The Curse of Supply

Being a supply teacher can be a tricky job. You're sometimes fighting on all fronts, schools who expects above and beyond your remit, agencies who play favourites and punish you if you don't take the gig in the school where someone was shot last week or that's two hours away by public transport and then there's the kids.

Most of the time the kids are great - hard work - but great. Occasionally you get one that is an aspiring 'gangsta' or whose big brother 'will beat you up for telling me what to do'. These are generally few and far between and as I became more experienced, I learned to always keep prizes in my kit - not to bribe them with - but to inspire some team spirit and competitiveness between them, so that they encouraged each other to do well. I also have a whole assortment of games and brainteasers in my kit so that if I turn up and there's no work left - which does happen fairly regularly (I always at the very least emailed in a brief lesson plan when I worked full time but that doesn't seem to be the standard in the UK), I've always got something for the to do.

Once, I turned up at a school, asked innocently whether anything had been left as sometimes plans go astray especially if the LSA had been in organising bits and pieces. I was castigated in a fashion which would have made the Spanish Inquistion proud in front of the entire staff about being unprofessional etc by not bringing my own work - which I had - and unceremoniously hauled off by the Deputy Head who printed off 6 maths sheets per child for me (which I later had to mark - only 30 children in the class so it was a breeze, natch). Suffice to say, I have not returned to that particular school.

The biggest frustration of the job though, is not the schools or the kids, but the agencies. One agency I'm with charges the school £250 per day that I'm there. That's £1250 per week. I know they've got people to pay and offices to maintain etc but when I see less than £450 of that money I get a little annoyed, especially when they don't allow me to fax my timesheet in.

Anyone who has ever worked for any kind of agency will probably know this scenario. You've got to get your timesheet into head office by Monday morning. It's two weeks before Christmas, so you make sure it's in the post box before Friday collection time, with a First Class stamp. Thinking you've done the right thing and all is well with the world you go to pay for your groceries on Tuesday. The piggy, supicious eyes of your fellow shoppers narrow, lips grow thin as they scent out your shame - you've not got enought money... you haven't been paid.

Of course it's your fault, you should have sent it express post - you can always claim postage in your expenses you know - because it's Christmas time and all, you have to take these extra precautions, because the mail is shamefully slow at this time of year.

Quite.

The bright side of all of this is, I do have a job, one that I enjoy most of the time.

I also know I will get paid... eventually.