Where are primary teaching jobs actually advertised?

The problem is not your application yet

If you are applying for primary posts and hearing nothing, the first thing to check is not your supporting statement. It is whether you are seeing the vacancies at all, and whether you are seeing them in the window when they are live.

Primary teaching has an unusual hiring structure. Most vacancies are advertised — schools are generally expected to advertise openly, and many are required to by their local authority or trust recruitment policy. But "advertised" does not mean "advertised somewhere you are looking". A one-form-entry primary in a rural county may post a vacancy on the county council's education jobs portal, the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service, and nowhere else. If you are refreshing Indeed, you will not see it.

The second structural oddity is the calendar. Teaching in England and Wales runs on statutory resignation dates, and those dates determine when almost every permanent post appears. Get the calendar wrong and you can spend six weeks applying in a month when the only live roles are the ones nobody else wanted.

The places primary vacancies actually appear

DfE Teaching Vacancies (teaching-vacancies.service.gov.uk) is the government's free job listing service for state schools in England. It is free for schools to use, which is exactly why it matters — a maintained primary with no recruitment budget will use it when it will not pay for a display advert. Filter by key stage and by travel distance from a postcode. Set up a job alert rather than checking manually; the posting-to-closing window is often short.

Local authority portals. Every LA with maintained schools runs some form of vacancy site, and for community and voluntary controlled primaries this is frequently the primary route. The naming is inconsistent — some are branded as "schools jobs", some sit inside the general council careers site, some are run through a shared service covering several counties. Find the ones covering the areas you would actually commute to and bookmark them individually. This is dull and it is the single highest-yield thing most primary applicants are not doing.

Multi-academy trust career sites. If a trust runs twelve primaries in your travel radius, its own careers page is where those twelve schools' vacancies land, often before or instead of anywhere external. Trusts also tend to advertise across the whole trust, so a post at a school you had not considered will surface. Make a list of the trusts operating near you — the Get Information About Schools service will tell you which trust each school belongs to — and check their careers pages directly.

Diocesan boards. For Catholic and Church of England primaries, the diocesan education service often carries vacancies, and for voluntary aided schools the governing body is the employer. Applications for these schools usually require a separate diocesan or CES application form rather than a generic one, and for many Catholic primaries a practising Catholic reference. If you are not applying to faith schools, you can skip a large slice of the primary sector in some dioceses; if you are, you need to be looking at the diocesan site, not just the LA one.

Tes. Still the default paid board for education, and where schools with a recruitment budget advertise when they want reach beyond their own county. Worth a saved search. Not sufficient on its own.

School websites. Every school has a vacancies page, and legally has to publish certain information. For a school you specifically want to work in, check its page directly rather than waiting for the aggregated version. Small primaries in particular sometimes post on their own site and their LA portal only.

Welsh and Scottish routes differ. In Wales, look at the local authority portals and at the all-Wales public sector recruitment sites; registration with the Education Workforce Council is the equivalent gate. In Scotland, local authority recruitment — councils employ teachers directly and post on myjobscotland — plus GTCS registration, and the probationer scheme is centrally allocated rather than applied for school by school.

The calendar that governs everything

Permanent teaching posts in maintained schools run on resignation dates set out in the Burgundy Book conditions of service. The practical effect for a teacher moving school is:

• To leave at the end of the autumn term, you resign by the end of October.
• To leave at the end of the spring term, you resign by the end of February.
• To leave at the end of the summer term, you resign by the end of May.

Academies are not bound by the Burgundy Book but very many follow the same dates in their contracts, because the sector moves together. Check your own contract rather than assuming.

What this produces is a recruitment cycle with a very sharp shape. The big wave of September-start primary posts is advertised in the spring term and through April, May and into early June — schools know their staffing after the May resignation deadline, and they know their budget after the funding settlement and their intake after the April primary admissions offers. A second, smaller wave appears in late June and July as schools discover late resignations, maternity cover, unexpected intake changes or restructures. Posts advertised in July and August tend to be either genuine emergencies or roles that failed to appoint first time.

January and April starts exist and are worth watching precisely because fewer candidates are looking. January-start posts appear largely in October and November; April-start posts in January and February. These are often maternity covers or fixed-term posts, and a fixed-term post inside a school is a far better position from which to get the permanent one than an application from outside.

