Some wellbeing advice sounds great—until you try to follow it in a real school day.

In this episode, we put a popular “7 ways to improve teacher wellbeing” guide to the test—through the lens of teachers juggling five lessons, duty, and a flood of “quick question” emails.

When the first tips are “move more” and “breathe,” we ask: is this genuine support, or are teachers being quietly blamed for systemic problems?

In this episode:

• Why most teacher wellbeing advice falls apart by Period 3
• The gap between school reality and wellbeing guidance
• The problem with the “just be more resilient” narrative
• What teachers actually need to feel better at work

If you’re a teacher feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, or tired of surface-level wellbeing advice—this episode is for you.

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What’s the most genuinely helpful wellbeing support you’ve experienced in a school?

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The “official” path into teaching sounds simple on paper: check your qualifications, understand funding, get some experience, choose a course, apply, train, get a job, start your career. But when you actually read Department for Education-style guidance out loud, it quickly becomes clear how little it prepares you for the reality of teacher training in the UK—or for what life in schools really demands.

In this episode, we unpack the parts that the checklist skips. Why do GCSE requirements sometimes feel oddly disconnected from the subject you want to teach? How do funding and bursaries quietly shape people’s decisions? And why does classroom experience matter far more than most applicants realise?

We also talk honestly about the different routes into teaching—PGCE, School Direct, Teach First and more—and the tension between seeing teaching as a “vocation” versus something you fall into through circumstance, bad luck, or simple pragmatism.

Along the way, we share stories from training and placements, including the very real issue of being placed somewhere you can’t physically get to on time without a car.

We finish with our takeaways: the formal route might be “graduate, train, qualify,” but the emotional journey looks more like hope, panic, and a lot of caffeine.

If you’re thinking about becoming a teacher—or you’re already in and quietly questioning your life choices—this episode offers honesty, humour, and a few uncomfortable truths.

Subscribe, share this with someone considering teacher training, and leave us a review. And tell us: what’s the missing step in the “how to become a teacher” guide?

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The Get Into Teaching website makes teaching sound like a clean, confident career choice: inspire from day one, teach with freedom, progress at your own pace, earn a competitive salary, and enjoy more holiday than your mates in office jobs.

So we do what any two qualified secondary teachers would do — we print it out and start reading it properly.

What follows is a line-by-line reality check.

We unpack the idea of “impact” and what it actually looks like when most corridor conversations are about shirts, toilets, and getting to period two on time. We talk about autonomy in the classroom — yes, you bring your personality, but curriculum pressure, accountability, and timetables can quietly reshape what teaching looks like in practice.

We also share stories from our own experience, where recruitment language starts to feel a bit like advertising that has never met a staffroom.

Then we get into progression, pay, pensions, and the great teaching myth: the holidays. We’re not here to exaggerate, but we are honest about what the job does to your evenings, your headspace, and your energy.

James brings the SENCO perspective, Ben brings leadership experience, and we land in the same place: teaching can be brilliant, meaningful, and genuinely funny — but it’s also far messier than the brochure suggests.

If you’re thinking about becoming a teacher, or you’re already in it and want to feel a bit less alone, press play. And if you’ve ever read a job advert for teaching and thought “that doesn’t sound like my school at all,” you’re in the right place.

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A supply agency calls itself “the home of happy teachers” and publishes a six-point guide to the differences between primary and secondary schools. That alone is enough to get us started.

We pick apart the claims one by one — from generalist vs specialist teaching, to workload, planning, marking, and the idea that pastoral care somehow disappears after Year 6. What sounds neat on paper starts to fall apart quickly when you’ve actually worked in schools.

We also compare notes on the uncomfortable reality of crossing phases, including a parents’ evening that makes a secondary teacher realise how little we understand about primary routines, language, and expectations.

From there, we dig into transition, curriculum continuity, and the ongoing problem: everyone says primary and secondary should talk more, but nobody builds the time or structure to make it happen.

Along the way we end up asking why science is always in labs, why behaviour systems change so sharply, and why “rewards” in education go from stickers to postcards that may or may not mean anything.

If you work in education — or just enjoy hearing myths about schools get dismantled — this one’s for you.

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Most podcasts lose you in the first five minutes. We’re trying not to.

We’re Ben and James — two secondary school staff attempting to make a podcast that’s actually worth your commute. To keep it on track, we structure each episode like a lesson: register, objective, “I do, we do, you do”… and then watch it fall apart.

In this episode, we follow a “how to start a podcast” guide and see what actually holds up when you’re recording for real. Expect questionable equipment decisions, DIY recording setups, and the reality of using things like the Zoom PodTrak P4 and Audacity without fully knowing what we’re doing.

Along the way, we get distracted by behaviour systems, phone calls home, staffroom culture, and the strange language of school “vision”.

If you work in education, think of it as informal CPD. If you don’t, it’s a behind-the-scenes look at what school actually feels like.

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Welcome to the trailer for Ben and James Could Do Better, an irreverent journey through the world of secondary education from the perspective of a man called Ben and a different man called James.

We turn up, we say some things about secondary schools, and we try to do better.

Episodes 1-3 drop on Monday, April 20th at 6:00 AM.

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