The benefits of supply teaching
Supply teaching can be a great preparation for HoDship
Before I became a head of department for the first time, I did a couple of jobs that turned out to be excellent preparation for the role — even though I hadn’t undertaken them with that in mind.
The first was supply teaching, which I did for a term or two. At the time I wanted to leave the job I was in, but there didn’t seem to be anything suitable. So, I signed up with a teacher agency, and went on supply.
The benefits of supply teaching are usually couched in terms of not having to do much (or any) preparation, and having no marking to take home. By and large these assumptions are accurate descriptions of the situation, for two reasons.
Firstly, you don’t know in advance what lessons you will covering, so you can’t prepare for them.
Secondly, you could be asked to cover any subject under the sun, most of which you won’t know enough about to be able to mark students’ work.
However, from a career progression point of view supply teaching turned out to be a good investment of time. This was for one simple reason: it enabled me to see close up how different subject departments were run.
There were those subjects that were a joy to work in. Work for the lesson would be on the teacher’s desk in the classroom, along with clear instructions. The students had routines and quietly got on with what they had to do, like dishing out books or marked homework.
In contrast, there were subjects where there was no work set, or work that was not self-explanatory, either to the students or me.
In one school, a teacher was off with long-term stress. The Head of Department took a top set of students, but the absent teachers students were set poorly-defined work or, often, no work at all, and supply staff weren’t given any help either.
I think a better head of department, or should I say a head of department who was better at management, could have done more to help both supply staff and students. At the very least, given that the teacher was not likely to come back to work any time soon, perhaps he could have put together some meaningful work for those students to do. As it was, it just felt like they had been written off.
In another school, I kept being asked to take a particular science lesson. The work had been set, but the problem there was that those students were getting no practical experiments done. They asked me to organise experiments for them, and I had to explain to them that, not being a science teacher (the only science I learnt in school was how to draw a Bunsen burner), I would be likely to cause the school to be blown up rather than achieve anything more beneficial for their exam grades.
I virtually begged the head of science to swap classes with me, even if just once in a while, so that those students could do at least some of the practical work they needed to do in order to pass the exam. I pleaded in vain.
On the other hand, some of the heads of department I worked for were truly excellent, and demonstrated what could be achieved, This was especially the case in a supply-like job I had that was called Permanently Unattached.
That probably sounds like a rather painful condition, but all it meant was that you were a permanent member of staff, but not attached to any particular school. The idea was to provide longer-term cover for illness, maternity leave, or other prolonged and known-about in advance absences — in your own subject.
In one school, where I was obliged to fill in for a maths teacher, the head of Maths arranged for me to have a one-on-one session with the local maths advisor. Of course, it’s not easy to arrange training for a supply teacher who is here today, gone tomorrow, but that head of department was so good, and so approachable, that I daresay she would have organised that session for me anyway.
Some heads of department excelled in how organised they were, with spare sets of resources, lesson plans, books and everything else, all easily findable to a teacher not familiar with the school.
The best heads of department were the ones who genuinely cared, and would go out of their way to be supportive and find out how things were going.
In conclusion, I don’t think I would go so far as to recommend supply teaching as a career option, even temporarily. However, if you have aspirations to lead your own department, and find yourself having to do supply work for a while, it’s not necessarily a bad situation to find yourself in.