Why teaching could be the single most important thing you do with your life

 There are many people out there who may have considered teaching at some point in their lives. Many see it as a fall back career, when it should be ranked highly on the list of careers to aim for - no other job is more challenging nor rewarding than teaching.

Without teachers there to guide students we wouldn’t have the scientists, architects, inventors, doctors, police officers or even the next generation of teachers that we need to advance and develop as a country.

Working as a teacher, you could be inspiring the next Bill Gates – who actually credits his math and English teachers as the people who pushed him to succeed – the next Prime minister of the country or the next sporting star. Teachers are much more influential than they are given credit for, one word of encouragement or a thoughtless insult from a teacher can set a child up to excel or fail.

Teaching is the single most important thing you could do with your life simply because it is a profession for leaders, for people who want to steer young individuals in the right direction and ensure they are ready for what the world has to throw at them.

Many people argue that teaching is an option for those who once aspired to be an entertainer or a profession that is only taken up if the individual doesn’t know what to do with their life. However, a new study has discovered that teaching is currently one of the top career choices for teenagers with 12% of 14-18 year olds naming teaching or lecturing as their ideal job, beating the likes of entertainment and finance to the top spot.

This is good news because we are currently experiencing a shortage in people signing up for teacher training, especially when it comes to science and maths teachers. Religious studies, geography, music and physics also made the list of subjects we are currently struggling to fill teaching places for and by the next decade it is predicted that there will be an extra 800,000 students, so the teacher shortage we are currently experiencing is only going to grow.

That’s why it has never been more important for people to become inspired to teach and why the routes into teaching need to become more straightforward, costly and weed out the best teachers from the weaker ones. Teachers are a special breed of people and with an average of 59.3 hours worked a week by primary school teachers and 55.7 for secondary they definitely need to be dedicated to the cause.

Once trained new teachers need clear routes into schools, whether that means being kept on by a training provider or using easy to navigate sites such as Edustaff that focus solely on advertising teaching jobs, otherwise we will never fill the places we need to. Schools need to advertise clearly when they are looking for teachers to fill positions and they also need to be more open to trainee and new teachers taking on roles.

Teaching is definitely the single most important thing you can do with your life, so if you are considering becoming an inspiration for young minds look into completing your degree, signing up for a PGCE or School Direct course and donning a smart suit for your five day week – oh and just think of that six week holiday you get to look forward to (filled with plenty of planning for the year ahead, around sunbathing in the garden).

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