There are many places these days where teaching jobs are advertised, though the vast majority are now on-line.

Local Council Pools Or Working Directly With Schools

If you are looking for a supply job, there are a small number of supply pools still running in England and Wales. Supply Pools such as:

• East Riding Supply Service
• Norfolk Supply Teaching Service
• Sefton Supply

These supply pools are worth working for because in general, they are run by the local council and tend to pay to scale. Being paid to scale means taking the annual wage of a full-time teacher and dividing it by 195: the number of days in a school year.

These rates tend to be higher than the rates teachers generally receive from private supply agencies, so finding work through a local authority pool could be beneficial. Currently it can work out that working three days through a local authority pool generates the same income as working a five day week for a private agency, plus you have access to the more generous Teachers Pension Scheme.

If you only wish to work part-time, it could be worth looking at a part-time position through a local authority websites. These are listed by area on the Local Authority Websites page.

There are also an increasing number of supply members who are approaching schools directly, to be employed via an ad-hoc zero hours contract with the school. When it works, this method can pay the same as the table above. To find out more, join the Directly Employed Supply Teacher Staffroom on Facebook.

Private Supply Agencies

Most work presently is allocated for teachers in England and Wales through private supply agencies. You may have a notion of an agent from footballers or movie stars, where their agent negotiates the best deal for their client and takes a percentage of that deal. The world of supply teaching is a little different. The agencies tend to charge the schools as much as they can and pay the teacher as little as they can get away with, so that they can keep as much of the money for personal bonuses and company profits as possible. Many schools think that supply teachers are on a good wage, as they think that the teacher is getting most of the money that they pay to the agency: they are often shocked when the supply teacher tell them how much they are actually being paid.

Finding An Agency

There are quite a number of agencies in each area of England and Wales. To find a list of the agencies in your area, go to the Supply Agency List, where agencies are listed by area. The list is not exhaustive and if you know of any other agencies in your area, let us know through the Contact Us page and we will update the list.

As a rough guide, do not just sign up with agencies who cold call you. They tend not to be the agencies who pay the most money or have the most work. It is far better to work on recommendations from other supply teachers. There are many supply teacher groups on Facebook:

• Supply Teacher Network
• Supply Teachers Network
• Supply Teachers group
• Twinkl Supply Teachers Group etc

where members will recommend certain agencies for their pay, the amount of work they find teachers and how friendly the staff are.

There are also union specific pages:

• National Supply Teacher Network (open to everyone on supply)
• NASUWT Supply Teachers group

where you will be able to ask the same sort of questions. All of the main union lines from officials of the union is that they would like supply teaching to be run once again by the local authorities, with supply staff paid to scale and with access to the Teachers Pension Scheme.

Thereare also regional union pages:

• Supply Teachers in Wales
• NEU Northern Supply Network
• North West Supply Network
• Leicester and Leicestershire Supply Teachers Network
• CAST (Yorshire & Humber)
• NEU London Supply etc.

where you can talk to local supply staff about local supply issues and local agencies.

If you are not on Facebook, the National Supply Teacher Network have a WhatsApp group and finally, there are the forums on this page as well.

Applying To Join An Agency

In the first instance, most agency websites will have a contact telephone number. When you phone the agency, it is always worth having some questions ready to ask. They could be something like:

• How much do you pay each day through your agency? Your follow up to their answer should be a suck on your teeth (like a garage mechanic with your car) and a, “Well, my other agency/agencies pay me (insert whatever you would like to be paid per day plus £10 or £20 so they can negotiate you down a little)”. If they ask you which agency that is, tell them you can’t say as that would be “unprofessional to divulge commercially sensitive material.”
• Do you pay directly or through an umbrella company? In almost every possible case, being paid directly by the agency (which you just have to ask for, see Your Pay) is better for you financially and legally than being paid through an umbrella company. Avoid being paid through an umbrella company at all cost. For more detail about umbrella pay, read Pay Through Umbrella Companies – A Comparison With Direct Pay
• Do you pay to scale, complying with Agency Works Regulations (AWR, see Your Pay) after I have worked in a school for 12 weeks? The answer to this question, as it is government legislation, is yes. If they try at this very early stage to say anything like “as long as you qualify” or “we will see at that point”, then you probably need to look at other agency on the list.
• If they say yes to the previous question, then you need to respond with: “That’s excellent. I’m M(?) on the pay scale. What would you pay me through AWR? A member who is current M6 (currently £189.54, see Your Pay) has been told everything from £140 (“No, I don’t think that is right”) up to £200 (“Thank you very much”).

