Thriving in education

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I’ve had the opportunity to write a book to support other new teachers in the profession. This all came about by working closely with two colleagues in my first school. We started as NQTs together and got on really well. We were able to support each other through our tough first few years and wanted to share our knowledge with other NQT teachers. We were given the name of a publishing company and contacted them about writing a book. 

We worked collaboratively to write it. We would brainstorm each chapter and discover which topics each of us was most confident in and write to our strengths. We would regularly meet to read each other’s work to discuss and add topics we’d been missed. It was a long process but having two co-authors really helped. We finished the book in August 2017 and spent nearly eight months working with proofreaders and editors. Our first proofread came back with six-hundred comments and we had only two-weeks to rework the text. Finally, after two years of working on it, the book has now been published.

We’ve had some really positive feedback, including reviews from Teacher Toolkit and UKEdChat and our book is now on the reading list for a few universities. To be recognised by people on that level, who communicate with, and train, educators across the country has been an amazing experience.

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Clearing kept me on the right track

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I messed up my A levels and didn’t get the grades I should have got. This left me in a position of what do I do, where do I go, what happens now?

I did not originally intend to study at Plymouth, but personal circumstances meant I changed my mind at the last minute. By this point my UCAS application had already been sent off, so I already anticipated even before I knew my results I would need to go through Clearing with Plymouth to stay in the local area. But in the end, everything worked out well for me.

My plan was to still study BSc (Hons) Biomedical Science and there was an opportunity for me to take a foundation year which would still allow me to follow my chosen route.

I got put in touch with the course leader before I accepted the place, which was really good. You read about courses online and when you apply you go through an interview process, but through Clearing you don’t necessarily get to have this opportunity to ask the extra questions. That was really important to me, to find out the information and confirm that it would get me to my end goal, even though I took a different route to get there.

As a secondary school teacher, I now do say to my A level students to stay calm and always have a list of questions to ask. It helps to handle any panic you may feel – 'my friends have all got their grades, what am I going to do? I must get on a course!' If you have a prewritten list of questions you can still check even though you are going through Clearing it is the right course for you.

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