I am a teacher that went into the job later in life as I had my own negative experiences of school myself as a child. As a result, I left school having failed my exams. The experience made me want to become a teacher to make experiences different for children.
So from 2012 I started at college, resat Highers to get into an undergraduate degree in university so that I could do the PGDE course in Primary teaching. It took me 11 years of resilience, hard work and determination (that’s including my probation year) to qualify as a Primary Teacher only for me to find myself stuck on short term supply with the occasional fixed term contract. This is not why I trained to be a teacher.
Also the level of dysregulation of children in schools that I have witnessed is impacted by the continuous changing of staff.
This is answer 140 of the 269 written answers that teachers let us quote anonymously in the Scottish Teacher Employment Survey 2026. It answers the survey’s last question: what do the people who make decisions about teacher employment need to know?
We have corrected spelling, added paragraph breaks and removed details that could identify anyone. Words in square brackets are ours.