Four dogs asleep around the base of the camera, as usual, none of them remotely interested in any of this.
Teachers ask us how to run the business side better. For me that’s the wrong question, because it assumes there’s a business there to run better. Usually there isn’t. There’s a teacher doing two jobs and only counting one of them.
So the one worth asking is simpler and slightly uncomfortable.
Ask a teacher who she works for and she’ll usually say herself. Or the studio, if most of the work is in one place.
Neither one is quite true, and the gap between them is where a lot of teaching careers quietly go missing.
A solicitor has a firm. A doctor has a practice. A barrister has chambers. None of that is an accident, I’d say — it’s what a profession builds first. None of them built those things, and most of them couldn’t tell you how they work. But the firm is what holds the insurance, sets the terms, covers the maternity leave, and vouches for them when a stranger rings up asking whether they’re any good. It’s the floor. It’s just there.
You don’t have one. Nobody mentioned that when you qualified, because there was no one whose job it was to mention it. So you’re doing the work of the institution and the work of the teacher at the same time, and only one of those is the thing you trained for.
That’s not a failure on your part. It’s the shape of the profession. But it does mean the floor only exists if you put it there.
When to use this
- If you’ve been teaching a while and it’s never quite felt like a career
- When something has just gone wrong, a studio closing or a term off, and you noticed there was nothing underneath
- Before a new venue, a new term, or any point where you’re about to add work
- If you’ve read anything else in this collection and want to know where it sits
Why nobody builds it
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said. Most teachers haven’t skipped this because they didn’t know. They’ve skipped it because doing it properly means calling the work a business, and calling it a business feels like admitting you’re in it for the money.
You know that’s not why you teach. So the agreements don’t get written, the numbers don’t get done, and the whole apparatus stays in a drawer marked not really me.
Which is understandable, and it costs a lot.
So it’s worth turning the thing round. The floor isn’t how you get more out of teaching. It’s what keeps the teaching alive through a bad year. A teacher with cover, terms and a real number can absorb a closed studio and keep going. A teacher without them loses the year, and sometimes loses the teaching altogether. The apparatus protects the craft. That’s all it’s for.
The six things a teaching life needs under it
This is the floor. Six things. You’ll have some already, probably more than you expect.
Take twenty minutes and write one honest sentence against each. Not what you’re meaning to do. What’s actually true today.
1. What you are. Your status at every place you teach: self-employed, employed, or something in between. It’s decided by how the work is actually done, not by what the studio calls you on an invoice.
2. What covers you. Your insurance, and just as importantly the things it doesn’t cover. Most teachers hold a policy and have never read it.
3. What you charge. A number you can say out loud without adding a get-out at the end of the sentence, and one that’s connected to what an hour of your teaching actually costs you.
4. What finds you. How a stranger checks you’re real. A venue that’s about to reply to your email will look you up first, and whatever they find is doing the talking.
5. What holds the week. A timetable that survives a bad month. Not the fullest week you can build, the one with some give in it.
6. What happens if you stop. Six weeks off, for whatever reason. Who teaches the classes, what the students are told, and what you live on.
What the blanks mean
When you’ve written your six, count the blanks.
None is unusual. One or two is normal and fine. Four or more isn’t a crisis, but it’s worth knowing, because it means your teaching is being held up by nothing except things continuing to go well.
Then look at which blank would cost you most if next month went badly. That’s the one to close. Not all of them, and not in order. Just that one.
The rest of this collection is the how. Where you charge is thin, the pricing pieces are there. Where nobody can find you, the visibility ones. Cover, status and agreements sit in Compliance & Safety, because they’re legal questions rather than business ones, but they’re part of the same floor and the page doesn’t care which shelf they’re on.
Who you actually work for
You work for a business. It’s been running for years, it has your name on it, and until today nobody had ever written down what it consists of.
That’s the whole reason a professional body exists. Not to teach you to teach, because you can already do that. To be some of the floor that the profession never built: the cover, the standard, the record that vouches for you, someone to ask when the question is legal rather than physical.
You’ve been doing both jobs. You only ever signed up for one.
Action steps
- Write the six sentences today. Twenty minutes, honest rather than tidy.
- Count the blanks and mark the one that would hurt most in a bad month.
- Close that one. Just it.
- Put the page somewhere you’ll find it, and look at it again at the start of the next term.
Related resources
- More than one way the work pays
- What happens if you stop
Six blanks is normal. So is one. You don’t have to close them all, and trying to is how people abandon the whole thing by February. Close the one that would cost you most in a bad month, and leave the others until it’s their turn.
Most teachers who’ve done this find the floor is further along than they feared and thinner in one specific place than they’d noticed. Both of those are useful to know on a Tuesday rather than in a crisis.