The below blog is intended to support you in the ‘why’ of filming your own personal statement to present to UK school leaders.

If you would prefer to skip to the video demonstration, scroll to the bottom of this page. The video is of Phoebe Smith, a 5 years experienced Australian trained primary school teacher who moved to the UK to expand her teaching career.

Why would it benefit me to film a personal statement? 

Filming your personal statement is an important step when applying for and standing out from the crowd when securing a teaching role. It should be personal, engaging and most importantly authentic to you! Best way to be authentic? Put yourself on camera! As your personal statement is about you, its important to use it to showcase your personality, experience, achievements and future ambition. Schools want to get to know you and why you would be an asset to their school environment.

As education is a competitive industry its important to stand out and put your personality out there to prospective Headteachers. From our own research, we know that senior school leaders much prefer to see someone physically or on film over being presented with 100’s of CV applications to sift through and trying to match who would be a good fit from a piece of paper.

What will I get asked?

Below we have set questions that you can answer within your personal statement video. This will outline the key areas of what senior school leaders want to know about you! From here, the school may request to arrange a Skype interview to further understand your teaching philosophy and passions.

1) Please provide a summary of your professional background, qualifications and experience.

2) Why have you chosen to live and teach in the UK? OR If based in the UK, what type of long term opportunity are you looking for?

3) What are two strengths you can bring to a role/school?

Note: We recommend your personal statement recording to be as precise as possible. Some of you may have just graduated Uni, and others may have been teaching for years! As a second interview is often requested over Skype, we recommend that you try and keep your video length to 3 minutes. 

 

Ready to get started? 

If you’re stuck or have no idea how to start your personal statement, we have a number of resources available to help you. You can download our personal statement video cheat sheet to start jotting down some ideas, or you can watch our personal statement video at the end of this blog for top tips and advice.
While theres lots of helpful advice and information online, you can also ask fellow teachers, parents and anzuk consultants for help if you’re stuck on what to say. Tell them why you are passionate about teaching at a particular school or why you want to teach overseas as it’ll help you to write down your thoughts and ideas, and create a brilliant personal statement video that you can be proud of.

Phoebe from anzuk Education on Vimeo.