At the chalk face: Are extra roles in school actually worth it?

Are extra roles in school actually worth it?  - Teaching Careers Explained

In this episode of At The Chalk Face, we (Craig & Dave) dive into the paid and voluntary opportunities that come along in teaching — from exam marking and mentoring trainee teachers to governor roles, subject leadership, CAS involvement, maternity cover posts, and more.

Some opportunities boosted career progression. Some improved teaching practice. Some created amazing experiences for students. And some… probably weren’t worth the stress 😅

Honest reflections, funny stories, practical advice, and a behind-the-scenes look at the twists and turns a teaching career can take.

Whether you’re an ECT, Head of Department, aspiring SLT member, or simply curious about what opportunities are really worth saying yes to, this episode is packed with relatable discussion and insight for computer science teachers and beyond.

👇 We’d love to hear from you in the comments:
What extra roles have you taken in school?
Were they worth it?
What would you avoid next time?

🎧 Subscribe to At The Chalk Face for more honest conversations about teaching, pedagogy, workload, careers, and computer science education.



👉 Don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe for more Computing education content from Craig’n’Dave!

🔗 More from us:
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Other paid and voluntary opportunities in your school are they worth taking or not?

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello, welcome back to another At the Chalk Face with me, Craig, and my colleague Dave, uh teachers of computer science throughout Gloucestershire. Or we were teachers of computer science. If you're new to us, we here we talk all things uh pedagogy and teaching. And if you are new to us, we resource computer science, soon to be Key Stage 3, 4, and 5, as well as a host of other free online resources. If you do follow us, you'll know we're starting a little mini-series. Last week we reminisced about our early days in teaching and the paths we took. Dave fought up my trauma of not getting my first two promotions to head of department. So thank you for that, Dave. And uh we left the episode, I believe. I was a head of department and you were an assistant head of year. So we're gonna take a slightly different tack now because we could just carry on sort of up that, you know, route and where people tend to progress. But but teach is one of those professions, as you will know as teachers. There's all sorts of routes and opportunities that open up to you. And you don't necessarily have to go sort of straight up the academic route or the pastoral route, which is what we were talking about last week. So I want to split this into two parts, Dave. Talk about um sort of other paid promotional opportunities that come along, which ones did you take? Were they worth it to you? Did you think benefit? And uh and then we'll look at all those voluntary roles that you can get in teaching. And there's so many options, which often people go, well, if it's not worth the money, I'm not doing it. But were some of those worth it? They may not have had extra money, but what were the benefits? So let's start off with the with the paid one. So you're an assistant head. What other kind of paid opportunities did you take in teaching? And and how were they?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Yeah, so just to be clear, I was an assistant head of year, not an assistant head. You know, there's there's obviously quite a big difference. At that point, but yeah, so I was an assistant head of year, and as I said at the tail end of the last episode, it only lasted a year, and that was because um I just got married, we'd just had um our first uh child, and our house was too small, and we were looking to move on in life, and I needed to earn more money to get a bigger house, essentially. So, although I loved uh my first school and being an assistant head of year, uh life kind of overtook things and I had to move on. So um I wasn't particularly looking, but something caught my eye at another school, and they were offering an assistant head of department in the subject of ICT and computing at another local school, and uh it was paying a ridiculous amount. It was paying the same as you would expect to earn if you were actually a head of department, and so it was an opportunity I just you know couldn't let go with my uh sort of financial position at the time. So I applied for it, I got it, I became assistant head of ICT and computing. And I did that for a little while. Um, but I uh I don't know why, if I'm a hundred percent honest, but I kind of didn't feel like I wanted to do what the head of