How to write a CV for a secondary school teacher role

You have applied for classroom posts and heard nothing, or heard nothing until the closing date passed and the school appointed internally. Before you rewrite anything, it is worth knowing what actually happens to a teaching application, because the mechanism is different from almost every other profession and most CV advice is written for the other one.

In maintained schools, the CV is usually not the document that shortlists you

Most state schools in England shortlist from their own application form, not from a CV. Safer recruitment practice, set out in Part 3 of Keeping Children Safe in Education, pushes schools towards a standard form: a full employment history with dates, explained gaps, and a self-declaration section. Plenty of adverts on TES, Eteach and MyNewTerm say explicitly that CVs will not be accepted.

That has two consequences.

First, if the advert asks for a form, sending a CV instead is not a bold move, it is a bin. Second, the piece of writing that decides your fate is the supporting statement or letter of application, and it is judged against the person specification, not against your prose. Someone sits with the person spec, goes down the essential criteria, and marks each one met or not met from the evidence you supplied. Criteria you did not address are scored as not met, even if you obviously have them. If the spec says "experience of teaching to A level" and your statement talks about your passion for the subject, you have not met it.

So where does a CV still matter? Independent schools, international schools, sixth form colleges, supply and long-term agency work, and speculative approaches to a head of department in February when you know a post is coming. Also: many teachers keep a CV as the master document they cut and paste the form from. Both jobs are worth doing properly.

The first third of the page: what a head of department checks before deciding to read on

A subject leader with thirty-odd applications is looking for a small number of facts, and they are looking for them fast.

Subject and key stages. Not "experienced teacher" but "Chemistry to A level, Biology and Physics to GCSE". Whether you can take an A level group is often the single thing that separates a viable candidate from a non-viable one, because departments are usually short of KS5 cover, not KS3. If you have taught KS5, say which specification, which year groups, and for how many years. If you have not, say what you have done that is closest — GCSE triple, Level 3 BTEC, KS4 top set — rather than leaving silence for them to fill.

Second subject. Small schools and small departments live on these. If you can offer a term of Year 8 Geography, or cover Maths to Year 9, or teach GCSE PE theory, put it near the top. It is a common reason one candidate gets interviewed over an equally good one.

QTS and your TRN. State "Qualified Teacher Status, awarded [month year], TRN 1234567". A Teacher Reference Number lets the school check the record on Teacher Services in a few seconds. If you trained in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, give your GTCS, EWC or GTCNI registration number instead and note whether you also hold QTS for England. If you qualified outside the UK, say plainly which route you are on and whether QTS has been awarded yet — vagueness here reads as a problem.

ECT status. If you are in induction, say how many terms you have completed, whether the outcomes so far have been satisfactory, and who your appropriate body is. If you have completed induction, say so and give the date. If you have been out of the classroom long enough that induction was never completed, address it rather than hoping nobody notices.

Availability. Teaching runs on resignation dates, and the Burgundy Book ones are 31 October, 28 February and 31 May for leaving at the end of the following term. A head reading in March is doing arithmetic about whether you can start in September. Tell them: "Available from 1 September 2026."

Current context in one line. "11–18 comprehensive, roughly 1,200 on roll, mixed intake, large sixth form." A head of department reads your experience through the intake you taught. Coming from a selective school into a comprehensive with high Pupil Premium numbers, or the reverse, is the thing they will quietly worry about, and one honest line about the setting is better than letting them assume.

How teaching experience is actually evidenced

The unit of evidence in this job is the timetable and the specification, not the bullet point about "delivering outstanding lessons".

For each post, give the allocation: which year groups, which sets or bands, how many groups, and whether you had exam classes. "Timetable across KS3–KS5 including two Year 11 sets and a Year 13 group" tells a reader more than a paragraph of adjectives. If you were given the bottom sets, or the nurture group, or the resit cohort, say so — those are hard timetables and experienced readers know it.

Name the specifications by board and, where you can, by code. AQA 8700, Edexcel 1MA1, OCR H446, Eduqas, Pearson BTEC Level 3 National, Cambridge Nationals, a T Level pathway. A department that teaches AQA and sees AQA in your CV has just removed a chunk of induction cost. If you have taught more than one board in your subject, that is a selling point; say it.

Name the exam-facing work you have done: examiner or moderator for a board, coursework moderation, NEA supervision, controlled assessment administration, appeals and remarks, entry decisions on tiering. Marking for a board is unusually valuable on a teaching CV and teachers routinely leave it off or bury it under "other".

Name the practical or technical reality of your subject where it exists. Science: CLEAPSS, required practicals, working with technicians, risk assessment. DT: which machines and which CAD/CAM software you are trained and competent to supervise. PE: coaching or officiating awards, fixture management, which sports you can run. Music: ensembles run, peripatetic timetabling. Drama: productions, LAMDA. These are the things a department genuinely needs and they are specific enough to be checkable.

