Why Teach First is a Times Top 100 Employer!
Teach First's mission is to address educational disadvantage by transforming exceptional graduates into effective, inspirational teachers and leaders in all fields. Our culture gives us the best chance to achieve our goal of breaking the link between family income and educational opportunity. This is a huge target but one we believe is achievable and one that we feel very passionately about!
We will only make it happen by ensuring that we have the right people with the right beliefs. We therefore recruit very carefully against our values to ensure that people joining the organisation are truly passionate about what we do and live our values. We use a values based interview process and reinforce this focus through the induction, performance appraisal, 360 degree feedback and development processes. In this way we ensure that our values are meaningful, understood by all employees and provide a shared and common bond that makes everybody work in a more effective way to address educational disadvantage. Whilst Teach First's mission tells people what the charity is all about, our values of Commitment, Excellence, Collaboration, Integrity and Leadership explain how to work in order to achieve them.
A key aspect of life at Teach First is a high performance culture - We want every person at Teach First to be someone we all respect and learn from, and strongly believe that a great place to work is working alongside great colleagues.
- The manager’s job at every level of Teach First is to recruit and develop their teams so that we have stars in every position. It’s about effectiveness – not effort – even though effectiveness is harder to assess than effort.
- We don’t measure people by how many evenings or weekends they are in the office or on campus or in schools.
- We do try to measure people by how big an impact they have!
Leadership is a core message of our Leadership Development Programme and for all our employees; we believe that all our employees and participants are leaders and believe that responsible people thrive on freedom, and are worthy of freedom. Our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow, rather than limit it, to continue to attract and nourish high performing, creative individuals so we have better chance of long-term continued success. We do have a series of policies designed to help our managers manage and employees to understand how things work which can be summarised as “act in Teach First’s best interests”.
We believe that the best managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their team. Organisationally we set context providing a clear line of sight for all employees, from our mission, to our 4 visions, to KPIs and individual objectives. This is a really powerful tool in clarifying for everyone how they actively contribute to the mission on a day to day basis. High performance people will do better work if they understand the context.
We are committed to providing an environment for everyone to grow their capability to influence the mission; we develop people by giving them the opportunity to develop themselves, by surrounding them with great colleagues and giving them big challenges to work on.
- We encourage people to drive their own development and provide them with the support and feedback to give them the best chance of succeeding
- Teach First pledges to create the right environment for people to grow through great colleagues and big challenges
In summary Teach First is a hugely exciting place to be, our employees passionately believe in what we do and are committed to working together to achieving our mission! We are looking for people who are passionate about our shared goals and who embody our five values. Click here to read more about our values.
