Rewards of the classroom

Mature entrants into the teaching profession are nothing new, but, increasingly, it is highly paid high-flyers who are giving it all up to retrain as teachers. Hilary Wilce asks some of these recent recruits what made them do it and how they are coping

Until recently, Manchester-based Carla Richards was an IT consultant earning £70,000 a year and flying to work in Rome, Ireland and London. City breaks and luxury meals were routine for her. "My hobby is dining out. I've spent the last years travelling round the world finding good restaurants."

But there were also things missing from her life – security, time for friends, and doing something that made a difference. So, with her 40th birthday just a couple of years away, and after a spell of sitting on a north-Wales beach, "staring at the dolphins and agonising", she decided to retrain as a secondary-school teacher.

For her, this means two years of training – her first degree was in production engineering, but she wants to teach maths – and a huge exercise in "recalibrating my wallet". She doesn't know how she is going to cover her mortgage, and hopes to find some evening tutoring to boost her income.

She also knows that the pay will not be great when she is qualified. Even so, she is convinced that she is doing the right thing. "There are incentives to do the training, but when you're finished, the rewards are still not there. But I feel this will take me in new directions. I'll have to develop people skills, which I haven't been pushed to develop in IT. I'm looking forward to joining a community and, although everyone says, 'Oh, teenagers. You're brave', working with kids is one of the big attractions."

There is nothing new about mature entrants to teaching. For the past three years, almost half of all the people taking up the 20,000-plus postgraduate training places a year have come from other jobs. But, increasingly, the profession is attracting a new kind of recruit: high-flyers from cutting-edge industries, who a few years back would never even have had schools on their radar.

This is, partly, the chill wind of retrenchment beginning to blow in previously booming areas. But people are also in search of new meaning for their lives.

Jake Mansell, a 31-year-old Oxford physics graduate, used to have a glamorous-sounding job running small, independent dance-record labels for a music-management company. "But at the end of the day," he points out, "it doesn't matter if you're dealing with baked beans or 12-inch records – it's still an office job. And, although I didn't realise it until I got into the classroom, I just didn't like being in an office."

His turning point came when he tutored a friend's sister for her GCSE maths, and she e-mailed him some problems when he was on holiday in Mexico. Downloading her queries, sorting them out, and typing them up on a Mexican keyboard to send back to her cost him a whole day's holiday. "But I realised I hadn't minded a bit because I was so enjoying helping someone to learn."

Under the Government's fast-track programme, aimed at attracting high-quality graduates into teaching, Mansell trained at the London Institute of Education. Recently, he began teaching maths at the John Kelly Girls' Technology College, in Neasden, with his enthusiasm undimmed. He enjoys the kids, feels he has fantastic support, and has "never met a nasty teacher – although I met lots of nasty people in the music industry.

"You know, in a commercial organisation people pay lip-service to the idea 'we're all a team', and send you on bonding weekends and stuff like that. But you walk into a school and everyone basically wants the same thing. They want the best for the kids."

But does such enthusiasm wear off after a few years at the chalkface? Not for Lucie Harris, 29, who used to work for an investment bank in the City, but who is now in her fourth year of teaching science at Gosford Hill School, Kidlington. Harris says that she would not go back to her old life if someone offered her twice the salary that she is on now.

"I became very disillusioned with it all. It wasn't challenging. You earn a lot but you work long hours, so there isn't time to spend all that money. In teaching, there's so much you can do. You can be creative, use your ideas, and although there's a strict framework for what you have to teach, there's a lot of room for manoeuvre. You're also surrounded by people of a similar mindset. If you've got a problem, there's always someone you can talk it through with. You're not in competition with them. I find it a very supportive environment."

Mike Watkins, head of recruitment to schools for the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), says that all kinds of people now switch into teaching, including solicitors and people from television. "We know, from the people who ring in to the Teaching Information Line, that the public perception of teaching is far more positive than it was."

He points out that the teacher's workload is being lightened, salaries are more competitive, bad pupil behaviour is being tackled, and more flexible job patterns are emerging. Meanwhile, the long-standing attractions of security and long holidays remain. In fact, a recent survey on career choices, commissioned by the TTA, found that when people were asked which career could give them the best improvements in lifestyle, finances and relationships, teaching came top of the list, way ahead of the second choice – accountancy.

The TTA is keen to recruit older trainees because it knows that they stick at it and bring maturity to the job. "They're more able to handle all the different relationships that they encounter when they come into school," says Watkins. "They have good social and interpersonal skills, and determination and enthusiasm."

But, despite training bursaries of £6,000 a year, golden hellos of £4,000 for postgraduates training to teach in shortage subjects, and the prospect of the Government repaying the student loans of newly qualified teachers in these subjects, actual salaries remain a problem.

Val Shield, the national officer of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, says that she is frequently contacted by mature, newly qualified teachers complaining that their previous experience is not reflected in their starting salaries. Governing bodies have discretion to award salary points for previous non-teaching experience, she points out, but are generally "looking for the lowest pay that they can get away with". And since mature entrants are perceived as expensive, and can therefore find it hard to land a first job, they often don't want to rock the boat by making a fuss about pay.

But teaching can bring some surprising perks. Jake Mansell is buying half of a flat under a government starter-homes initiative, something that he's eligible for as a public-sector worker, "but which I could never have done if I had stayed in the music industry."

Case Study: 'Sometimes, I do still think, "Oh, I won't be able to go skiing in Aspen any more"...'

Cathy Bryan, 32, used to have a lot of prejudices about teachers. From her viewpoint as a new-media professional, earning £70,000 a year working on websites for magazines such as Loaded and NME, she saw them as "downtrodden", "corduroy-wearing", and "undynamic". But she has now signed up to retrain as a citizenship teacher at the Institute of Education in London. And at the end of her very first day's observation, at Crampton Primary School, a beacon school in south London, she found her views were already changing. She had watched the head run a staff meeting, seen well-behaved children working towards clearly defined objectives, and been surprised at how much she found herself "itching to get involved".

"I never had that 'Eureka!' moment. I never woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm going to be a teacher!'," she says. However she had been made redundant, she did want to do something more stable and rewarding, and she could see that teaching offered a good long-term career strategy, with a variety of opportunities, and the chance to fit a job around any future family.

"The first question that they asked me at the interview was, 'How do you know you're not allergic to children?'. But I'd done a Tefl (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course and taught teenagers for three weeks and really enjoyed it. I'd also done an MA in Human Rights, and that obviously helped. I so believe in citizenship as a subject. It's not just something you learn for its own sake. It's something that teaches you how to live."

Even so, she still has moments of blind panic. "Initially, it was more of an ego thing. All my friends are in law and the media, and I kept thinking, 'what will they think of me?'. I've got over that now. But I still think, 'Oh, I won't be able to take my parents to lunch in the Oxo Tower now'. Or, 'Oh, I won't be able to go skiing in Aspen any more'."

The hardest thing of all, she says, has been to leave behind a fast-paced media culture for a world that she fears could be dominated by waffly government reports, a limp kind of educational liberalism, and inadequate resources. "I did raise an eyebrow when one teacher said that her PC at home was broken, and I realised that without it she couldn't do her work that week. But having said that, the classroom I was in had two PCs and lots of new books – far more than I remember having when I was at school."

education@independent.co.uk