Probation Bounty
8:51 pm on the 25th of January, 2006In just under a year I have to make some choices. Richard Ledingham had to make them recently and won’t find out the outcome until May or so.
Yes! I’m talking about the lottery that is being placed for your probation year following a teacher training course in Scotland. Now that newly qualified teachers get their first school chosen for them a situation has arisen where some local authorities (LAs) don’t get enough new teachers and other LAs get too many, to try and resolve this there is now what I like to call a bounty payment to entice people to go where nobody else would touch with a barge pole. It’s a nice idea, it means that I get rewarded for going to a place that I’d have chosen otherwise. The places that fail to attract people generally are the most beautiful parts of the country - the highlands, islands, and generally more remote parts - and as such they are the parts that I would choose to go to normally, this way though I get and extra ?6000 for doing so. The downside of it is, it could literally be anywhere in Scotland, it could be one of the places that people don’t touch with a barge pole because they are horrible places - I won’t say where, you can decide for yourself - and that is what makes it a hard decision. On top of that I could end up somewhere that is miles from anywhere Morven wants to be.
Still, I have about a year to decide, and ?6000 is a lot of money.
[tags]GTCS, probation, teaching[/tags]
Tags: GTCS, probation, teaching
January 26th, 2006 at 10:38 am on the 26th of January, 2006
Hello. First of all don’t panic. The money is a huge temptation I agree but the decision is essentially the same. If you wish to go the the Highlands, Western Isles or Orkney etc. and you say so on your GTC form you are almost gauranteed to be sent there as so few people are willing to move that far. Of course by stating this preference you will not be given the ?6000. It all depends on how committed you are to other people and places. If you have children or a partner than obviously the decision on where to go is slightly more complex. One of my friends on the course this year has 4 children and a new husband but as a family they all said for her to tick the box and to take them on an adventure. Another thing to note is that if you state a preference for Orkney and get Orkney the Local Authority will provide you with ?2000 to help with settling in…so it might be an idea to see if any of the other ‘remote’ councils are willing to do the same.
And finally, if I had decided to aim for the city where I live I would have had no gaurantee at all which school I would end up in. On balance I would rather have the adventure, the cash and the chance of a ‘rural’ school in beautiful surroundings as opposed to an inner city school that I could not pick myself.
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