What should a secondary teacher's cover letter actually say?

In teaching, the letter is not the extra bit

In most jobs, the covering letter is decorative. Someone reads the CV, maybe skims the first line of the letter, and moves on. Advice written for those jobs tells you the letter barely matters.

Secondary teaching is the exception, and it is worth understanding why before you write another one.

Most schools will not accept a CV. You complete the school's or trust's own application form — through My New Term, Tes, eTeach, Face-Ed, a trust portal, or a Word document emailed to the school office — and that form asks for a full, unbroken employment history with reasons for any gaps. That is a safer recruitment requirement, not a formality. The form captures your QTS status and TRN, your degree, your employment record and your referees. It captures almost nothing about whether you can teach.

So everything that decides shortlisting has to live in the supporting statement. The letter is not attached to your application. In this field, it more or less is your application.

That cuts both ways. It means the letter carries real weight. It also means a generic one is far more visible than it would be in another sector, because there is no CV sitting alongside it doing the work.

Who reads it, and how fast

It varies more than most advice admits, and the variation matters.

In a single-form-entry or smaller secondary, the head or a deputy will often read every application personally, usually alongside the head of department. In a large multi-academy trust, a central recruitment team may sift first against the essential criteria, and the head of subject sees only what survives. For a shortage subject, the head of department may be sent applications as they arrive rather than after the deadline.

What is fairly consistent is the mechanism. Shortlisting in schools is normally done against the person specification, criterion by criterion, often on a grid with essential and desirable columns and two people scoring. This is partly good practice and partly a defence against a challenge on the shortlisting decision. The practical consequence: if the person specification says "experience of teaching to A level" and your statement never uses the words "A level", someone has to make an inference on your behalf, under time pressure, at half past four. Sometimes they do. Often they don't.

Use their vocabulary. If the spec says Key Stage 5, write Key Stage 5 rather than "sixth form". If it says "adaptive teaching", use that rather than "differentiation" — the terminology changed with the ITT Core Content Framework and it signals you have read something written after 2019.

One more timing point. Adverts that say "we reserve the right to close this vacancy early" or "applications will be considered on receipt" mean it. In a shortage subject, a school with a September gap and no candidate will interview someone in week one of the advert rather than wait three weeks on principle.

The two questions it has to answer

Strip away everything else and a secondary shortlister is asking two things.

One: can you teach this subject, to these year groups, including the exam classes I need covered?

This is a timetabling question and it is more specific than "are you a good teacher". The head of department has a curriculum model, a set of classes nobody wants to lose, and a gap. They want to know whether you can take Year 11 foundation and Year 13, or whether you are a Key Stage 3 and lower-set teacher who would leave the exam load with the existing staff.

So be exact. Name the specifications you have taught, by board: AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, WJEC/Eduqas, and for sixth form whether it was the A level or an applied route like BTEC or a Cambridge Technical. Name the years. "I have taught AQA GCSE Combined Science Trilogy across higher and foundation tier for four years, and Edexcel A level Biology to Year 13 for two" tells a head of science more than a page about your passion for the subject. If you have a second subject you can genuinely teach — the physics specialist who can hold an A level maths group, the geographer who can cover a Year 8 history class — say so plainly, including how far up you could take it. Timetable flexibility is worth a lot in a small department and almost nothing in your own head unless you write it down.

Two: what will happen to behaviour in your room?

Nobody asks this directly in the advert and everybody is thinking about it. It is the single most common reason a new appointment fails in the first term, and heads of department know it.

You cannot assert your way out of this. "I have excellent behaviour management" is what everyone writes. What works better is describing the mechanism: that you have worked in a school with a centralised behaviour system and used it consistently rather than absorbing everything yourself; that your routines are at the door and in the first four minutes; that you know what your current school's on-call or removal procedure is and when you use it. One specific, unglamorous sentence about routines does more than a paragraph about building relationships.

If you are an ECT, the second question shifts slightly. It becomes: are you going to be coachable and is your mentor going to have a hard year? Write about feedback you have acted on and what changed as a result. That is more persuasive than claiming a finished practice you do not yet have, and it is more honest.