If you are searching in late September, as now, you are in one of the thinner parts of the year for permanent primary posts. That is worth knowing before you conclude your applications are the problem. What is live now is mostly January starts appearing over the next few weeks, plus supply work, plus the occasional school that is still carrying a vacancy it could not fill in the summer.

Agencies and supply: what they actually do

Supply agencies dominate day-to-day and short-term cover in primary. They do not, on the whole, control access to permanent classroom posts — a maintained primary appointing a permanent class teacher generally advertises it and runs a formal process with a governor on the panel. Where agencies matter is:

Day-to-day and short-term cover. Registering with two or three agencies covering your area gets you into classrooms. This is not a consolation prize for a job search that is failing; in primary it is one of the most reliable routes into a school that will later have a vacancy, because heads appoint people they have watched teach.

Long-term cover. Maternity and long-term sickness cover placed through an agency, sometimes a full term or a year. These frequently convert, either to a permanent post when one arises or to a direct fixed-term contract with the school.

Temp-to-perm arrangements, where the school pays a finder's fee if they take you on directly. Read what you sign, because some agency agreements restrict you from taking a direct contract with a school you were placed at for a period afterwards.

Things to be clear-eyed about: agency pay is usually a daily rate that does not track the main pay range, and time on supply does not automatically build the same pay progression or pension contributions as a teaching post on the Teachers' Pension Scheme. Some agencies use umbrella arrangements; ask directly how you will be paid, at what daily rate, and whether the Teachers' Pension Scheme applies. Ask before you register, not after your first booking.

You will also want your DBS on the update service, and your ECT status clear. ECTs can do supply, but induction has to be served in a post that meets the requirements, and short-term day-to-day supply generally will not count towards it. If you have started induction and are trying to complete it, the appropriate body and the type of post matter more than the salary.

Internal movement, and why some posts feel invisible

A meaningful share of primary movement is internal and does not produce an external advert at all. A Year 4 teacher moves to Year 6. A class teacher takes on the maths lead role. A TA completes an apprenticeship route or an assessment-only QTS route and moves into a class. A school with falling numbers reduces from two forms of entry to one and redeploys rather than recruits.

TLR posts — phase leader, maths lead, SENCO, EYFS lead — are often advertised internally first as a matter of policy, and only go external if there is no suitable internal candidate. This is why the leadership rung can feel closed from outside. It is also why a fixed-term class teaching post at a large primary or inside a trust is worth more than it looks: it puts you inside the pool for the posts that never reach a job board.

The corollary is that being known to a school changes which vacancies you hear about, not just how your application reads. Concretely, that means: asking heads you have done supply for to tell you when something comes up; taking up the offer to do a day at a school you are interested in; and, if you are a serving teacher, being the person your head thinks of when a colleague at another school asks who is any good. This is not the same advice as "network more". It is that in a sector where the employer is a single school with a governing body, your visibility to that one school is the entire mechanism.

What to do this week

1. Write down every local authority whose area is inside your commute. Find each one's schools vacancy portal and set up an email alert on each.
2. Set an alert on DfE Teaching Vacancies filtered by distance from your postcode and by primary phase. Do the same on Tes.
3. List the multi-academy trusts operating primaries in your radius. Use Get Information About Schools to check which trust each school belongs to. Bookmark each trust's careers page and check them weekly — trust sites are the worst-indexed and most frequently missed source.
4. If you would work in a faith school, find your local Catholic diocesan education service and Church of England diocesan board pages, and download the CES application form so it is not a surprise under a deadline.
5. Register with two or three supply agencies now, ahead of the autumn absence season, and ask each one the daily rate, the pay mechanism and the pension position before you commit.
6. Work out which start date you are actually targeting. If it is September 2027, your heavy application period is the spring term, and between now and then the highest-value thing you can do is get into schools on supply. If it is January or April 2027, you are in the window now and should be checking daily.
7. Get your paperwork ready as a single canonical set: TRN, QTS certificate, induction status, DBS update service number, two referees including your current head, and a supporting statement you can adapt rather than rewrite.

The reason the portal-by-portal work matters is that primary vacancies are fragmented across hundreds of small employers with no single index; jobmarket.pro searches those sources for a candidate, reads each advert in full and prepares the application from one profile.