Divisional Managing Director at Reed
For those without a background in teaching, approaching such a career leap can be daunting to say the least. Lucie Daluiso, Divisional Managing Director for Further Education at Reed, gave us the inside track on how best for candidates to make themselves desirable for further education (FE) institutions.
“Having the right industry qualifications and experience is best,” Lucie states. “There’s often support out there to help you get the teaching qualification you need. For example, some employers want you to have a level 3 qualification in your industry and then will provide the funding you need to gain the relevant teaching qualification.”
A Level 3 Award in Education and Training acts as the ideal springboard from which to get to grips with FE’s roles, responsibilities and relationships involved in teaching for individuals with little or no experience in this field. City & Guilds offers a Level 3 Award in Education and Training that is a credit-based qualification (12 credits) with 48–61 guided learning hours and a total qualification time of 120 hours.
Candidates can always seek qualifications themselves via an apprenticeship or college or university course, “but all in all, you need to prove your industry experience, as employers will expect you to have experience or a qualification in the subject you want to teach,” Lucie states.
Standing out from the crowd is high on candidates’ agendas and being able to communicate a “strong reason for why you want to switch to teaching” will certainly enable interviewees to demonstrate why they are the best fit for their desired FE role. Lucie encourages candidates to “express your passion by focusing on what you can offer the educational institution and its students”. She adds: “I would always say to focus on the students first: touch on what you think you can offer them, explaining why your industry experience will benefit their education.”
Lucie thinks so. In certain FE subjects at least. “There’s a growing trend within the construction and engineering subjects for industry, as well as the newer subjects, such as electric vehicle maintenance and green technologies,” Lucie believes. “At the moment, there’s a key shortage of lecturers in these subjects and there are plenty of teaching opportunities here.”
Problems with teacher recruitment and retention in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects are much documented and cause for significant concern in the FE sector. A Financial Times-commissioned survey in 2022 found that there were nearly three quarters of colleges in England unable to recruit the staff required to teach technical and digital subjects. In addition, 85% had shortages in construction courses, 78% in engineering and 62% in IT and computing. The flipside of this shortage is that it presents plenty of opportunities for those considering a career change.
The government has put in place steps to address the issue head on with the Engineers Teach Physics programme established to train engineers and material scientists to become physics teachers. Training bursaries are also available to trainee teachers in a bid to attract high-quality graduates into the teaching profession. Aside from this, there is a limited amount of scholarships available each year that are worth £29,000 for trainees on mathematics, physics, computing or chemistry courses and £27,000 for trainees on French, German or Spanish (no other languages) courses.
FE in particular lends itself to those considering teaching as a profession with no prior experience due to the “greater need for academic subjects in schools and universities over the more industry subject-specialisms we see in FE,” as Lucie identifies.
When it comes to differentiating between primary, secondary, FE and higher education in terms of choosing a career in teaching, Lucie explains that a younger candidate is often seen applying for primary and secondary school jobs and could be attributed to “the curriculum offer in FE being so vast compared to that in secondary, and therefore, you’re more likely to attract people into the sector with a more varied skillset”.
She adds: “FE teaching can, sometimes, be more of a change of career option, rather than a career entered from university, which would explain the more experienced applicants.
https://www.ft.com/content/cd5e8335-bc51-493d-928e-52e8e9b6df3c
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