Name: Janet Carter

Job title: Teacher – 14 years French, five years Health & Social Care, many years Guidance/PSHE, Maths, History, Geography, RE, English and all sorts in between!

Employer: Cumbria LEA

Age: 49 (no, really! No husband, no kids, no pets, no wrinkles! Sponsored by Olay, L’Oréal and paracetamol…)

Where are you from? Born in Liverpool, brought up in North Wales

Where do you live now? Near Cockermouth (far enough away to be out of the catchment area but close enough to get there and back in a lunchtime when I forget stuff!)

Where do you work? Netherhall School in Maryport

How long have you done this job? 25-and-a-half years. - You get less for serious crime!

Take us through a typical day: Morning briefing to get the notices for the day is at 8.15, followed by registering and catching up with my lovely Y13 tutor group. They’re in the middle of A-levels at the moment so a lot of that time is spent soothing nerves and listening to gripes about revision!

There are six 50-minute lessons a day and currently I only teach GCSE and A-level classes, so they’re mostly all there because they enjoy the subject. I do miss teaching the younger ones but it’s very satisfying to teach voluntary students!

I have four non-contact lessons during the week that are usually spent sorting admin emails, marking, preparing guidance lessons for non-specialist teachers to deliver, sorting out Year 10 work experience placements, working with the Young Enterprise student company, and doing departmental things. Break and lunchtime is either in the staffroom or fielding questions and sorting problems from all sorts of students. Although the final bell for students goes at 3pm, I don’t usually leave school till 5.30 - 6pm, and then preparation and marking starts again when I get home.

Most half terms are spent working at some point, but I try not to do anything over Christmas, Easter or the summer.

What do you like most about the job? The thrill of student success. No, honestly! There’s nothing better than seeing students I taught go on and do amazing things. Even if it’s nothing to do with what I taught them; to have played a tiny part in them doing something special in the future is brilliant. I have former students in the premier league, at the Paralympics, in the West End, travelling the world on cruise ships, producing programmes in the Caribbean for the BBC, being doctors and lawyers, owning their own small hairdressing or construction businesses, bringing up fabulous children that I also teach. It doesn’t matter how they end up being successful, it’s just great to watch and hear about.

What do you like least? The marking! Oh goodness me, the marking and paperwork…. It’s a hazard of teaching a subject that is 75% coursework at GCSE and 50-60% coursework at A level, but if I could pay someone to do one job for me, that would be it!

Why did you want to do this job? I got a bit of a taste for it during my degree (French and Italian at Lancaster) when I had to live in France for a year. I lodged at a secondary school near Poitiers and spent my days being paid nice pocket money to speak native English to French teenagers. Once I finished my degree, I realised I wasn’t qualified for anything except speaking decent French and Italian, so decided to go back to Lancaster at St Martin’s (now the University of Cumbria) and do the PGCE. That was in 1993. I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to teach even then but it didn’t take long at Netherhall to realise there really is nothing and nowhere better!

What jobs have you done previously? The only other job I’ve done was working in a toilet soap/gel air freshener factory during one summer at university. I’m one of those teachers who have never had a “real” job! Where would be the fun in that?

What qualifications or experience do you need? Back when I first qualified, to go into secondary teaching there was really only the one way – university followed by a PGCE. Nowadays there are more options, and we often have teacher-training students in school in a wide variety of subjects, usually doing PGCEs or through School Direct.

What is a typical salary for this job? The starting salary for newly-qualified teachers is a bit under £24,000 and can rise year on year to around £35,000. You could also move to the upper pay scale by meeting targets set between you and the line managers in school, which could take you to around £39,500. If you’re ready, willing and able to take on responsibility like a head of department or head of year, you could get an additional amount on top of that. Salaries are generally the same all over the UK. except in London where they are higher to reflect the higher cost of living.

Any advice for people wanting to get into your profession?

1. Don’t go into it with rose-tinted glasses believing that you work six hours a day and get 12 weeks holiday a year!

2. It’s not enough to just know everything about your subject – being a good teacher is more than having a lot of knowledge.

Time management is everything to keep a sensible work-life balance and for people with young families, I can imagine it could be quite harsh. You have to find a way to control the amount of time and effort the job takes to do it well, or it can easily take over your life and burn you out. If you can learn to teach a subject schools are often crying out for (maths, sciences and languages in particular), they will snap your hand off to take you on and there are often bursaries available to entice you in. But if you want job satisfaction, a feeling of achievement, seeing young people change right in front of your eyes and vicarious success, there’s honestly nothing better!

Come and have a look around a school (especially Netherhall!) – it’s nothing like it was “back in the day”. Teenagers are very different creatures now to what they were, and I wouldn’t be without any of them!