Get Into Teaching Seminar 2025

Getting Into Teaching: Seminar Highlights

We recently held our Summer tutor enrichment seminar: Get Into Teaching. The seminar was led by six expert panellists, with a range of experiences with different Initial Teacher Training Routes and careers within Education. The panellists were able to use their expertise to share top tips for getting into teaching, as well as teaching as a career. The seminar ended with a Q&A session, during which our panellists answered questions from our attendees.

Our panel of experts included: 

Dr Ben Stutchbury: Ben started in academia and moved into teaching after a brief interlude in pharmaceutical advertising. He has been teaching for 7 years and has moved up to head of department in a high-achieving grammar school 

with a sixth form. He has experience teaching all three sciences to GCSE level and biology at A-Level. Ben says that joining the teaching profession is the best decision he has ever made.

 

Rachel Levy: Rachel trained as a Primary School teacher 12 years ago and has been working with young people ever since. She worked as a Teaching Assistant for a year, before doing her PGCE at the Institute of Education in London. She worked for 4 years as a primary school teacher and 2 as Head of a Pre-School , before moving into the Education Charity sector with Team Up. She is currently working for a children’s health charity running online groups for young people. Rachel says that her PGCE and teaching experience has opened up a whole world of transferable skills, passions and opportunities.

 

Adam Deane: Adam is an SEN teacher and has worked in both primary and secondary settings since 2015, initially as a teaching assistant and now as a teacher. His background in performing arts plays a significant role in his teaching style as he loves bringing lessons to life with interactive stories and music. Currently, he’s working with a reception class of students with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties. He says ‘it’s busy yet incredibly fun!’

 

 

Joe Cowley: Joe started his career as a Teach First trainee, teaching History in the West Midlands on the 2016 cohort where he gained Qualified Teacher Status and his PGCE. After spending three years there, Joe moved back to his home city of Leeds to teach at an outstanding Sixth Form college, helping develop the A-Level curriculum and re-design entire schemes of work. In 2021 he pursued a Master’s at Queen’s University Belfast, Joe has since re-joined Teach First as a Programme Talent Officer, mentoring incoming Teach First trainees and spreading the message of the charity on campuses up in Scotland. Joe puts his teaching experience to good use, helping deliver prep sessions for trainees, taster sessions for students interested in finding out more about Teach First and running events at universities to highlight the charity’s work.’

 

Ruby Kent: Since completing the School Direct programme in 2016, Ruby has taught across the primary phase, working with mixed-age classes, high levels of mobility and EAL, and a range of SEN. Ruby has been a year group, phase and subject leader (Science, Geography and History), leading projects to increase creativity and engagement through effective lesson planning, child-led investigations and strategies to support children’s long-term memory. Ruby is now Leader of Learning at a school in Westminster, working on whole school curriculum design, oracy and adaptive teaching.

 

Malcolm Low: Malcolm began tutoring during his second year of university in 2018 as part of the Team Up programme. After graduating, he pursued a career in teaching, training via the PGCE SCITT route with United Teaching. He is now Head of Maths at a secondary school in South London, where he teaches students across Key Stages 3, 4 and 5. His favourite strand of maths is Statistics – where numbers meet real life!

 

After sharing their differing journeys within teaching, our panellists shared their top tips for getting into and working within the profession. 

Here are just some of the pearls of wisdom shared during the event:

  • Get as much experience in schools and classroom environments as possible before you start your teacher training. This way, you’ll have a good idea of what teaching as a career will look like day to day. Many training routes offer ‘experience days’. Another way to get experience working with young people is by volunteering as a Team Up tutor! 
  • Don’t be afraid to let your pupils see a little bit of your personality. This can really help with building rapport with your students.
  • During lessons, be prepared for the unexpected! Prepare to change or adapt your plan and don’t worry if you have to ditch the plan completely! Be resilient, reflect on it and use the lessons learnt to improve your practice.
  • Be strict with your work/life balance to avoid burnout. Make sure that you look after yourself!
  • Don’t take on the weight of the world. There was a fantastic quote from our panellist, Joe, to highlight this: ‘You can’t change the system overnight, but you can change the lives of the kids in front of you.’

Team Up would like to thank our panel of expert speakers for sharing their experiences and top tips during the seminar. We hope that our tutors left this seminar with an insight into what it is like to train to become a teacher and work within schools. We wish our tutors the best of luck in their future teaching careers!

If you are a Team Up Tutor or alumni who would like any further information about getting into teaching, please reach out to a Team Up team member and we will be happy to source the answer from our network.

Keep an eye on our social media channels @teamuphub to hear about more upcoming seminars and workshops, exclusively available to our volunteer tutors and alumni.

If you are interested in joining us to tutor on our upcoming programmes (and gain access to more seminars like this!) please contact us at: tutor.applications@teamup.org.uk or apply now to start your Team Up Journey.