What Do Education Professionals Do?

Your teacher and support staff job descriptions detail the key aspects of how the educational team functions and define your teaching methods and how the candidate will fit in your establishment’s culture. Your school or organisation needs to hire teachers and supporting staff carefully, with a mix of experience and skills for facilitating learning, promoting equality, and ensuring student well-being. The reputation of your school is on the line and safeguarding this is paramount to the financial performance and success of your school.

Depending on the educational environment, educational employees oversee:

• Maintaining a safe environment
• Connecting students with appropriate resources and learning support
• Grading learners using various assessment methods
• Ensuring confidentiality and conformity with the Data Protection Act
• Promoting further education and training
• Setting ground rules for the group and individual learner
• Creating or following the lesson plan
• Conducting teaching in line with regulatory requirements
• Promoting diversity/equality
• Liaising with awarding bodies

Education Role

The duties of educators are completed by individuals in roles titled as:

• Teacher
• Teaching and Learning Assistant
• Nursery Nurse
• Early Years Practitioner
• Higher Level Teaching Assistant

Education Responsibilities And Duties

Education duties are the must-do and high-priority responsibilities of the teacher or teaching assistant roles. These are the job aspects that you will likely govern the individual’s performance on, and as you can imagine, these vary depending on the role and type of learning establishment.

Education responsibilities and duties include:

• Attending faculty meetings, parent conferences, and events
• Setting the behavioural guidelines for students
• Supervising children during lunch, breaks, and excursions
• Ensuring students don’t participate in bullying
• Comforting upset children
• Giving first aid and completing accident reports
• Completing administrative tasks
• Maintaining a safe learning environment
• Preparing lessons and teaching lesson plans/interactive learning/gathering educational content
• Educating students/teaching lessons following the national curriculum guidelines
• Maintaining a positive learning environment
• Assigning homework
• Grading tests/grading students’ progress and creating progress reports/documenting progress
• Liaising with awarding bodies and local authorities
• Promoting equality and diversity
• Delivering extra support and assistance to small groups or individuals
• Hiring staff (head teacher or nursery manager)

These duties are pretty generic, but you can make the job’s duties more engaging and meaningful by saying how the responsibility should be accomplished. For example, ‘Creating a positive learning environment by encouraging student participation and introducing engaging learning activities.’

Education Skills

To ensure your learners receive the very best teaching and learning experience, you need educational practitioners with the key skills for creating a supportive learning environment. Other professionals, such as teaching assistants and nursery workers, play an important role and require slightly different soft and hard skills to fulfil their responsibilities in education.

To complete their support, teaching, and learning job, you need teaching staff with skills including:

• Knowledge of learning styles and the teaching cycle
• An ability to adapt the teaching style to meet individual learner needs
• Verbal communication skills and written communication skills
• An ability to motivate students and young people in the classroom
• Reading body language
• Understanding and empathy for different cultures and beliefs
• Classroom administration skills
• Organisation and patience
• Adaptability and listening skills/active listening
• Leadership, collaboration, and teamwork
• Interpersonal abilities
• Time management
• Honesty and truthfulness
• Empathy and compassion
• Numeracy
• Problem-solving skills
• Objectivity
• Impartiality
• Target-driven
• Adaptable
• Presenting skills
• Foreign language skills
• A commitment to lifelong learning
• Knowledge of teachers standards

Educator Qualifications And Education

The professional qualifications and education depend on the teaching jobs and level of seniority but might include:

• An Education Degree (Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree) with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)
• Professional Graduate Diploma in Education
• Expert knowledge in specialist subject areas
• Computer proficiency

Required Education Experience And Education Training

Education job descriptions for teaching roles will require a candidate that has completed the Initial Teacher Training. Initial Teacher Training provides classroom experience, overseen by experienced classroom teachers. Some roles require previous teaching experience in a primary school or secondary school.

Education Job Description FAQs

Here we answer your questions on education roles and job descriptions.

WHAT ARE THE EDUCATION ROLES?

There are many teachers in education roles such as primary school teacher, head teacher, and teaching assistants. A teacher job may also be defined by the subject (maths/English) or type of facility (nursery).

WHAT DOES A TEACHER DO?

A good teacher is able to create work and lesson plans, deliver educational activities, monitor student progress, run school meetings, collaborate with other teachers, and maintain good parent relationships.

WHAT ARE THE SKILLS NEEDED TO BE A TEACHER?

The skills required for a teacher job or other education jobs depend on the role, age of the student, and subject. Beneficial skills for candidates interested in educating students include written and verbal communication, adaptability, empathy, body language recognition, motivation, and organisation. If you employ teachers, a degree and qualified teacher status may be a prerequisite for the teaching jobs.

WHAT QUALIFICATIONS SHOULD CANDIDATES HAVE?

Candidates may have an assortment of qualifications, including for example:

– Bachelor of Education
– Bachelor of Science with QTS
– Bachelor of Arts with QTS
– Professional Graduate Diploma in Education

WHAT ARE THE TEACHING METHODS?

