I am conscious that some of you don’t have the same sense of humour or outlook on life as me – after all “my perception is my reality” – so when I blog about the teacher shortage I don’t mean it to be all “doom and gloom”. In fact I do whatever I can do, given my other commitments to try to help the situation. I know that I can’t influence policy but one of the things I have been doing for a while now is acting as a case study for career changers, when the need arises for the National College of Teaching and Learning. Not a massive thing to do, but at least I’m “doing my bit”.

This week I did an interview for BBC Radio Gloucester about changing career and becoming a teacher (to be honest I’m not sure if it’ll see the light of day, as I don’t hunt this type of stuff down once I’ve done it!). In my brief about the interview which was part of a piece with Charlie Taylor (the Chief Exec of the NCTL) I was told some recent stats about similar career changers and the impact of the annual “new year, new career?” campaign that they run, which I thought I’d share as I find them interesting:

• Last January the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) saw its busiest month of 2014 with over 11,000 calls to the ‘Teaching Line’ from aspiring teachers and almost half a million visits to the ‘Get into Teaching’ website.
• Almost half (46%) of all people who registered an interest in teaching last year were career changers, with a significant proportion (38%) in their 30s.

Once the seed of the idea to change career was planted, I was spurred on by the fact that I didn’t want to get to 60 and regret not having at least tried teaching as a career. Teaching can for the most parts be the BEST JOB IN THE WORLD and I can’t imagine doing anything else right now.

So if you have, even the smallest yearning to teach, the NCTL are running a series of live interactive online events running in January and February. They are a great opportunity to get your questions answered and you have nothing to lose … if you’re interested find out more -> here