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What makes someone believe they could become a teacher?

Perhaps it starts with a moment of recognition: seeing someone like themselves standing at the front of a classroom. Perhaps it’s a conversation with a teacher who inspires them. Or perhaps, after years in another career, it’s the realisation that the skills, experience and perspective they’ve built could make a difference to children and young people. For many career changers, deciding to become a teacher is a significant leap of faith.

So, when we talk about creating a more diverse teaching profession, we need to look beyond how we attract people to teaching. We also need to think about what happens once someone takes that first step. Does the journey into teaching make them feel that there is a place for them? This is one of the biggest questions I’ve been left with after leading the recruitment element of the Mission 44 funded pilot at Now Teach in partnership with Mindful Equity UK and the National Institute of Teaching.

Creating a different route into teaching

The Mission 44 funded pilot was designed to increase the number of teachers from Global Majority backgrounds entering the profession, with a particular focus on career changers aged 35 and over. Funded by Mission 44, a collaborative pilot brought together Now Teach, the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT), and Mindful Equity UK to recruit Global Majority career changers across the West Midlands, with a portion of those recruits joining NIoT’s September 2026 teacher training cohort.

As Project Lead at Now Teach, I led the recruitment element of the pilot. I developed our recruitment approach, built relationships with potential candidates and partners, supported candidates through their journey into teacher training and worked closely with colleagues across the partnership to understand what candidates needed and, where possible, implement those things. Now that the recruitment phase has come to an end, I’ve had the opportunity to step back from the day-to-day work and reflect on what the experience has taught me.

The biggest lesson is a simple one: belonging begins before the classroom.

A candidate doesn’t experience a recruitment funnel

We often describe recruitment as a funnel. Someone hears about an opportunity, expresses an interest, applies, is assessed, receives an offer and eventually begins training. From an organisational perspective, this makes sense. But no candidate experiences their journey as a funnel. They experience it as a series of human interactions, each one shaping their perception of whether this is a profession, and an environment, in which they can see themselves thriving.

A message can make someone feel encouraged to take the next step. A conversation can give them confidence. An application form can feel manageable or overwhelming. A question about eligibility can either provide clarity or create uncertainty. A wait for an answer can either feel reassuringly short or leave someone questioning whether they are making the right decision. An interview, a decision and every interaction in between all contribute to the overall experience.

For a career changer, this can be particularly significant. They may already be questioning whether they are making the right decision, while also considering the financial implications of retraining, balancing wider life or family responsibilities or wondering whether their previous professional experience will really be valued in a school.

This has made me think differently about the role recruitment plays in building confidence. Every interaction is an opportunity to reassure someone that they belong, rather than create another barrier to entering the profession.

Start with listening

One of the most valuable parts of the pilot was the opportunity to listen closely to candidates and understand what was influencing their decisions. It’s easy for organisations to decide what people from underrepresented backgrounds need and then design initiatives around those assumptions. But the more we listened, the clearer it became that there is no single “Global Majority candidate experience”.

People brought different careers, circumstances, ambitions and concerns. For some, finances were central to the decision; for others, location or childcare mattered. Some needed clarity around eligibility, while others needed reassurance that the skills they had developed over many years outside education would be relevant in the classroom. These might sound like practical issues rather than questions of belonging, but they are closely connected. If the route into teaching doesn’t feel accessible within the reality of someone’s life, it becomes much harder for that person to imagine themselves succeeding within the profession.

This reinforced an important principle for me: we need to design with people, not simply for them. Inclusive recruitment starts with curiosity. It means asking candidates what they need, listening to the answers and being willing to adapt, rather than assuming that one intervention or one approach will work for everyone.

Career changers bring more than a career history

The pilot also reinforced for me the enormous potential of career changers. Someone who enters teaching later in life doesn’t arrive empty-handed; they bring years of experience, knowledge and skills that can enrich a school and, ultimately, the experiences of the children and young people within it. They may have led teams, managed complex projects, worked with communities, solved problems, communicated with different audiences, built businesses, worked across cultures or developed deep expertise in a particular field.

At the same time, changing career can mean feeling like an outsider. Career changers are entering a profession with its own language, structures, expectations and traditions, and they may have questions that someone coming directly from university doesn’t. They are also making a significant transition, often alongside financial, family and practical considerations that can make the decision to retrain feel particularly daunting.

That’s why I think we need to stop thinking about career changers simply as another recruitment pool. They are people bringing a wealth of experience into a new profession, and our role is not to lower the bar or remove the standards that make teaching a profession. It’s to make the route into teaching clear, navigable and supportive, while recognising the strengths that people already possess and helping them understand how those strengths can translate into the classroom.

Inclusion lives in the details

The pilot also changed how I think about inclusive recruitment. When we think about diversity and inclusion, we often think about big things: targeted campaigns, dedicated programmes, diversity strategies and new initiatives. These matter, but sometimes inclusion is much quieter and can be found in the details of someone’s experience.

It’s a prompt response to someone’s question. It’s explaining a process clearly and making someone feel comfortable enough to say, “I don’t understand this, can you help me?” It’s recognising that a candidate’s previous career is an asset rather than something they need to leave behind. It’s being flexible when someone’s circumstances require it and taking the time to understand the individual behind the application.

None of these things, in isolation, feels revolutionary. But together, they can fundamentally shape someone’s experience of entering a profession. They can determine whether someone feels that the system is working against them, or whether they feel that there are people within it who genuinely want to see them succeed.

And that’s where I think the connection between diversity and belonging becomes particularly important.

From representation to belonging

Increasing representation matters enormously. Children and young people deserve to see a teaching profession that reflects the diversity of the communities around them, while schools benefit from the breadth of experiences, perspectives and knowledge that a diverse workforce brings.

But representation is not the end point. We also need to think about what happens once people are through the door. Do they feel valued? Are their experiences recognised? Can they see opportunities to progress? Do they feel able to contribute their perspective? Most importantly, do they feel that they belong?

Recruitment can open the door, but belonging is what makes someone believe they can stay on the other side of it. This is why I think diversity and belonging need to be considered together. We cannot focus solely on changing who enters the profession without also thinking about the experience we create for those people once they arrive.

For me, this means that the goal of diversity recruitment shouldn’t simply be to increase the numbers. It should be to create a profession where people can see themselves, recognise the value of what they bring and believe they can thrive.

What I will take forward

When I began working on the Mission 44 pilot, I was focused primarily on recruitment: how could we reach the right people, encourage them to consider teaching and support them through the process and into teacher training? I still care deeply about those questions, but I finish the recruitment phase thinking about something broader: what does it take for someone to believe that they belong?

Sometimes it starts with seeing themselves represented. Sometimes it’s someone believing in their potential. Sometimes it’s a straightforward answer to a difficult question, or a system that is flexible enough to recognise that people arrive with different circumstances and different strengths. And sometimes, it’s simply another person saying, “You have something to offer here.”

That, for me, is the real opportunity within diverse recruitment. It’s not simply about increasing the numbers or meeting a target; it’s about widening the doorway into teaching and helping more people recognise that the experience they’ve accumulated throughout their lives can have a place in the classroom.

The Mission 44 recruitment phase may now be complete, but the questions it has raised will stay with me. If we want a teaching profession that better reflects the communities it serves, we need to think about the whole journey into teaching, not just how we get people through the door, but how we make them want to walk through it.

Because belonging doesn’t begin on a teacher’s first day in school. It begins much earlier – with the first moment someone starts to believe that there might be a place for them in the profession, and that sense of belonging can ultimately benefit countless pupils.