If you’re a secondary teacher thinking about moving to primary, most of the advice out there is about the paperwork. The paperwork is the easy bit: in England, QTS isn’t tied to a phase, so you don’t need to retrain. The harder part is showing a primary school that you can do the job, and getting yourself ready to do it.
Every subject, one class
The biggest change is going from teaching one subject to lots of children to teaching every subject to one class. You’ll need to be comfortable across the whole primary curriculum, including the bits you last studied at school yourself.
Schools will also want to see you can make links between subjects and build them into units of work, something most secondaries don’t have much time for.
And because you’ll spend most of the day with the same thirty children, the pastoral side matters much more. Being a form tutor helps, but it isn’t the same as being the adult a child sees for six hours a day. You’ll see much more of their parents too, often every morning at the gate, and a school will want to know you can make that relationship work for the child.
Know the curriculum, and the tests
Before an interview, get to know the primary national curriculum well, especially the parts that don’t exist at secondary. Early reading is taught through systematic synthetic phonics, using a programme the school has chosen. There’s the phonics screening check in Year 1, the multiplication tables check in Year 4 and the Key Stage 2 tests in Year 6. You don’t need to be an expert in all of it on day one, but you do need to know what each is and why it matters to the school.
Then bring some ideas of your own. Talk to primary teachers you know, spend time in a primary classroom if you can, and look at what primary schools share about their teaching.
Your secondary background counts in your favour here. Primaries are often short of specialist knowledge, and languages are compulsory at Key Stage 2, so if you teach French or Spanish, say so loudly. Maths, science, music and PE specialists are welcome too.
Behaviour and communication
The principles of good behaviour management don’t change with the age of the children, but the practice does. Be ready to explain how you’d keep a class of seven-year-olds on task, which looks rather different from Year 10 on a Friday afternoon.
You can be far more expressive in a primary classroom without sounding patronising, and you’ll need the energy to go with it. Think about the lessons you’d plan to grab their imagination, because that’s what keeps them with you.
Working with other adults
In most primary classrooms you’ll be working with a teaching assistant for much of the day. That’s quite different from getting on with colleagues in the staffroom: you’ll be planning for another adult and directing them, sharing a room with them all day. If you’ve already done this, perhaps with a TA supporting a pupil with SEND, make sure the school hears about it.
Get some experience
Primary schools will ask what primary experience you have, and that’s hard to get while you’re teaching full time in a secondary.
There are a few ways in. If you can drop a day, do some supply in primary schools. It’s tough at first, but it shows you know what the job is like. Otherwise, get as much time with Year 7 as you can, work with your school’s transition lead, or offer to run taster sessions in your subject for your feeder primaries. If there’s a middle school near you (there aren’t many left), it can be a gentler step.
Want it
Most of all, you need to show you really want to teach younger children. It comes through in everything you say, and it’s the one thing you can’t fake at interview. If you’re serious about the move, this should be the easy part.
If you’re getting ready to make the switch, How Can Teachers and Teaching Assistants Best Work as a Team and Spelling in the Primary School are good places to start.