Once you have had the telephone conversation, if you like what you have heard, then make an appointment to have an interview with the agency. If however, you are not convinced by their answers or their manner, then don’t go for an interview and phone the next agency on the list. There are more supply agencies than you could ever work for, so take your time choosing the correct agency for you.

Going For An Interview

Always go for an interview in your best work clothes (and with a brush/comb): they almost always take a photograph of you sometime during your interview which they use as your profile picture on all the documentation they will send out to schools, so it is worth looking your best. Make sure you work out where you are going to, which buses/trains you need to catch or nearby parking, in advance and turn up in plenty of time. We know members who have turned up early enough that they have completed all of the forms before their interview begins.

Most agency interviews begin with a great deal of form filling. Most agencies ask you to fill in forms on-line before you attend the interview, but then give you almost identical forms to fill in by hand on the day of the interview. You will be asked to bring documentation to the interview: proof of identity (passport/driving licence), proof of address (council tax letter, utility bills, bank letters etc.), qualification certificates and proof of residence and right to work if you are foreign national. These days, agencies are beginning to accept DBS certificates on the Update Service: ask before the interview and if this is acceptable to the agency, bring your original DBS certificate as well. It is usually best to keep all of these in a document wallet and make 100% sure you get them all back, especially your passport.

Once you have completed all the paperwork and had all your documents photocopied, then the actual interview will begin. Make sure you keep calm and answer the questions honestly and with detail: it is a chance for you to expand on your CV and talk about those excellent lessons you have taught and the good feedback you have had from schools and pupils you have taught. Unlike a job interview, in this interview you are almost certain to be taken on, so just focus on making sure the agency know the very best side of your teaching experience.

There will come a point of the interview where you will have to discuss pay rates. We have evidence from Network members that two members, working in the same schools, teaching the same children through the same agency, have been paid a difference of up to £30 a day. The only real difference between the two teachers is that, at interview, one teacher took the initial daily rate offered by the agency and the other teacher negotiated a better rate for themselves. Agency staff do not want you to negotiate a better rate, as this will into their commission, but the staff will respect you more for attempting to negotiate a better wage: it demonstrate a force of character which is needed to be a good teacher in the first place.

Alternatives To Supply Agencies

As mentioned above, though the supply agencies are currently dominating the marketplace in England and Wales, there are alternative models to providing supply cover and you don’t have to look outside of the UK.

In Northern Ireland, the two main teaching unions worked together with Belfast City Hall to set up NISTR, the Northern Ireland Substitute Teacher Register. Set up in 2006. the Register is a database of all the teachers working in Northern Ireland. NISTR then leased software from one of the supply agencies in England and installed it in all the schools in the country. This created a nationwide supply pool, where the school secretary books the supply they need and all the teachers are paid to scale with access to the Teachers Pension Scheme (see Your Pay).

In Scotland, except for the large metropolitan centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow where some supply agencies have got a foothold, the majority of supply teachers are still employed through local authority supply pools.

And on the Isle Of Man, due to the small number of schools, the supply agency model wasn’t working. So back in 2017, the Manx government decided to duplicate the NISTR model from Northern Ireland and created their own in-house computerised supply system called Education Supply. Again, this system pays to scale and gives the teacher access to the Teachers Pension Scheme.

We have Network members who work in each of these countries and report back that they get enough work and are often shocked by the poor rates of pay being offered by agencies in England and Wales.

The main goal of the Network is to improve pay and conditions for all education supply staff and we believe that these models, for taking supply procurement back in-house, represent the best hope for achieving that goal. To this end, Network members have been involved in setting up a not-for-profit, cooperative supply service called Proxi Education. Proxi will aim to:

• Negotiate the best best pay possible for the teacher (to the teachers experience point and beyond if possible).
• Always pay PAYE: no umbrella company pay. 
• Always pay AWR from week 12 (or earlier if possible). 
• Charge no finders fees (we want to keep teachers in education, not provide barriers to them getting permanent positions)

If you would like to join Proxi, go to https://proxi.education/