department was doing. Again, I'm not it's hard for me to put my finger on why at the time that was. Maybe I felt that I wasn't quite ready for it, a little bit inexperienced, and maybe I was just comfortable. I think the the reality of the situation is I was just comfortable doing what I was doing. I was very happy. Um and so the you know, other opportunities. One thing I did want to do is reduce my uh contact time with students. So I had a full timetable, as you'd expect with um being an assistant head of the department. I only had a sort of a couple of free periods to do things like create schemes of learning, that sort of thing. And um I really wanted less contact time so that I could do other things. You know, bearing in mind I come from industry as a programmer, and I felt that I could use my programming skills to enable the school to really move ahead in the same way that I had done in my previous school, and I'd impressed the head teacher there. So I thought, look, I can I can do all these things again and I can do them better in my second school. Um, but but I didn't really have enough enough time, enough free time to do that properly. So uh I kind of invented a role, if you like, because this was at a time when schools suddenly were developing websites and you know the the the internet was becoming much more of a thing, and you know, publicity uh for schools through uh through websites and things like that was starting to become important. And I had some of those uh skills, largely as a hobbyist web developer, if I'm if I'm honest, but I had those skills. And so I kind of put a proposal to the head teacher that look, I don't really want to be a head of department, but I do want to help the school in these areas. This is what I can offer. And he invented this role, head of online services, which was supposed to be adjacent to a head of department. It was supposed to enable me to, if you like, leapfrog the head of department role and then go into a more senior position without ever having had or been a head of department. I absolutely loved it. I got lots of extra free time on my timetable. I could pursue all the things I was really interested in and enjoyed, and I made a real difference to the school. But was it worth taking? That's the question. And so, you know, for me personally, and what I got out of it and what I enjoyed in terms of turning up to work every day, yes. Was it worth taking in terms of a career move? Would it enable me to leapfrog that head of department role? No, and something really interesting happened because we took on an NQT, um, who was obviously underneath me, and he eventually became my boss because he became head of department while I was head of online services. And so I ended up answering to him, and it and it sort of felt to me personally a little bit awkward. Um, and then I I realized quite late on that I was not going to get uh a senior leadership position, an assistant head teacher role, because critically I hadn't managed a significant number of people or been able to have an impact on academic results and things like that. So was it worth taking? Hmm, debatable. Anyway, so that was the first thing uh that I did that was paid. What about you?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Um, oh I got I got three. I won't do all three at once, but they're quite quick. I did two which uh brought in additional money to me, so it's all while ahead of department, and one that brought in uh an awful lot of money for my department. And actually, for me, I think they were all worth it for different reasons. Uh one I'm sure teaches away of the classic exam marking. Um I I I did it for I I genuinely did it for two reasons, Dave. One, I did it for the extra money. It's not great, you'll know that if you've you've marked exam papers, but once you get hold of it, it is it is some extra money in there. Yes, you're working for your holidays. So there's that extra money. But the second one really was a real desire to get to grips with those Mart schemes, just being frustrated and just assuming that the examiner was always right and the MARC scheme was always infallible, and then starting to realise, oh, it's not quite like that. And just wanted to be able to prepare my students better. And of course, I mean, I did it for two years, I wouldn't do it again after that. Um, if I'd stayed in teaching, I probably would have done it again with a new spec for a year or two. I think if you're in a school for long time as a head department, do it for even if you do it for one year, the benefit to me is not in the money. The money's nice, a little bit extra holiday money. Uh, but the the benefit just doing it for one year, you get that exam board training, you get to the team leader meetings, they