A head of department shortlisting for a September start reads applications between lessons, usually with a mug going cold beside the laptop. The first question is not what you believe about education. It is whether you can teach their subject to the year groups they need covering, and whether you have already taken a class through the specification they run. Everything else on the page is read in light of that.
This is what separates a secondary CV from a primary one, and it is not a small adjustment. A primary teacher is hired to take one class across a whole curriculum. A secondary teacher is hired as a subject specialist who will hold that specialism from Year 7 through to sixth form, across five or six classes and often 150 students at a time. Your degree subject, your exam-board experience and your results are load-bearing credentials rather than background detail. A CV that mentions your subject once, in passing, is a CV that gets skimmed and set down.
The section order that works
Education CVs are read in a fixed way, so give the reader what they are hunting for in the order they hunt for it.
- Name and contact details. Plus your teacher reference number if your system uses one.
- Personal statement. Four to six lines. No more.
- Subject specialism and levels taught. A compact block, near the top. This is the section a primary CV does not have and the one a head of department reads first.
- Qualifications. QTS, PGCE or equivalent route, degree with subject and classification, relevant A-levels only if you are early career.
- Teaching experience. Reverse chronological, with responsibilities and outcomes under each post.
- Pastoral and whole-school responsibilities. Form tutor, safeguarding, transition, clubs, trips.
- Continuing professional development and safeguarding training.
- References.
If you are applying for a promoted post, leadership of the department moves up and sits directly under the statement.
Writing the personal statement
Most of them open with a sentence about passion and dedication that could have been written by anyone applying for anything. Cut it. Name the subject, the levels, the phase, one thing you changed, and where you are heading. Four sentences is enough for a reader to know your ceiling, your exam boards and your direction of travel. There is a full example further down.
Subjects, levels and exam boards
State the specification, not just the subject. Two teachers who both write "teaches A-level Chemistry" are not equivalent if one has run OCR A and the other Edexcel, and the school knows which one it uses.
Present it as short lines:
- Chemistry - KS3, GCSE (AQA Trilogy and Triple), A-level (OCR A). Four cohorts to GCSE, two to A2.
- Biology - KS3 and GCSE (AQA Trilogy) as second subject, taught alongside my main allocation since 2021.
- KS5 tutorial and EPQ supervision - two candidates per year since 2022.
If you cover a second subject, say so honestly and say how much. Schools with timetable gaps care enormously about this, and overstating it is discovered in the first week of September. If you have taught the International Baccalaureate, BTEC, IGCSE or a national curriculum outside the UK, name it exactly, because those are not interchangeable.
Results, without overclaiming
Exam classes are the closest thing teaching has to a quantified outcome, and that makes it tempting to overreach. Do not. Everyone reading your CV teaches the same exam system and can spot an inflated figure immediately, and if a number is on the page you will be asked about it in interview.
Three rules hold up:
Give the cohort context. "78 per cent grade 5 or above" means nothing without the intake. "78 per cent grade 5+ in a cohort with a Year 6 prior attainment average below national" means a great deal.
Prefer progress to headline grades. Residuals, value-added, the gap between predicted and achieved. A teacher who moved a bottom set from a projected grade 3 average to a grade 4 average has done harder work than one whose top set got 8s, and the second is easier to claim credit for.
Never quote the department's numbers as yours. If the whole-school Progress 8 improved, that belongs to a team of eleven people. Write "one of three teachers on a 62-student GCSE cohort" and the honesty registers as competence. Heads of department read a lot of CVs claiming a department's results, and it is the fastest way to lose credibility with the one person who knows exactly what happened.
If you are newly qualified
Your placements are your experience section, so treat them like posts rather than a footnote. For each one, give the school type and rough size, the year groups and sets you taught, the specification, and something you actually produced.
An entry might read: second placement, 1,100-student 11-16 academy, taught Years 7 to 11 across four classes including a Year 11 foundation-tier maths group; wrote and taught a six-lesson sequence on ratio that the department kept; ran a lunchtime Year 8 intervention group for a term. That is more persuasive than any statement about your teaching philosophy. Add your subject knowledge enhancement course if you took one, and be straightforward if your degree is adjacent to your teaching subject rather than identical.
Professional development and safeguarding
Keep this section short and current. Drop anything older than five years unless it is a qualification.
Worth listing: your safeguarding level and the year you last renewed it, examiner or moderator work with an awarding body, subject association membership, NPQ modules, mentoring or ITT training, SEND and EAL courses, and anything specific to adolescent behaviour or mental health. Examining work carries particular weight, because it means you understand mark schemes from the inside.