Name the systems. MIS — SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom, Edulink — plus whatever you use for behaviour and reporting: Class Charts, Go 4 Schools, Satchel One. Curriculum platforms: Kerboodle, Educake, Sparx, Dr Frost, Seneca, Pearson ActiveLearn. Data tools: 4Matrix, SISRA, ALPS, FFT Aspire. None of these makes you a better teacher, but they shorten the first fortnight and a school in September cares about that.

Results, stated in a way a data-literate reader will accept

This is where teaching CVs most often fall over, in both directions.

Overclaiming is obvious to the reader. Nobody believes a single teacher owns a whole cohort's Progress 8 figure, and quoting one as if it were yours signals that you either do not understand the measure or hope the reader does not. The same goes for percentages of grades that you cannot show a comparator for.

Underclaiming is the more common failure. Teachers write nothing at all about outcomes because they are worried about attribution, and then a head of department has no evidence of impact.

The usable version is comparative and bounded to what you taught. Say which group, what the starting point was, and what the comparison is: results for your Year 11 set against the department's target grades for those students, or your A level group against the school's ALPS or value-added measure for that year, or a resit cohort's pass rate against the previous year's for the same kind of group. If you know the number and it is accurate, give it with its comparator. If you do not have the number to hand, describe the comparison in words rather than inventing a figure — heads of department can read a data sheet and they will notice a figure that does not behave like a real one.

If your results have been unremarkable, do not manufacture a story about them. Evidence impact somewhere else: an intervention programme you designed and can describe, a scheme of learning you wrote that the department still uses, a Year 9 option uptake that rose after you took over the taster unit.

Pastoral, leadership and the things teachers routinely leave off

Secondary teachers habitually omit half of what they do, because inside a school it is just the job.

Put in the form group and how long you have had them, and Head of Year or assistant head of year roles with the size of the year group. Put in whether you hold or have held a TLR, which band, and for what. Put in your pay range point — M or UPS, and whether you have passed threshold — because it affects whether the school can afford you and heads work that out anyway.

Put in the mentoring. Being an ITT mentor for a School Direct or SCITT trainee, or an ECT mentor or induction tutor, is direct evidence of the coaching a middle leadership post needs. So is running subject knowledge sessions for non-specialists.

Put in the NPQs by name — NPQLTD, NPQLT, NPQLBC, NPQSL, NPQH, NPQ SENCO — with completed or in progress and the date. Put in safeguarding: Designated Safeguarding Lead or deputy DSL training, and the date of your most recent KCSIE update. Put in SEND specifics if you have them: EHCP provision you have written or delivered, work with a SENDCo on adaptive practice for named needs, EAL or new-to-English teaching.

Put in the extras that cost your evenings — Duke of Edinburgh, trips led with the EVC paperwork you did, clubs, revision sessions, school production, whole-school literacy or numeracy work, curriculum enrichment days. These are not padding; they are what a head weighs when two candidates teach equally well.

What to leave out, and what has to be exactly right

Leave out the personal statement that describes your philosophy in the abstract. Leave out lists of adjectives. Leave out "outstanding" as a self-description — the reader will decide. Leave out generic classroom duties that every teacher does: marking, planning, parents' evenings, reports. Leave out a photograph, your date of birth and your marital status.

What has to be exactly right is the employment history. Schools recruit under safer recruitment rules and a gap you did not explain becomes a question in interview at best and a withdrawn application at worst. Give month and year for every post, account for every gap in a line — travel, caring, illness, redundancy, retraining, all fine — and include any name you worked under previously, because DBS and reference checks run against it.

References: in this sector your current headteacher is normally expected as a referee, and many schools take up references before interview rather than after. If you have not told your head you are applying, decide how you are going to handle that before you apply, not after the shortlisting call. If there is a genuine reason you cannot name your current head, say so briefly and offer an alternative senior referee rather than leaving a hole.

Also right: an Enhanced DBS with children's barred list check, and whether it is on the Update Service. "Enhanced DBS, [date], registered with the Update Service" is one line and it removes a real friction from a September start.

What to do next

Take the advert for the last job you wanted and find the person specification, which is usually a separate PDF attached to the listing. Write out the essential criteria as a list. Against each one, write the specific thing you would offer as evidence — a class, a specification, a scheme of learning, a named responsibility, a date. Where you have nothing, write nothing and look at how many blanks there are. That list tells you whether you were not shortlisted because your CV was weak, or because you were not a match for that post, and the two problems have completely different fixes.

Then build one master document with everything in it: every specification and board, every year group and set, every TLR, NPQ, mentoring role and safeguarding qualification, with dates, and your employment history with the gaps already written. Every application after that becomes a job of selection against a person spec rather than an act of recall at eleven at night. If you want the matching step done for you, jobmarket.pro reads each advert in full and prepares the application from a single profile it cannot add experience to.

One more thing worth knowing: in this sector timing does much of the work. Adverts cluster before the resignation deadlines, and a strong application in late February for a September start sits in a much smaller pile than the same application in June.