A primary school teacher became so desperate for work that he placed a personal advert on the TES website - and was offered a job in Thailand.
Tom Tolkien, 29, spent the summer months scouring the country for a job, only to resort to selling himself online as a last attempt at finding work.
His advert read: “Teacher for sale! Good condition... Fairly recent model - five years on the clock. Two previous lady owners. Looking for new primary school with GSOH for long-term relationship.
“Can start in September. Will travel to anywhere in UK. For service history and contact details view my website...”
Mr Tolkien had been keen to avoid the prospect of supply teaching after deciding to leave his previous post in the middle of the summer term.
But despite many messages of support from fellow teachers who read about his plight, the only job he was offered was at an international school in Thailand.
He said: “It was depressing because supply work had just disappeared, and at that time of year everything else has gone. I’d been registering with every supply agency going. It was proving extremely difficult to elicit replies from the agencies and there seems to be no-one around at the LEAs over the summer at all.
“Then I got the email from Thailand and was pretty much offered the job to teach key stage 2 - but it seemed a long way to go.”
Eventually, several weeks later, after staying up into the early hours to catch vacancies as they were posted on the TES jobs site, Mr Tolkien was offered a job as head of English at a private prep school in North Yorkshire.
“The advert was good and I have since been offered two PE teaching jobs in the UK from it. At the time it was great for morale with all the messages of support I got and the traffic on my website.”
www.tesjobs.co.uk
