Explore Teaching Adviser

Start date: November 2024

Location: Home-based. Frequent travel required. Ideally, candidates would be able to travel to South and South West England – e.g. to Portsmouth, Plymouth & Bristol.

Salary: Dependant on experience, circa £35,000

Hours: Full-time 37.5 hours per week.

Training Duration: Initial on-site 3 days training followed by longer term on-the-job training & mentoring.

Contract: Initially temporary until end of March 2027.

Overview

The Explore Teaching advisers are successful in encouraging undergraduates to consider teaching as a career, and support aspiring teachers to become more able to secure places on teacher training courses once eligible.

Our advisers mentor first and second year undergraduates to explore teaching as a career, to prepare to apply for a teacher training place, for up to two years prior to their application. They use experience from their own teaching career in schools to persuade candidates that this might be a suitable career for them. Much of the contact with assigned aspiring teachers has a focus on offering support remotely using a range of communication tools such as phone, email, WhatsApp and SMS. There is also a need for delivering face to face support for candidates at physical and online events or workshops.

In addition, the Explore Teaching advisers work to encourage university professionals to consider ways to help us to engage with their students, to encourage them to consider teaching as a career.

The ideal candidate will have:

• A successful teaching background, and must hold Qualified Teacher Status
• Expertise and enthusiasm for teaching young people in a school setting
• Outstanding influencing, networking and persuasion skills
• An ability to build relationships with stakeholders and undergraduates

The Role

• Provide one-to-one support to up to 200 individual candidates at any time to retain and encourage an initial interest in teaching. Help them to decide on a teaching career, and take the most appropriate steps towards this
• Encourage universities to help us to engage with their students to help increase awareness of teaching as a potential career for them
• Host and support events for candidates to foster and grow commitment to a teaching career
• Help candidates to improve their readiness to apply for teacher training, e.g. by supporting them to gain school experience
• Facilitate discussions in an online community, to encourage teacher training course applications
• Share insight with candidates on what teaching is really like, helping candidates to explore their concerns, such as those relating to classroom behaviour and setting realistic expectations on what schools require of trainees, ECTs, teachers and leaders
• Support Teaching Internship providers to promote the programme and to engage with the Interns to support them in considering a teaching career

Essential Criteria

Successful candidates must:

• Be an experienced teacher in the compulsory educational setting, and have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)
• Be sufficiently IT literate to successfully work from home independently using Outlook, MS Teams, and databases
• Be willing to travel within England, with the need for potential overnight stays. For this particular vacancy, it's likely that much of the travel will be in the South and South West of England

Desirable Criteria

Successful candidates may have:

• Strong evidence of resilience, emotional intelligence and commitment to peers and candidates
• The confidence to make and nurture new contacts, e.g. with university career services and undergraduate departments
• A working knowledge and experience of contemporary teacher training courses, or the early career framework
• Experience in coaching or mentoring adults
• Have proven ability to adapt to frequent change, e.g. in the policy direction of the work or emphasis on different areas of support
• Able to identify improvements in working processes