Methods include teacher-centred, learner-centred, participative/interactive, and content-focused.

WHAT IS A SAFE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT?

A safe environment maintains high standards, fosters positive relationships between students and staff, focuses on academic achievement, promotes diversity, and encourages parent and community evolvement.

HOW DO I HIRE AN EDUCATION PERSON?

Job advertising for education will need to be refined for the type of classroom, lessons, organisation, and role. It will help to leverage a hiring strategy that encompasses advertising on general and specialist teacher job boards, social media, and for word of mouth referrals. Your recruitment strategy might also include having a presence at teacher conferences and online with professional bodies, where you may find passive external professionals.

Crucial elements that will affect recruiting success include writing an effective job description and selecting the proper job title. Your job description should define:

• Teacher qualifications
• Classroom duties
• Professional development opportunities
• Your values and mission
• Teacher and student support

Flat fee recruitment solutions continue to deliver the best results when recruiting teaching staff for the classroom.

WHAT IS AN EDUCATION JOB DESCRIPTION?

An education job description is a document that sets out the role’s duties, tasks, and skills. Putting these in black and white is crucial and will help you find the right match for a position that directly affects the teaching experience, learning environment, and the school’s and students’ success.

The job description should be transparent and clearly set out who you are, who you want, what they will do, and why good teachers might want to work for you. It helps tremendously to use language and jargon that engages your audience.

When you get all of this right and include the best words to use when writing education job descriptions, you will get job applications from qualified candidates that closely match your ideal person profile.

HOW DO I WRITE AN EDUCATION JOB DESCRIPTION?

When writing a job description either for advertising school teacher jobs or an internal job specification, you need to focus on 5 main criteria:

1. What are the key jobs, tasks, and duties required for an education position
2. Consider all the job responsibilities required for an education role
3. What skills the person must have for the job
4. What personality traits the person must have to work in education
5. Appropriate and relevant education and qualifications

These five criteria should help you build a picture of your ideal candidate. Good questions to consider that will help you write a concise teacher job description that stands apart from others (essential in the current competitive job market), and attract the best candidates, include:

• What value does this role bring to your organisation?
• How does the role align with your organisation’s culture, values, and mission?
• How does this role differ from other positions?
• How is this role similar to other positions?
• What are the minimum teaching skills or transferable skills?
• What are examples of your school’s targets?

Suppose you are not hands-on in the teaching environment or highly familiar with the teaching methods or work and lesson plans. In that case, it can help to interview one of your head teachers, a good teacher, or teaching assistants to gain a greater understanding.

A word about jargon: The phrase ‘jargon’ has good and bad connotations, and if it isn’t carefully considered, it may deter candidates from applying. Ask yourself if words and phrases are internally exclusive or recognisable by individuals that may have valuable transferable skills in similar or alternative business sectors.

Furthermore, if you are hiring for senior-level leadership team positions, you might expect candidates to have a greater vocabulary and understanding of the jargon. However, if you are hiring for junior-level jobs, consider being as straightforward and transparent as possible.

WHAT EDUCATION TASKS SHOULD I INCLUDE IN A JOB DESCRIPTION?

The tasks of a head teacher, school teacher, or teaching assistant are any other activities that they complete occasionally or on a daily basis. These are usually subsidiary tasks such as responding to parents’ emails, attending teacher training events and running school meetings.

It is tempting to leave some of the more ‘mundane’ tasks out to make your vacancy sound more attractive, but this can lead to trouble down the road as you may recruit individuals for your teaching jobs that are not a perfect match. If you hire the wrong person your school, team, students, and parents may suffer. The employee might leave your organisation, and you are back to square one, requiring another investment in recruitment and training.

If you get to the end of the process outlined here and find that your job description is too long and concise has gone out the window, it is time to review your first draft. To bring things back into line, you should delete unnecessary phrases and fluff, remove prepositional phrases, focus on what is role critical, and refrain from putting your entire ‘about us’ page in your content.

HOW DO I ENGAGE EDUCATION CANDIDATES?

As a final note for employers and recruiters, it is crucial to remember that while a job description is about what and who you want, describing this alone will not create an inbox full of great teachers and other professionals willing to comply. A job advert must go beyond the duties, skills, education, qualifications, traits, and tasks that you want and communicate the position’s value to job seekers.

Public and private sector schools should convey their employee value propositions to engage teaching staff, highlighting both monetary and other benefits. Benefits that will entice qualified job seekers to apply might include:

• Stating the teacher salary or average salary range
• Focusing on work-life balance
• Flexible working – are hours flexible or can teaching or administrative tasks be completed remotely?
• Opportunities to gain additional teaching qualifications
• Career development opportunities
• The quality of classroom facilities, equipment, or teaching methods
• How the organisation’s values align with those of students, parents, and employees