foolfillment: the blog

I got a letter today!

I’ve got lots of other things I was going get around to blogging about soon (like teachmeet07) but this gets immediate attention! I’m delighted to get placed in East Lothian for next year and I can’t wait to find out which school I’ll be in. It’s great to know finally where I’ll be and I can start making some more concrete plans. As well as it seemingly being a great place to start out in, it’s also a lot easier for me as I don’t need to start looking for a place to live.

It was a bit of a shock to find out today, I wasn’t expecting the letter until Wednesday but I should have taken a hint when I got an email from the GTCS yesterday wishing us luck in our probation year.

In 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]