Where are secondary teaching jobs actually advertised?

You have applied to a dozen schools and heard nothing from most of them. Some adverts closed early. One school interviewed you and appointed someone else the same afternoon. If you are applying in October for a September start, the problem is probably not your application at all — it is that you are looking in a month when almost nothing is advertised, on a site that only carries part of the market.

Secondary teaching has an unusually rigid hiring structure. Statutory resignation dates set the calendar, safeguarding law sets the application format, and a large share of posts get filled inside a trust before anyone outside sees them. Once you know the shape of it, the search becomes a scheduling problem rather than a mystery.

Whether the post reaches a board at all

There is no general legal requirement in England that a classroom teaching vacancy be advertised publicly. The School Staffing (England) Regulations place specific duties around headteacher and deputy headteacher appointments in maintained schools; ordinary teaching posts sit largely with the governing body or trust to fill as they see fit. Academies operate under their funding agreement and the Academy Trust Handbook rather than those regulations.

In practice that means three categories of vacancy:

Advertised externally. Most main-scale classroom posts, because schools genuinely need a field. Shortage subjects especially — physics, maths, computing, MFL, chemistry, design and technology — are advertised widely and repeatedly.

Advertised internally first. TLR posts almost always. Second in department, head of year, KS3 coordinator, lead practitioner. A trust with fifteen secondaries will circulate these on its internal bulletin, and often fill them, before anything appears outside.

Never advertised. The person who did their ITT placement in the school and impressed. The long-term supply teacher who has been covering a maternity leave since January. The TA doing an apprenticeship route. When a head needs a Year 11 English class covered from Monday, the known quantity wins.

That third category is why supply work matters more than it looks, which I will come back to.

The places posts actually appear

Teaching Vacancies (teaching-vacancies.service.gov.uk) is the DfE's own listing service for state-funded schools in England. It is free for schools to use, which matters — it is the one board where a small standalone academy or a village-adjacent 11-16 school has no cost reason to skip listing. Coverage is not universal, but it is the first place to set up alerts, filtered by subject and travel distance.

TES Jobs is the long-standing commercial noticeboard for the sector and still carries a large volume of secondary posts, including leadership and independent schools. Schools pay to list there, so budget-squeezed departments sometimes use it only for hard-to-fill roles.

Eteach and similar sector boards carry a substantial slice of the market, and — this is the useful part — Eteach powers the careers pages of a lot of schools and trusts, so the same post may reach you through a trust site rather than the board itself.

Local authority portals. Where a maintained school is still LA-linked, the county jobs site often carries the vacancy. Some counties run dedicated education portals. If you are geographically fixed, find the portal for every authority you would commute into and subscribe to each one. These are the listings people miss.

Trust careers pages. This is the big one. Harris, United Learning, Ark, Star, Outwood Grange, Oasis, Delta, Dixons, E-ACT and the rest each run their own recruitment site and applicant tracking. Some syndicate to the boards, some list on their own site days earlier, some fill internally and never syndicate. Work out which trusts run secondaries within your commute — a trust locator or simply the school's website footer will tell you — and bookmark the careers page of each. Fifteen bookmarks covers most of a large town.

Diocesan lists. If you would work in a Catholic or Church of England secondary, the diocesan education service usually publishes vacancies across its schools. For many posts in Catholic schools, practising Catholic status is a genuine occupational requirement, and leadership posts commonly ask for the Catholic Certificate in Religious Studies; Church of England schools vary far more, and many appoint on ethos sympathy rather than denomination. Read the person specification rather than assuming either way.

Outside England: teaching posts in Scotland run through council recruitment and myjobscotland, with GTCS registration as the gate. In Wales, EWC registration is the equivalent requirement and local authority sites carry much of the volume. In Northern Ireland, the Education Authority and CCMS route a large share of school vacancies. The English boards will not show you these.

The calendar runs everything

Maintained school teachers in England and Wales work to statutory resignation dates, reproduced in the Burgundy Book. To leave at the end of the autumn term you resign by 31 October; to leave at the end of the spring term, by 28 February; to leave at 31 August, by 31 May. Academies are not bound by these but most mirror them, because they recruit from the same pool.

Everything follows from that. A head does not know a post exists until a resignation lands, and a teacher does not resign until they have another job. So:

January to February is the first real wave for September, plus everything for an Easter start. Serious volume.

March to May is the main September market. This is where most secondary posts for the following academic year are advertised, and where you have the most choice.