talk you about what's acceptable, what's not. You learn about the the the kind of like the the ethos around exam marking, and it it makes a difference. And you don't have to slug your way through it for the uh what is not a huge uplift, I'll be honest, for the the pain and suffering you go through. For was that worth it 100%. So, yeah, the exam marking. I got a couple of others. I feel like mine are so much quicker than yours, Dave. That's because I don't waffle. Um I'll do I'll do one, I'll do one more. I'll do my other paid one, my other paid one, and then that you can give us another. The other paid one I did was, oh, it's left my brain. Dave, help me. What was it? I did exam marking. Um, oh, yes, I did some independent authoring. So this was long before Dave and I'd even smattered with the idea of putting our own resources online and forming our own company. Uh, I I found uh a company out there that was basically looking for freelance authors. They needed to be experienced teachers, they needed to have an enthusiasm, they wanted genuine authors to author resources of computer science. So obviously that had to be completely known my own time. Uh, I did declare it to the head teacher. Uh he said absolutely fine, as long as it doesn't affect your day job whatsoever, uh, then not a problem. You know, I wouldn't say no to exam marking. Why'd I say no to that? So I had a great head teacher. And that was good. I mean, I authored a number of units for uh that company, and and that money was obviously quite decent. Of course, it's a private sector, isn't it, Dave? So they weren't paying two pounds a script. I mean, uh, they actually pay royalty checks. And even to this day, 10 years later, I still receive uh small royalty checks every six months from units that sold. Obviously, they're dwindling as those units die off and the specs change. But yeah, and again, that was um interesting and different. Was that worth it? That wasn't as useful to me in terms of helping my students and my department getting to know stuff. Financially, that was the better one than the exam marking. So both really useful, both paid opportunities, uh, very different in pay, um, but uh useful in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yeah, so uh meanwhile, um, while I was head of online services, um I got the um I got the taste for having less contact time with the students. Now, don't get me wrong, I I loved my classroom teaching, but you know, there are always some classes and year groups that perhaps you don't resonate uh much with. And I really came into teaching to teach the A level. It was the thing that I really wanted to do. And I loved the little year sevens, but I often found year eight, year nine, you know, year ten perhaps a little bit tedious at times. And I really wanted to focus on um the academic side of my subject at A level. So I was looking for more opportunities to have uh less contact time because the less time I had on my timetable for teaching, the more could be taken up with just A level and potentially GCSE classes. So I was kind of crafting my own timetable in that way. And it helped that I was the only specialist teacher uh with a degree in computer science as well. So, you know, who else was going to teach the A level? Other people didn't have the subject knowledge, so it kind of worked out. But um what happened was uh I became aware of a post at the local university, and for me, that's Gloucestershire University. And the post was the subject leader for initial teacher training. And the role essentially meant that anybody in the county that wanted to train to be an ICT or computing teacher would have to be interviewed by me. I would make a decision about whether they would had the credentials to be successful on the course as a teacher, and they would join the cohort. And then every Thursday afternoon, I would train them in the pedagogy of teaching, increasing their subject knowledge in applications and things like that. And in the Thursday morning, I would either prepare for those afternoon sessions, or I would go and visit the trainees in their schools, and I would observe their lessons and I would talk to uh their mentors, and I would lead the mentor team across the county. So they would come to me periodically and we would talk about uh making sure the program was of a high standard.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Uh, I believe you also had to, I might be wrong here, I believe you also had a part in, or you had to uh mark some of the university assignments because weren't there three pathway ones and three university ones? You think you had to mark the pathway assignments for the university as well. So you're doing university post-grad marking, is that I got that wrong?