Supply work and short contracts
Do not give every two-week booking its own entry. It fragments the page and looks worse than the reality. Group it.
Write one heading such as "Supply and short-term contracts, September 2022 to July 2024", then a line describing the pattern: "Daily and long-term supply across six secondary schools in the borough; longest placement covered a Year 11 maths class for two terms of maternity leave, including exam preparation and mock marking."
Career breaks and time abroad follow the same rule. One line, then move on. Unexplained gaps invite worse assumptions than the truth usually deserves.
References
Education references do not work like commercial ones. Safer recruitment means the school will normally require your current or most recent headteacher, references are frequently taken up before interview rather than after an offer, and a reference from your head of department alone is usually not sufficient.
So name two referees with roles and institutions, or state plainly that your current headteacher can be approached at shortlisting stage. "Available on request" reads as evasive in this sector.
Length
Two pages is standard and nobody will complain. Three is acceptable for an experienced teacher with real responsibility, exam board work or leadership. This is genuinely different from commercial hiring, where a third page is a liability, so do not compress your subject and results detail to hit a limit that does not apply here.
Many schools use their own application form and treat the CV as supporting material. Write it so it stands alone anyway, because it is what circulates when a head of department asks a colleague whether anyone good is looking.
A worked example
Here is how the top half of a real-feeling CV looks for an invented mid-career teacher, Priya Raghavan, applying for a second in science post.
Personal statement
Science teacher with physics specialism, teaching in an 11-18 comprehensive since 2018. Currently teach AQA Combined and Triple Science at KS4 and AQA A-level Physics to Years 12 and 13, with a Year 9 form group. Led the rewrite of the KS4 Triple Physics scheme of work in 2024 and mentor two trainees a year. Applying for second in department to take on KS5 curriculum and results analysis.
Subject specialism
- Physics - KS3, GCSE Triple (AQA 8463), A-level (AQA 7408). Five GCSE cohorts, three A-level cohorts to A2.
- Combined Science - GCSE Trilogy across all tiers, taught every year since 2018.
- Chemistry - KS3 and GCSE foundation tier as second subject, 2019 to 2022.
Qualifications
- QTS, awarded 2018
- PGCE Secondary Science (Physics), University of Leeds, 2018
- BSc Physics, 2:1, University of Sheffield, 2016
Experience
Teacher of Science, Ashfield High School, 2018 to present. 1,240 students, 11-18, above-average pupil premium intake.
- Teach 22 periods across KS3, KS4 and KS5; typical allocation of six classes and roughly 170 students.
- A-level Physics results 2024: 11 candidates, 8 at grade B or above, cohort average half a grade above prediction.
- 2023 GCSE Triple Physics set 2: 24 students, 71 per cent at grade 6+, one of two teachers on the cohort.
- Rewrote the Year 10 Triple Physics scheme of work with the head of department; adopted across the department from September 2024.
- Form tutor, Year 9, since 2021. Ran the Year 9 options evening physics stand for three years.
- Founded and run the STEM club, Years 7 to 9, and take a team to the regional physics olympiad annually.
Professional development
- Designated safeguarding lead training, renewed 2025; KCSIE annual update
- AQA A-level Physics examiner since 2022 (Paper 2)
- NPQ Leading Teacher Development, completed 2024
- Institute of Physics member; attended Teaching Physics in Schools course, 2023
Notice what is missing. No skills bar chart, no photo, no paragraph about inspiring the next generation. Every line is a subject, a level, a board, a number with its context, or something she runs.
The mistakes that get secondary CVs rejected
- Leading with a philosophy paragraph instead of the subject and levels.
- Listing "GCSE and A-level" with no board and no indication of how many cohorts.
- Claiming departmental or whole-school results as personal outcomes.
- Burying exam classes inside a paragraph of general duties.
- Sending the same document for a classroom post and a head of department post.
- Omitting the pastoral side, when form tutoring and behaviour work is half the job in secondary.
- Ten years of CPD listed in full, including a 2013 twilight session on interactive whiteboards.
- Missing safeguarding training, which reads as a compliance problem before it reads as an oversight.
- Photographs, graphic templates and skill rating bars. Some schools will discard the application outright.
The document that gets a call is unglamorous. Subject, levels, boards, cohorts, honest results, what you run outside your timetable, and one clear line about what you want next. A head of department can read that in ninety seconds and decide whether to interview you, which is the only thing your CV is being asked to do.