Before you get started, make sure that you have registered for approval to teach with the NSW Department of Education.

Teach casually to build your experience

Many teachers begin their career on a casual basis as it offers several benefits, including the opportunity to explore various schools, network with colleagues, and discover your own teaching style and preferences. As a casual teacher, you will expand your teaching repertoire in areas such as classroom management, building rapport and engaging with students of different ages, backgrounds and abilities. Commonly, casual teachers who work at a school frequently, are offered temporary blocks of work, which provides you with the opportunity to build additional experience to enhance your CV.

Casual teaching also gives you the flexibility to branch out and build experience across various school settings. For instance, if a teacher is interested in developing their skills in inclusive education, they may apply for day-to-day casual work in a School for Specific Purpose (SSP) to build experience in teaching and supporting students with additional needs. Alternatively, a teacher who may have completed their training as a primary school teacher but wants to develop their practice in a secondary school, can teach on a casual basis in a secondary school setting, or vice versa.

Stay informed with JobFeed

JobFeed is a weekly e-newsletter listing all current permanent and temporary teaching positions in NSW public schools. To ensure you are proactive in seeking employment with the NSW Department of Education, you can subscribe to receive JobFeed straight to your inbox every Wednesday afternoon. You can find school and position information listed in the advertisement, however you should also visit the school’s website to conduct your own additional research and to view the school’s plan and annual reports.

Develop a stand-out application

Before you apply for a position of interest in JobFeed, it is important to do your research on the school. This will give you an idea of whether or not the school is a good fit for you, and will also allow you to better identify how your skills and experiences fit with the school. Locating information on student enrolment, school targets, key focus areas and programs on offer, as well as developing an understanding of the school context, will ensure you stand out as a strong candidate. You will also need to become familiar with the merit selection application guidelines, which outline how to address the selection criteria.

If you are looking to enhance your responses to the specific selection criteria, we recommend looking at ways to upskill and gain further experience that you can refer to in your application. Consider seeking professional development opportunities in the area of need, or find a way to gain hands-on experience in a school where you are working on a casual or temporary basis.

For instance, if you are applying for a primary school role that requires you to demonstrate effective, evidence based classroom teaching practices that support and extend a diverse range of learners in the domain of literacy, you may choose to browse the catalog of online professional learning in MyPL. Here, you will find a number of courses which are designed to promote evidence based teaching strategies to support students in the attainment of key literacy skills. You could then reference your training in this course within your application.

Alternatively, if you prefer to learn on the job, you could express your interest in either team teaching or observing a colleague who is using evidence based practices in their literacy lessons. This approach allows you to gain practical experience and observe these practices being implemented first hand in the classroom.

To assist you further in developing a great application we recommend that you view the videos on the Teach NSW website.