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Oh no, you're absolutely right. It was a it was essentially a lecturer's role, right? But it also included leading a team of mentors across the county as well. And um that was something that it did, it did nothing in terms of my career progression within school, in terms of securing a senior leadership position in the future. I don't believe it really did very much, if I'm honest. And I know that because um the head teacher actually encouraged me to step down from it in the end as to pursue other things in school that would enable me to um catch his eye and and you know get back on the ladder, as it were. Um so tricky, because I know there are uh other teachers out there that will be thinking, oh, should I become a PGCE or GTP mentor? You know, um, should I become a in charge of teacher training in my school, that kind of thing. If you're doing it because you think it's going to give you a promotional opportunity into senior leadership, then I would say, no, it won't do that. What it will do for you is it will improve your teaching immeasurably. You know, I the the gains that I got in my professional development in becoming the teacher I am today, I would I would not replace that time with anything else. It was gold. I would not be the teacher I am today if I wasn't training other people to be teachers, because you've got to be on the game and you've got to really know and focus on what good practice really is, and you've got to exemplify it.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

So I have a comment, Dave. Um uh you've just reminded me of of something, and I don't really want to veer into the voluntary section, but obviously you're talking about taking the pathway leader role for the subject in the county. Obviously, that was paid and time released from the school to do that. But you mentioned you uh had a team of mentors. Now the mentors is a voluntary role. Yes, you get some time off your timetable in your school to mentor the trainee that's in your school, but but there's no extra money. But it makes sense to talk about it here. I did that. So uh a number of years uh in into teaching, obviously, we had a GTEP um scheme in our school, and I mentored, I think, for four different years, two different students, one who actually interviewed and then uh worked for me in my department. And so we have I've veered into the voluntary side, but uh it was when you said about the CPD. Um, just I mean, me, I was just in charge of one teacher in my subject, but they would meet with me dedicated once a week, and that time was sacrosant to that trainee. The questions they would ask you, and you'd be, you know, most of the time you'd be surprised at what you did know, and you'd be surprised what you didn't know as well. And you'd go away and think about it because they're looking to you. You know, you're you're their mentor in their training school. They only see their poor pathway representative, Dave, once a week. You're the one they see every day, all day. Buck stops with you, they've had a bad class, they're in tears, they've got a question, they come to the mentor. So um I for me, I have feared they're into voluntary. I thoroughly enjoyed being the mentor. No extra money, but it it really, really um, you know, really developed me as a teacher, that CPD side, yes. So I can imagine at the level you were at, as you say, not a springboard for SLT, but certainly an incredibly valuable experience.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Yeah, and like you just said, it it really sharpens your teaching. And that's what I really got out of it. Uh, but more than that, um as you just alluded to there, it is about managing people in a slightly different way. So you've got this group of trainees who uh appear to be continually in tears or continually in a stress state, because the demands on teaching and on teacher training are huge. I mean, the slight sidebar. I nearly didn't become a teacher at all because about three-quarters of the way through my teacher training, I had a wobble moment where I just felt like I couldn't do the job. I wasn't in control, I was making some students upset, I didn't feel that I could I could do a good job. I didn't feel like I was getting good training myself either. I felt like I was kind of shoved into the deep end, especially in my second placement. And and I just felt alone and I nearly gave up teaching at that point. And it was my best friend at the time that essentially said.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

I don't know that story, Dave. Don't think I know this story. You don't know this story, no.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

So it was my best friend at the time who we always used to kind of you know go drinking with at the weekend and play snooker and that kind of thing. And and he essentially said to me, Look, Dave, you've come this far. You you are literally a few months away from getting your PGCE. Get your PGCE. And if you then don't want to become a teacher and you want to go back into programming into the industry, that then do that. It's fine, but at least get the qualification, otherwise it's wasted. Um, and this was at a time when once you'd got the PGCE, you didn't have to then get a job and get a school placement and you know, then get it ratified a year later, as it were. Once you got the PGCE, you got it for life. So at any point, even though I never went into teaching, it would always have been a door that was open to me if I wanted to do that, because it wasn't something they could take away from you once you got it. So it was my best friend that convinced me to sort of carry on. So I I know um, you know, how difficult and stressful teach training is. And as I said, my trainees were frequently stressed, frequently in tears. And so it it taught me those people management skills that enabled me to get them over the line in the same way that my best friend helped get me over the line.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

I'm surprised you've not mentioned it. Sorry, Dave. I'm surprised you've not mentioned it yet. Come on. What's that? Well, I don't know. Did you have a particularly great and exceptional trainee any one year that you had to train?

SPEAKER_00 19:26

No. I well, I did. There was a chap called Lance.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Oh okay, whatever. Yeah. For those who don't get the gag, I was actually one of Dave's trainees. So there you go. I know that. I know that.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

I'm not going to make your head any bigger than it is. Forget it, mate. Anyway, look, the other thing is mentors are quite rebellious. So they come to your sessions about, you know, good practice and consistency and all the rest of it. They they nod away if they attend at all. Um, and then they go back to their own school and they just do their own thing with their trainees. And it it's really tricky trying to manage that group of people that are all in different schools with different initiatives and school expectations and all the rest of it. So, um, you know, did it did it get me a promotion to senior leadership team? No, but what it did for my teaching uh was was immeasurable. And the final thing I've got to put into the the paid category, paid opportunities, was a maternity cover. Now, this was a maternity cover for an assistant headship, okay?

