Quite an Education

I haven't mentioned my attempts to actually use my hard earned teaching qualification to get a job in teaching. There's a good reason for that. Basically, I've given up. I've found that teaching is one of the biggest closed shops around. Believe me, unless you enter it straight from university and can get a job at the school or college where you did your placement, forget it. It doesn't matter how well qualified you are, or how good you are, the odds are stacked against you if you have the audacity to try and enter through any other route. Oh, sure, it's relatively easy to get the requisite qualifications, but, as I've found, trying to use them is next to impossible. My experiences this Summer have taught me that the colleges I'm applying to have decided who they're going to offer the job to long before the interview. Let me give you a couple of examples.

I went to one interview where I was one of only three candidates - pretty good odds, eh? I thought so. Until I found that one of the candidates had done their placement at the college. Now, it's normal at these interviews for all the candidates to take a short class. Indeed, I was told (in writing) that this would be the case here. Consequently, I put quite a bit of effort into preparing a lesson. On the day, it transpired that the college didn't have any students available for this activity! As a result, we all ended up just talking through what we would have done in our lesson, had there been a class to teach, with two members of the teaching staff. Two members of the teaching staff who had worked with the 'internal' candidate and had seen them teach several hours of classes throughout the preceding academic year. Hardly a fair contest. In my other example, I didn't even get as far as the interview - I was invited, but at less than 48 hours notice, meaning that I couldn't get any cover at work. Oh, they claimed to have tried to get me by phone, but complained that my voice mail was on. So why the fuck didn't they leave a message? I would have got it long before the e-mail they did send. To compound the fact that they really didn't try very hard to contact me, they also dropped the bombshell that the posts on offer were not, as advertised, permanent appointments, but temporary posts for a single term! Jesus, don't make it too obvious that you are just going through the motions of being seen to advertise a job you'd already effectively appointed someone to.

The long and the short of it all is that it has become quite obvious that I'm just being used so that colleges can claim that they have put posts up to free and open competition, even though they already know who is going to be appointed. Well, if I can't play on a level playing field, then I'm simply not prepared to play at all. Where does this leave me? In limbo, I guess. There's a part of me which feels that all the energy I put into getting my PGCE was a waste of time. However, I'm not prepared to carry on wasting considerable amounts of my time and effort preparing for fake interviews. I'm sorry if I've broken some unspoken 'rule' of teaching by coming into the profession at a mature age after having careers elsewhere. I'm sorry if I make the established educators feel insecure because I've actually experienced life outside of teaching (apparently something of a crime, I've gathered). But if that's such a problem to the world of teaching, then they can fuck off and stop wasting my time.