The calm before the storm

Well here it is, Friday again - but not just any Friday.  Today is the last day of the Easter school holidays and the last day of relative peace and quiet before schools return next week.

From 7am in the morning the calls to our companies from panic stricken schools for last minute supply teachers will begin, it will be business as usual.

Spare a thought for the day to day supply teachers who will be thrust into strange schools, with strange pupils and sometimes even stranger staff and be expected to perform like the top grade teachers they are.  For these amazing people every day is the first day of school and armed only with steely resolve, quick wits, a mind full of lesson plans and the ability to think on their feet they will do their best to educate children up and down the country.

They will face unruly classes, the scrutiny of head teachers and the judgement of the Ofsted Inspector at a moments notice.  They will deliver lessons, entertain, engage, manage, assess, report on and build a rapport with a class full of students they have never before met in the space of the lesson they spend with them.  At the end of they day they will try and remember their way back to reception, hand in their visitors badge and their paperwork for the day and wend their weary way home.  Then in true groundhog day fashion they will do it all again tomorrow - just in a different school, with different pupils and different staff and different ......

Hats off to that special breed of person - the supply teacher!!