So you are in your final year of your undergraduate degree and you are wondering about your next steps. What can you do with your degree? Should you do further study, or an apprenticeship or graduate training programme? Or perhaps you have been working for a while and are considering going back to university to re-train. Perhaps you have explored taking a PGCE in secondary English teaching. Well, sit down with a cuppa and let’s talk about the PGCE course itself and the longer term: life as an English teacher.
If you have already decided to apply for your PGCE English course, be sure to read my guide on Top Tips for your PGCE interview.
To help you decide if the PGCE English course is right for you, let me share some insights into life as a teacher:
You have to like young people to be a like being an English teacher.
Teachers have to like young people. It’s as simple as that.
You are ‘on duty’ from the moment you get out of your car into the building, through morning pastoral time, to your day teaching your subject. Every minute (almost) is spend with children and young people. These kids are fill of life, full of ideas, full of personal issues and full of opportunity. It’s so hard to sum young people up into a few sentences! But boy, are they full of everything! You’ll experience that from day one of your first PGCE placement, and then every day after that until you retire.
They take you by surprise; one minute you are praising a wonderful idea or big improvement in learning, and the next, you are trying to sort out who said what, to whom, and how. Vaping in the toilets. Repeated homework issues. No pen. Pastoral concerns for their home situation. And then back again into nouns and verbs!
Teaching is a job that takes you on a journey every day, and you are the tour guide. You are expected to know and understand how to steer young people through the difficulties of life, of learning and of everything else in between. Teachers need to be prepared to be that critical friend, to intervene and support, to encourage and cajole, to prompt and guide. It’s nouns and verbs, but it’s so much more, and you have to have an open heart to support and spend time with these amazing young people.
Your passion becomes their passion. I absolutely love English Literature, and this comes across. For example, my Year 11 class are studying Of Mice and Men. I figured out (after some time), how to photocopy a life-sized version of Slim from an original A4 (ps you can download it here if you like!). We spent a double people drawing all those beautiful metaphors and similes: ‘… his hands, large and lean, were as delicate in their actions as those of a temple dancer”, and many others. We drew the images, stuck down quotations, and debated whether Slim is really all that or not. It was my favourite class of the week. Finding joy in language is the true love of an English teacher.
Of course, we spend a long time on PEE paragraphs, comprehension skills, supporting reading, spelling tests and lots of other things that don’t always do it for me. But when we open up a literature text, I think I have the best job in the world, and when a student loves it too, well … chef’s kiss!
At any given time, you will have a Shakespeare text on the go, a modern young fiction novel, a series of poems on war or love or identity and several grammar topics.
You need to know your adjectives from your adverbs and be able to use apostrophes, but you also need to be ready with a quick summary of World War 1 to set Private Peaceful in context, or a summary of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression for a unit of work on Of Mice and Men.
Your knowledge doesn’t have to be perfect (let’s be honest, it never will be!) but you need to be ready to learn and bring your students along with you.
In my first year of teaching, I spend a loooooong time planning lessons, preparing resources, marking books and setting up my classroom. This year, year 16, I spend a long(ish) time planning lessons, creating resources and marking books! I think it was year 3 that I had an epiphany … English teachers English teachers work hard all the time. Yes, the planning gets easier over time. Yes, you get faster at certain tasks. Yes, you build a bank of resources as the years go past. But changes come: the specification changes and for a science or maths teacher, that might mean teaching topics in a different order.
But if the specification changes in English or English Literature, that usually means new texts. These texts might be completely unfamiliar to you. Also, you might change school or get a new HoD who wants to change text. This year, I am teaching two new novels at KS3, a new poetry anthology and a new drama text for GCSE. That’s a lot of new resources to prepare. I love it, but it’s a lot.
Also, the marking. Oh, the marking! It gets easier over time, but it doesn’t magically disappear and it makes up the bulk of my workload outside of contact time with students. (Check out my amazing hack for managing your marking workload. Honestly, I think it’s a game changer).
All this is to say, that if you love working with young people and you love your subject, then the work is not necessarily awful, but it is certainly time consuming. ‘I have finished all of my work’ is a phrase I have never said and I can’t ever imagine a time when I could ever clock off and think: ‘that’s me done. Everything I need to do is fully complete!’ You have to be willing to work outside of the school day, and outside of your directed time.
Creativity and flair are on a sliding scale, so don’t panic! You don’t have to be an extrovert (I’m definitely an introvert) to be a good teacher, but you do need to hold the attention of your class and present information to them in new and interesting ways.
You need to be able to take ideas and shape them into activities to make students think, work together, explore their own learning etc. I think you also need a sense of flair with language to try to capture your students’ imagination. I like to model paragraphs or techniques for students to use as a starting point. We all do this. The lively examples are the ones that get the students’ creative juices flowing.
You need to be able to still teach a great lesson on the day that half the class is absent, or the computer network goes down, or the electricity is off, or the … (fill in the mild to moderate school-centred disaster that could potentially happen). In other words, you need flexibility and imagination and ideas to inspire those same characteristics in your learners.
With all of these high expectations, what is the pay off? I have painted a picture of a very high bar, with life as an English teacher seeming very demanding, difficult and all consuming. But there are beautiful benefits too. I hope this list convinces you.
Those amazing young people!
It really is a privilege to spend your time with young people and to be part of their life experiences. They will always remember you – what an honour.
Those amazing holidays!
Yes, the six week summer, two week Christmas, two week Easter and occasional half term break are well earned throughout the year (look at it as building up flexi-time … you work extra hard through the term to accumulate the days off). But nonetheless, when the holidays come, you can enjoy some extended time off and I am willing to put the hours in to reap the rewards.
A steady income that you can rely on.
Teachers are not millionaires, and they never will be on a teaching salary alone. If you are after a big salary then teaching is not for you. But there is a lot to be said for career and salary progression, starting in the mid-twenty thousands a year initially, and rising to just over forty thousand a year at the top of the scale for a classroom teacher. That’s not anything to turn your nose up at in my humble opinion.
Career progression, training and opportunities.
Your career and your salary can increase with additional responsibilities, for example taking on a pastoral role such as Head of Year, or a management role such as Head of Department or Senior Teacher. These roles add points to your salary and help you to progress up the ladder. Even without additional responsibilities, there are courses and certificates you can take which will up-skill you and help you to feel more confident in your role.
So, I hope that if you were considering applying for a PGCE, that this article has helped to clarify things for you. Please comment below with any questions and I’ll get back to you, or use the contact form here.