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Now you're trialing the trialing the job before you take it. These are great ones.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

So we've skipped we've skipped ahead a little bit in the timeline here because I was head of online services. I did these little auxiliary jobs on the side. Um, I realized it wasn't going to get me into SLT, and I applied for a head of department job in another school, which at the time I was a bit resentful of because it felt like a sideways step that I had to take. Um, and I should have done it sooner if this is what I wanted to do. But again, I was just a little bit comfortable in what I was doing, to be perfectly honest. And uh, but it was a school that I knew, another local school, actually, a school that I went to as a student. And so I knew the school really well. I loved the school, and I thought, yeah, I got an opportunity to uh to go and teach in that school. This would be great. So I took um a head of department job. So at this point, I was now head of uh computing and ICT in an in another school. I'd done that for a few years, I'd been really successful, I'd improved the academic results, I'd brought the team together, I'd really sort of um achieved, uh I felt. And um one of the assistant head teachers who was my boss at the time, um was going to start their family. And so they got pregnant and there was a Maternity leave opportunity. And they happened to be leading the sort of um whole school technology, ICT infrastructure, you know, line management of the technicians, that kind of thing. So it was very much in my wheelhouse. And there was probably nobody else in the school that was kind of better qualified to do that role, if I'm honest. I'm not being arrogant, it's just fact. Um, so I I applied for that. And uh, you know, I was successful in getting it because of my credentials. And so I had a short-term maternity cover on the senior leadership team. And absolutely, you've got to take that because then you really get to see uh what's going on in SLT, how it all works, and what you need to do to get in there permanently. So, one of the things that my school did is it offered heads of department an opportunity. This was after I'd got my maternity cover, and then I converted it into a full-time assistant head teacher because I the role was just created for me when the other person came back from maternity leave. But anyway, the point I'm making here is that then my school decided to offer other heads of department that would have been in my position little secondments. So join SLT for six months, you know, um, get a feel for it.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

With the idea being lead this specific initiative, I assume, that type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Yeah, leading a specific initiative or helping out in a particular area of responsibility. Um, and it really was sort of um offered as an opportunity for you to get whole school experience to enable you to apply for senior leadership jobs in other schools. That that's kind of how it was set up. Because as a head of department, you can get a little bit stuck because the assistant head teacher roles require experience of leading whole school initiatives, and you might not necessarily get that as a as a head of department or sometimes as a head of year, so it can be tricky. So those opportunities, you know, if they come up and we've sort of veered into the voluntary here again, because quite often they will not be paid. Um, but I would definitely take them if you've got any ambition into getting into SLT, because that experience is invaluable and you you know you can stick to it.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Those sort of opportunity, especially the maternity covers. I used to kind of nickname those try before you buy opportunities. I mean but I I mean, generally in the in the 14 years that I taught at the long school, I remember I remember, I think I can remember three specifically, but maybe more maternity covers where someone stepped through the role knowing it would end, and then they later on went for that role further down the line and got it every time. Now I'm not saying that always works, but of course, just think about that. You're at the interview. What makes you think you'd be good at you know this role? Are you kidding me? I I I literally did it for nine months and you were really happy. Of course, you set yourself up for failure. If you did it really badly, you'd have to go somewhere else. But yeah, great opportunity. Right, we've been talking for half an hour and we haven't even touched voluntary. Um, I I had I had one other that I alluded to, but I'll do it very quickly. This wasn't paid for me, but this was great for the department. It was um at the time a new qualification. It was the OCR Cambridge Nationals, which is ironic because now that would be called the Cambridge OCR Cambridge Nationals. Uh, but it was a brand new qualification and there were no resources. So we made them all in-house. And this was my first real stint, I guess, at making resources to sell without realizing it. And um, yeah, we we made them all. And then as a school, we started selling them. And uh, we put a little noddy website up and um schools up and down the country started buying them because there was nothing out there. And I went to the head teacher and said, We're making money out of this. And I ended up kind of negotiating with the head teacher. I said, Look, I realize this can't be my money, but I want this money ring-fenced for the computer science department or ICT as it was at the time. Uh, I don't want this being gobbled up by um uh you know SLT. And again, I said to my head teacher, it was great as well. No, you make the money you can spend it on your department. Better than that, we'll put it in a separate pot for department budget. If you don't spend your department budget, we'll claw it back. So you know, I think teachers are aware of that. Usually don't have a problem spending your department budget. But this one was like, no, you you can you can save that up, and we did, and it allowed us to do some amazing things for the department, you know, buying Lego robotics kits and not one of them, buying a dozen of them and having an entire robotics club after school and having our mini robot wars. I remember it now, and all sorts of cool stuff we would do. I mean, I ended up at one point with £40,000 in that pot. And it's saying to the department, what do you want to buy? What initiative do you want with this department? Yeah, that was four or five times my entire budget for a year. Uh, so that was again no financial benefit to me, but wow, not as something that we planned for, not something that's always going to commonly come around, a lot of effort. But when the department were like, Do you reckon we can each have an iPad when they're becoming those things? And I was like, Oh, is that just buying toys for boys to, you know, for my for all my male, you know, teachers? Uh and uh I went to their teacher and he went, I think it's decently justifiable. They're one of the new things, you're the technology teachers made 40,000, buy yourself an iPad each. Didn't even bat an eyelid. You know, but but the things we managed to do for the kids are amazing, really, really good. Okay, let's move on to voluntary. Sorry, Dave, go on.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

