also teach.

Key responsibilities

You will be required to flip between the following roles at the drop of a hat, without additional pay, and you must show no surprise. Students smell weakness.

• Drill sergeant
• Riot negotiator
• Etiquette coach, gently outlining that there are, in fact, many words that do not start with F
• Lunch duty officer
• Paperwork administrator
• Forensic marker and hieroglyphic decoder
• Lesson architect
• Pedagogy researcher
• Wellbeing expert, including your own, for which you will not have time
• Parent tamer
• Clinically accurate box ticker
• Printer technician
• Educator

You will also be expected to absorb the following phrases without visible reaction and without HR involvement:

"Yeah whatever, you ain't my mum." "What are you even on about?" "This is so pointless!" "School is dumb, I'm going to be a TikToker and make more than you, sir. Easily." "Where is the button to turn on this book?"

Every word you say back must be professional and carefully calibrated to DfE standards, while addressing a yelling class who have mistaken English Literature for a paper aeroplane and gum chewing competition, and while your brain slowly malfunctions from the cortisol now pooling up to your eyeballs. Choose your words poorly and you will receive complaints from parents, after which an investigation will be opened.

What we offer

Premature ageing. Wrinkles and fine lines are included. Accelerated hair loss and weight gain are likely. The delightful catering staff offering sugary salvation are your best friend and your GP's nightmare.

Salary. After your investment in qualifications, your net hourly rate on graduation is approximately £12 to £13 per hour. This is the market rate for a profession requiring a degree, a postgraduate qualification, subject expertise, and the mental toughness of an SAS soldier. As a result, nearly 20% of teachers have taken a second job to cover the cost of living. One teacher told the NEU: "It is embarrassing that I am a respectable teacher. But I cannot afford to live."

Holidays. Thirteen weeks per year, during which you will go to therapy, exercise, and attempt to regrow the parts of your brain that haemorrhage from stress. You will also find time to visit Boots for the stomach ulcer medication you have been meaning to buy for three months. You will try to forget you are a teacher, and for once you will not be sworn at for extended periods. It is magnificent. You will write social media posts glamorising teaching, and be judged by strangers for choosing a "cushy job that knocks off at three."

Pension. Excellent. The clearest evidence that the people who designed this compensation package were thinking very much about the long term.

Colleagues. Genuinely lovely. Exhausted beyond reasonable limits. Lovely nonetheless.

Person specification

Essential

Skin as thick as a rhino and an ego wrapped in kevlar. You will face daily disrespect from adolescent males engaged in the painful dance of asserting dominance in front of their peers. You will understand the theory of pubescent development. You will not take it personally, or you will not survive long.

The ability to power through your own mental health struggles without disrupting the timetable. Four in five teachers report experiencing mental health symptoms. The school day continues regardless. The government appreciates your flexibility on this point.

A calling. This is listed under Essential, because the workload structure requires it. A candidate motivated by financial reward will not last, and should have chosen to be a plumber or an IT technician. Many candidates motivated primarily by a calling have also left. They misunderstood the word. We are working with the dictionary publishers to amend the definition and avoid further confusion.

Relaxed personal boundaries between work and personal time, ideally treating that boundary as more of a suggestion than a contractual reality. There are "directed hours." That too will need to be looked up in the dictionary.

Desirable

Previous experience troubleshooting photocopiers, televisions and IT equipment under pressure, while thirty students go absolutely ballistic in a confined space and your head is down over a laptop that has decided this is the moment to install an update. A high tolerance for sensory overload, including thirty two chairs scraping simultaneously on a hard floor and nondescript shrieks from the corridor. The ability to drink coffee quickly without second degree burns is a plus.

How to apply

Submit a personal statement via TES. Copy and paste the school's values into ChatGPT and ask it to describe you in line with them. Include references. One reference must be your current headteacher. The one you have not yet told you are leaving.

If, having read the above, you remain interested in the role, we admire you. The profession needs people like you more than it has ever needed anything.

One more thing

If you are already in post, and you are wondering how any one human being is supposed to do all of the above and still find time to mark thirty papers before Monday morning, you are asking the right question.

The answer is not to work harder, mark faster, pull up your socks, or douse yourself in Red Bull. It is not to care less. It is to use the professional tools that exist to reduce the workload.

Tools like DeepMark were built by teachers who asked exactly that question, and decided to do something about it rather than simply write a very long job advert about it. You scan the pile, the marking pass does the heavy lifting, you check the marks, press print, and go home. The marking is yours. So is your evening.

Applications close when teachers stop leaving.

Try DeepMark →