After realising her dream job as a teacher wasn’t all it was set out to be, Harriet Bermingham took the plunge and left her stable career for something a little different
A teacher who was fed up of putting in long hours for minimal reward packed in her £35,000 job at a school for a job paying twice as much – and she still gets to inspire children. Harriet Bermingham grew up always wanting to be a teacher after seeing her parents and grandparents do the job, but she quickly realised once she became one that it wasn’t what she had expected.
The 31-year-old was fed up working such long hours and not being able to give her students the support she felt they deserved. She decided to embark on a new career, putting her passion into action and believing she could still make a difference to children’s lives – without being a teacher.
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Harriet, from Worsley, Salford, ditched the traditional classroom setting at the end of 2022 after not getting much job satisfaction, and after the birth of her son Teddy she become a private tutor – making twice as much money as she did as a teacher. After initially setting up a phonics playgroup, she began doing some private tutoring alongside her teaching job.
She left her job at Flixton Primary School to offer private tutoring from her home and now proudly boasts 85 children on her books. All attending in groups of four or five at a time, she feels like she’s now able to properly teach again – and works half the hours she used to.
Two years on, with seven years of tutoring experience under her belt, the owner of Bold Beginnings Tutoring says she’s ‘never looked back’.
With 85 children on the books, attending in groups of four or five at a time, she feels able to teach properly again and is earning twice what she was at the school for half the amount of hours. “There just isn’t enough funding for schools and there’s little job satisfaction. With the amount of children in each class – often 30 kids to one teacher, plus maybe a teaching assistant if you’re lucky – you just can’t spend that one-to-one time with the children without distractions,” she told Manchester Evening News. Now she can do tailored and focused activities with her students, and notices the progress they make.
When she was a full-time teacher, Harriet would be in school for 7am, leave at 4pm and spend a lot of her spare time lesson planning, which meant she was working around 70 to 80 hours a week. She knew this was going to be unrealistic after having her son Ted, and now works four hours a day for four days a week.
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“My mental health is better and I can put so much more into teaching as I have the energy to do it, whereas before I was constantly burnt out. There’s too much pressure in schools. It’s become less about teaching and more about ticking boxes, admin and behaviour management,” she continued.
She has converted her garden room into a learning haven, with all of her resources and enough seats for five pupils at a time. This means she can work with no distractions while her son is at nursery, or in the house with his dad. She has also noticed a big increase in the number of parents seeking tutoring since Covid and says many aren’t aware they can use the government’s childcare vouchers to help pay towards private tutoring, providing it’s with someone who is Ofsted registered.
Now Harriet is helping other teachers get out of a rut and do the same, launching her own online course called ‘The Ultimate Teacher Exit Plan’ which offers guidance and support to those wanting to make the same step. “When you’re in teaching, you often can’t see a way out. But now I’m on the outside looking in, I see how different it is and it’s honestly life-changing.”
While she knows it can be daunting to leave a stable job with regular pay, her course is all about helping people get set up as a teacher alongside their teaching job like she did, before going at it alone, and being able to give students the help they deserve.
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