No, no, we are gonna move on to voluntary. I was just gonna say it it's enabled you to get more job satisfaction, it enabled you to really enjoy the job more than you otherwise would have done and create more opportunities for your students and your and your colleagues as well. We genuinely did that.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

We genuinely did that. Okay, moving on to voluntary then. So these are all the opportunities that come along in teaching and they're vast. Uh, we'll try and do these a little a little quicker, Dave, because they got these forever. But we both uh took opportunities as governors. Now I took a governor in my own school, uh, I did that as a teacher governor. I know your route's slightly different, and I'll ask you about that in a in a minute. But I was a teacher governor in my own school, and I did that for a similar reason that I took the exam marking. I seriously think if you before you get to SLT, if you want to know a bit more about the whole the politics, governance of the school, uh, was something which actually isn't an awful lot. It's a lot less stress and load and work on you than exam marking, but there was an expectation and the awareness of seeing that bigger picture for me was really interesting. Obviously, whereas an exam marking was very much for my academic progress with my students uh and learning about the subject and how it's marked. This was really about learning how the school operates at a cross school, a whole school level. You know, we'd I'd report back as a teacher governor to the um staff body after each meeting. We'd have a small stand-up in morning briefing and just let them know. And I did that for I think three years. And in terms of before, you know, learning about the the politics of a school and budgets and decisions and and you know, that wider, higher level thinking that you don't get for your N SLT, uh, that was great. Again, completely voluntary. Uh, is it is it worth it? I I would say yes. I learned a a lot there. Things that surprised me. What about you, Dave? Your governor route was a bit different, wasn't it? It wasn't intern, I think.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Yeah, my governor route was a little bit different. So the this is going back in time again. I was head of online services, and part of that role was doing some outreach work to the local primary schools, skilling up the primary school teachers and uh offering other local opportunities, essentially so that our school could be the hub of the community. So it was great. Um, and as part of that sort of responsibility, um, one of the local uh head teachers of the primary school said, Um, look, we're always struggling to get governors. You are a school teacher, you have got specialism in computing, you're already uh helping us in lots of ways. And we could really do with your expertise on the on the board of governors. So any chance you might consider becoming a governor, that that's how that worked. And I jumped at the opportunity. And uh, having been a governor for a little while, uh, because I knew education inside out, I was able to ask the kind of questions, the challenging questions that other governors perhaps uh couldn't ask because they didn't know the question to ask. And so it was quickly spotted uh by the chair of governors. And so I very quickly became then the vice uh chair of governors. And then when the chair of governors actually left to do um other things, actually in the secondary school that I was working at, um, the opportunity for being chair of governors um opened up. And uh and I took that. Um a little while later, we're casting ahead in time again, because I was now doing this in tandem with being uh uh head of department in my new school, um the uh the academization program happened. And so this primary school uh was then already doing outreach work with other primary schools across the county to raise standards. And so having been uh rated uh outstanding as a primary school when I was chair of governors, we um then became a multi-academy trust and brought on those other schools as part of uh