The school is expanding without many of the crucial processes or systems in place. As an employee, you will soon realize that the organization does not have some of the most basic employment processes properly in place to ensure staff retention.
e.g.
- transparency in pay structure and bonus
- comprehensive processes to appraise/recognise staff work
- career progression
- professional development
As a teacher, you would be frustrated with the poor planning, communication, and the disconnect of the school leaders. Staff morale is extremely low in the school, as all the teachers are overworked and burnt out from the chaotic, clueless and top down management.
If you're going to apply to be a teacher, please note that:
- You do not have any admin/free periods ( a normal school would give a teacher admin periods to catch up on marking, class admin, lesson planning)
- You will be using your weekend to catch up on on lesson planning and resources since you do not have any "free periods" to do so during school hours. It's a norm for Pathlight teachers to work through the weekends or work until late in the evening on weekdays.
- You do not have any breaks from the time the school starts to end (the students' recess is not your break, because of the profile of the students they need help with buying food etc, so please expect no breaks at all. Make sure you eat a full breakfast before 7am, because your next meal/break is after all the students leave the school at 1pm plus).
- You are asked to step into a class and teach a subject immediately without any training. You are assigned a "coach", who is either very overworked as well to provide any proper guidance or his/her "training" is outdated since the organization does not have a proper appraisal/professional development processes. So you're likely going to be new, untrained and left on your own to figure autism friendly strategies and teaching.
- If HR promises you professional development during the recruitment interview, please also bear in mind that there is a real shortage of teachers in the school. Manpower is tight. So you are unlikely to be sent for NIE DISE training anytime soon. There are many senior teachers in the school who have worked many years and have not even received their NIE training.
- Do not expect any career progression or prospects. The hierarchy is flat. There are just a handful of key leadership positions that has a promotion in payscale (e.g. track head, vp, hod). The school also rarely promotes their own middle management for key leadership positions, usually preferring to outsource. For the rest, "leadership" position may just be a title promotion with no remuneration
- You're going to feel extremely exhausted and find yourself falling sick easily once you work as a teacher in this school. P/S: MC rate is high in the school
- If you're a responsible and hard-worker, you're are likely going to burnt out very quickly. You would survive better, if you care less and do less with the many loopholes in the organisation management which explains why many of the good teachers have quit this organisation