The days after 31 May are the sharpest spike of the year. Resignations that came in at the deadline generate vacancies that must be filled inside eight or nine weeks. Advertising is compressed, interviews are quick, and schools are noticeably less picky about a candidate who is not a perfect fit. If you can be available in June, you are looking at the most favourable conditions of the year.

July and August is the scramble: late resignations, pupil numbers that came in higher than forecast at admissions, a departmental restructure that did not go to plan. Some genuinely good posts appear here. Many are filled by agency supply because there is no time for a full process.

September and October is a thin patch aimed at January starts, with 31 October as the trigger. Fewer posts, but also far fewer applicants.

November and December is near-dead for classroom posts. Leadership recruitment carries on — headship and senior leadership run on longer timelines and often advertise in autumn for September — but if you are looking for a main-scale geography post in late November you are looking at a market that does not really exist yet.

If you are searching now, in late September, plan for two campaigns: the small January-start window over the next few weeks, then the real one from January onwards.

Agencies, and what they are actually for

Education agencies — the large national supply agencies and the regional ones — sit in a different part of the market from the permanent boards. Their core business is day-to-day and long-term supply: cover for absence, maternity, long-term sickness, a vacancy the school could not fill.

Two things follow. First, if you need income while you search, agency supply gets you into schools quickly and lets you see the inside of twenty of them, which is genuinely useful information about where you would want to work. Second, long-term supply placements convert. A school that has had you teaching Year 10 triple science since October has already done its assessment. When the post is made permanent, you are the obvious candidate and often the only one considered.

The friction is the transfer fee. Agencies charge schools to convert a supply teacher to a permanent contract, and some budgets simply cannot absorb it. Ask about the terms before you take a long-term placement, and ask specifically after how many weeks or days the fee tapers or disappears.

One underused move: contact the cover manager or business manager at schools directly and ask to go on the internal cover list. Many secondaries maintain a bank of known supply teachers they call before going to an agency, because it is cheaper. That gets you into the building without an agency in the middle.

Independent and international

Independent schools advertise on TES and on their own sites, and the sector's own associations publish vacancy lists. Two practical differences: QTS is not required, though many schools prefer it, and notice periods are usually a full term — resign by a date in one term to leave at the end of the next — which means the independent hiring calendar runs earlier than the state one. Posts for September often appear from the autumn term before.

International schools recruit largely through their own specialist boards and through recruitment fairs, which cluster in January and February for August starts. If that is of interest, the registration processes take weeks, so they need starting in the autumn.

The application is a form, and it is doing more work than you think

Almost no state secondary will accept a CV alone. You complete the school's or trust's application form, and the format is driven by safeguarding rather than by HR taste. Keeping Children Safe in Education requires schools to obtain a full employment history, to explore gaps, to take up references on shortlisted candidates — commonly before interview — and to conduct online searches on shortlisted candidates. That is why the form insists on continuous dates, referee details up front, and a self-declaration.

Three consequences worth acting on:

Referees get contacted before you interview. Give your current head or head of department warning, and make sure the referee you name is the one the school will accept — for teachers, it is usually your current headteacher, not a colleague.

The supporting statement is the shortlisting document. Shortlisting panels typically score against the person specification, point by point. Write it in that order. If the specification says "experience of teaching A level in the subject" and "experience of using data to plan intervention", those should be findable paragraphs, not something the reader has to infer from a narrative about your teaching philosophy.

"We reserve the right to close this advert early" is not boilerplate. Schools do interview and appoint before the closing date, especially in shortage subjects and especially in June. A strong application sent on day two beats a perfect one sent on the closing date more often than it should.

And expect the interview to be a full day: a taught lesson to a real class, often 20 to 30 minutes with a brief you get in advance, a pupil panel, sometimes a data or book-scrutiny task, then a formal panel — with the decision made that afternoon. Ask for the class, the topic and the prior attainment data when they invite you. Most schools will tell you.

What to do this week

Set up alerts on Teaching Vacancies, TES and Eteach for your subject within your travel radius. Then list every secondary within that radius, look up which trust or authority each belongs to, and bookmark those careers pages — that is the half of the market the boards will not reliably show you. Add the diocesan list if faith schools are in scope.

Write the supporting statement once, structured against a typical person specification for your subject and phase, so that each application is an edit rather than a fresh start. Get your referees squared away now, before a school contacts them at short notice.

If you need income before January, register for supply and approach cover managers directly, choosing schools you would actually want to work in permanently.

Then treat January to June as the real season and plan your effort accordingly. Reading every advert in full across the boards, a dozen trust portals and a diocesan list is the part that does not scale by hand; jobmarket.pro does that reading and drafts from one profile it cannot add experience to.