our trust. And of course, that required a complete, completely different infrastructure in terms of leadership and management. And so I transitioned from being the chair of governors in one school to being the vice chair across the multi-academy trust, and the actual chair um of the multi-academy trust was another chair of governors that was at another school that we were working with at the time. So um, you know, I didn't feel like I had the time to be um the chair of the the MAP board. Um I don't forget I was a head of department in my own right and my own school. So just being vice chair was was more than enough. And I actually struggled with the role. And these are not voluntary, we should point out, these are voluntary roles, that's it. Completely voluntary. So I struggled with the role, not not academically, not in terms of my skill set. That was that was easy. Um because at this time I was now an assistant head in SLT in my school anyway, and so it was it was no problem at all. Um, but I struggled with it with time, I just didn't have the time to give it. So I think the one thing that I would say with all these roles is you know, have you got the time to do it justice? Because you've got to do it justice if you're going in there to do the role either because you want a promotion in the future or you want to make your um your job more enjoyable, or you just I don't know, lots of reasons we've already covered why you might want to take some of these roles. Just make sure you've got the time to to do it, to do it right. Um there was one other thing that I wanted to mention, and I forgot about it early on, actually, Craig, because one of the whole points of this episode was supposed to be those sort of those sort of roles that sometimes they're paid, sometimes they're voluntary, it they kind of depend, but they sort of exist in all schools, and I'm thinking about the sort of head of house role, you know. Should you take a head of house role? And I'm I'll just say what I think and and then I'll pass over to you and we can end the episode. But I think the head of house role, I'm not talking about any of my voluntary roles yet, because I shouldn't be able to talk about it. But I don't have anything more to say after this as well. Okay, yeah, carry on, carry on. Yeah, so the the head of house, I I think sometimes it can be those kinds of roles can be a poison chalice. I think you've got to look at what the role means in your school. If there's a paid or a voluntary opportunity in your school, ask yourself how valuable is this role to the senior leaders and to the head teacher? If you don't think the head teacher values that aspect of the school particularly, I would caution against taking that role if you're doing it to gain a promotion in the future, because the head teacher isn't really going to care what you do. If it's something that's right at the heart of your school and makes a real difference and you can have an impact and you can get noticed, and this is the critical thing. Does the role enable you to get noticed, to stand out, to make a difference, to lead? If it does those things, then it's worth taking. So, head of house. In all the schools that I've worked in, the house system was secondary. It didn't really matter. Academic performance was significantly higher than anything else. And so heads of house, I didn't take them. Other people took them, naively thinking it would get them into assistant heads of year or heads of year or some other opportunity in the future. And it never did. It was a dead end, and it was a lot of work for not making a lot of difference. So avoid. If you're in a school where the house system is absolutely central to that school and it means everything, then yes, take the role because it matters to the senior leaders. So I think that's my final bit of advice is if you're thinking about taking a role, either take it for yourself, yeah, or take it because it matters to somebody else that can have an impact on your future career progression. I think that that would be my advice there. Over to you.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