Where the letter carries little or no weight

Some of this you will already suspect, and it is better said than left to erode your confidence.

Supply and agency work. Agencies want your availability, your DBS on the update service, your subject and your postcode. A supporting statement is largely wasted effort there.

Genuine shortage subjects. If you are a physics, maths, computing, chemistry, D&T or MFL specialist with QTS applying in a difficult recruitment area, a competent letter that establishes what you can teach and when you can start will usually get you to interview. A brilliant one does not add much. Spend the saved hours on the interview lesson.

Oversubscribed subjects. PE, history, English and psychology posts in desirable areas can attract very large fields. Here the letter's job is mostly defensive: clear evidence against every essential criterion, no gaps the reader has to guess about, nothing that gives a tired shortlister a reason to put you in the no pile. That is not inspiring advice, but it is what the grid rewards.

When there is an internal candidate. It happens, schools are obliged to advertise anyway, and you cannot tell from the outside. Nothing you write changes it.

After shortlisting. This is the big one. Secondary interviews are a full day: a taught lesson to a class you have never met, a pupil panel, sometimes a data or in-tray task, then a formal panel. Heads routinely decide on the lesson. The letter's entire function is to get you into the building; once you are there, almost nobody refers back to it except to pull an interview question out of it. Do not spend a fifth draft polishing prose that stops being read the moment it works.

Things schools notice that the general advice misses

The resignation calendar shapes the field. In maintained schools the Burgundy Book leaving dates mean a teacher resigning by 31 May leaves on 31 August, by 28 February leaves on 30 April, by 31 October leaves on 31 December. Academies set their own terms in contract, and many mirror these, but not all. The effect is that the main September market runs from roughly February to the end of May, and anything advertised in June or July is a school with a problem. Applying late in the cycle means a smaller field and a more anxious panel. That is not a worse position to be in.

Ofsted references date fast. Single-word overall effectiveness judgements for state schools were scrapped in September 2024 and the inspection reporting changed again after that. A line about helping the school "move from Good to Outstanding" now reads as though you wrote it some years ago and have not looked since.

The safeguarding line should be one sentence, not a paragraph. Application packs often ask for a statement of commitment. Write one true sentence about your responsibility under Part One of Keeping Children Safe in Education and your experience of reporting through a DSL. The five-sentence boilerplate version is recognisable and adds nothing. Separately: KCSIE asks schools to consider online searches as part of due diligence on shortlisted candidates, so it is worth knowing what a search for your name returns before you find out at interview.

Visiting the school before applying is one of the few genuinely differentiating moves. Many adverts invite it. If you can get released — and plenty of people cannot, because you have your own timetable — a single concrete observation from the visit, about the corridors or a curriculum conversation with the head of department, is worth more than any amount of researched flattery about the school's values statement.

Do not quote their vision back at them. Every school has one and every applicant quotes it. What reads as real is a specific comment on something you could only know from the curriculum pages, the subject blog, or an actual conversation.

What to do with the next one

If your applications are not converting, the fix is usually structural rather than stylistic. Do this with the next advert in front of you.

Print the person specification. Go through it line by line and mark, honestly, whether each essential criterion is evidenced somewhere in your draft in words a stranger would recognise. Any essential criterion with no evidence is a likely rejection, and it is better to know that before you send it.

Then check your opening. The first line should state the post, the subject, the key stages and your available start date, because school offices route applications and some schools are advertising three vacancies at once.

Then check the middle. If the paragraph about the department would survive find-and-replacing the school's name, it is not doing any work. That paragraph, and only that paragraph, needs rewriting for every application. The subject and behaviour material stays largely stable across applications; the fit paragraph cannot.

Then cut to the stated length. If the pack says two sides of A4, two sides means two sides, and a shortlister who has asked for a limit notices who ignored it.

If the volume of rewriting is what is actually stopping you, jobmarket.pro reads each advert and person specification in full and drafts from a single profile it cannot add experience to.

The rest of it — the lesson, the pupil panel, the moment in the head's office when they ask whether you are still a firm candidate — is a different problem, and a better one to have.