In effect, the teaching profession’s biggest, most-used advertising medium has been opened up to anyone, anywhere in the world, with an Internet connection.

The full text of all the recruitment ads from The TES and TES Scotland, display and classified, is there. At peak seasons, this means the site is updated with 3,000 jobs per week.

Within a couple of hours of going live, we were being bombarded with email from all over the world. Most were congratulatory, along the lines of:

“Hooray! At last!”, “Well worth the wait”, “Great -but my head will hate itI ” One teacher was sad that her search for the ideal job - “Head of English in a warm country” - had drawn a blank.

Why all the fuss? There is no similar service on this scale anywhere else. Putting the jobs online was an expensive and potentially risky process for The TES. It was a milestone on the road to a wired-up education system, and a big vote of confidence for the vision of the National Grid for Learning.

Using TES Online Jobs is delightfully simple. On the front page, which you can access directly by keying in the address http:www.jobs.tes.co.uk, are invitations to search by keywords, or browse a list of categories in red type - identical to those listed in the paper.

Clicking on any one of these will summon a list of all the jobs in that category, from headships to CPS1 posts. Useful, especially if you’re looking for a snapshot of the current state of the recruitment crisis in primary education - but most teachers will have a more specific notion of their ideal next job.

This is why we provide a very flexible search tool. You can carry out a quick search (by subject or town, say) from a box on the front page - or hit the blue search button in the navigation bar above for a more detailed search form.

With the latter, you can sharpen the search by setting your preferred category, location, and points on the CPS (Common Pay Spine). Then, using the “keywords” box, you can hone it right down to the name of the town or village, or the name of a particular school, or whatever.

When you get your results, click on the job title to see the full text of the advertisement.

At the bottom of this search results page, there’s an email address box which allows you to set up a personal email job alert. Enter your email address, send it back to TES Online Jobs, and each week our server will sift through all the jobs using your original search criteria: it will then send you an email saying how many jobs match your requirements that particular week.

There’s no additional charge to advertise on TES Online Jobs - and for users, this site, like the rest of the TES Internet service, is free of any charge or even the need to register.

Simple, or what?

Try it and let us know what you think - there are feedback forms on both TES editorial and jobs websites. If you get a job using our service, congratulations. If not, don’t forget to let us know.

Tes Internet editor