Best Practice

Supply teaching: All dressed up, nowhere to go

Teaching staff
The life of a supply teacher is rarely made easy by schools, despite the huge amounts of money they spend on supply each year. Sue Binding offers nine rules for schools to make supply teaching effective

Surely it’s time to value our supply teachers? After all, a school spends, on average, almost £60,000 each year on their services.

We have all seen them. The unaccompanied stranger wearing an ID badge in the staffroom with a packed lunch and possibly reading a book. Do we say hello? Ask how they are getting on? Whether they know where the nearest toilet is?

Often, however, we don’t say anything because they are only here for a day and we are far too busy anyway.

Take a closer look and you will see a fully qualified, experienced and often “good” teacher who is a real and probably very nice person and for whatever reason needs to work in a challenging, underpaid and often ignored role – much like your own, some of you will be thinking.

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