Supply work is good for building experience and your reputation in and around your council area.
However, supply work makes it difficult to build strong working relationships when you are only in a place for a short or temporary period of time. This has a damaging effect on people’s mental health and sense of belonging.
Then there is the additional difficulty of being paid a full time wage while working, to then earning no wage over the summer holidays until the next time you receive supply work – which can be closer to October. That’s three months with no income.
Teaching is supposed to be a sought after career, one which people pursue because they want to make a positive impact on the world through education. How can we do that when each year we work without a permanent job, we get further away from changing anything other than our own career path?
It takes a lot of hard work to qualify as a teacher, and more hard work to get through your NQT year. There has to be some sort of reward for that hard work! What other job requires a person to jump through so many hoops to get hee haw at the end of it???
Education cannot continue like this. The country deserves so much more.
This is answer 149 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.