The Get Into Teaching website makes teaching sound like a clean, confident career choice: inspire from day one, teach with freedom, progress at your own pace, earn a competitive salary, and enjoy more holiday than your mates in office jobs.

So we do what any two qualified secondary teachers would do — we print it out and start reading it properly.

What follows is a line-by-line reality check.

We unpack the idea of “impact” and what it actually looks like when most corridor conversations are about shirts, toilets, and getting to period two on time. We talk about autonomy in the classroom — yes, you bring your personality, but curriculum pressure, accountability, and timetables can quietly reshape what teaching looks like in practice.

We also share stories from our own experience, where recruitment language starts to feel a bit like advertising that has never met a staffroom.

Then we get into progression, pay, pensions, and the great teaching myth: the holidays. We’re not here to exaggerate, but we are honest about what the job does to your evenings, your headspace, and your energy.

James brings the SENCO perspective, Ben brings leadership experience, and we land in the same place: teaching can be brilliant, meaningful, and genuinely funny — but it’s also far messier than the brochure suggests.

If you’re thinking about becoming a teacher, or you’re already in it and want to feel a bit less alone, press play. And if you’ve ever read a job advert for teaching and thought “that doesn’t sound like my school at all,” you’re in the right place.

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