Um yeah, okay. So we talked about I talked about the governor. Um one thing we haven't touched on is all those sort of national body subject associations. There's often lots of opportunities there, but unless you really go into them full-time, there's very few paid. The biggest one, obviously, we're talking about is computing at schools. We've got one of the biggest and longest standing grassroots um subject associations of any subject. And uh I I went heavily into the CAS route. In fact, I can't even think when it was now, 2010, it would have been maybe nine. I was uh one of the very first ever CAS Master Teachers. So it was a pilot scheme. They've got £200,000 of seed money, and there were 15 of us, and we went down to London and got told about this initiative. And if it was successful, it would be rolled out. And lo and behold, two years later, the government times that money by 10 and went, that's worked quite well, hasn't it? Here's two million, and then cast master teachers started popping up everywhere. So that's something I did. Now I I enjoyed that role. You had to leave training for local schools and show what training you were putting on and all the rest of it. Uh, and um, although I thoroughly enjoyed it and it was great for my subject knowledge, and I'll talk about very briefly about a couple of the really nice opportunities. I almost let it go too far before realizing that I wasn't able to give it at the time to do it justice. I have an excellent head teacher, as I said before, but there were always limits. The head teacher was happy for me to continue professional development and to push this, but at the end of the day, he wanted my academic results to be better. You know, he wanted this to be better, he wanted to know what I was doing there. He wasn't actually that interested in that. He was very supportive, but not at the expense of the performance of the students and the subject in his school, which I get. Uh, so I pursued that route, the CAS master teacher, and then I became um uh a regional coordinator of the CAS. We applied and became one of the um the National Centre for Computer Education lead schools in computer science. Uh the head teacher loved that. Certificate went up in the lobby, it went on the foot of you know all the paper that went home. He he loved all that, but I started to almost resent the head teacher. I need more time for this, and it's like um UA level results, I need I that's what I care about, and the GCSE results and and and what's happening here. It's like, oh. So um I I went a bit down the garden path with that one, and at some point I actually I actually kind of tailed it back. Would I take it back? No. The opportunities were great. Working with other professionals that are super keen in your subject. We've always said before, schools of eight insular environments, and even within a school, you can be insular within your own department. So the opportunity to take that subject knowledge and speak to specialists and people across the country is invaluable. It was voluntary. I did get time off my timetable for it, so that was okay. And probably one of the biggest things that came out is the um, well, it was new at the time, but it's the outgoing now. That the new national curriculum, the 2012, where we actually changed the name of our subject from ICT to computing off the back of that famous speech that Michael Gove gave at Bet. Um, I actually ended up being invited down to a working group and going to Whitehall for the first time in my life and finding myself across the table from the DFE and actually helping to work and draft the new national curriculum. Now, please don't blame me if you don't like it. I was one voice in a room of 40 people. Uh but I mean, those opportunities would never have come up. I mean, fascinating. So, yeah, great opportunity. I would take it again, but I think some things you said, Dave, really resonated with me there. Um, you've you've would it have actually helped me get a senior leadership role? Possibly not. Did I enjoy it thoroughly? Um, I I've got others in my head as well, but I mean we've been on here for 41 minutes. I think we've got some really interesting messages there, though. It's not as straight, is it, Dave, in teaching? He comes as an NQT and you think I'm either going to root, go pastorally, assistant head of year, head of year, head of key stage, or I'm gonna go academic, you know, and either root will end up to SLT, and you end up with SLT head of pastoral, or you end up with SLT head of teaching and learning. But it's it's not. There are so many forks in the road. Paid, unpaid, volunteers group. And I think we'll hit on some really interesting stuff there. Is it right for you? You know, it uh what are you getting from it? Uh and really, while you just hit on there, if you're doing it with the intent to get a promotion, especially within your own school, is it of value to the senior leadership team? That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't take it. Because if you think it's a benefit to you and you can take that elsewhere, great. But that's something an angle I hadn't I hadn't thought of. Anyway, we're not gonna finish there with mini-series, it's gonna carry on, but but any any any last thoughts or comments on this video, Dave, before we wrap it up for today?

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Well, we're genuinely interested in the opportunities that have presented themselves at your school. What opportunities have you taken? What opportunities have you let go? Did you regret it? Were you uh happy that you took it? Let us know in the comments below. Join the conversation, and in the next episode, we're gonna talk about leaving teaching.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Yes, I was just about to say that. The last episode will indeed be how did we end up going from where we were to running Craig and Dave? Because that didn't happen overnight either. Right, join us next week when we'll be chatting about that. Take care for now. Bye bye.