The First Two Weeks Back

There's a particular kind of optimism that arrives in mid-August. The planner is empty, the displays are in your head already, and this is the year the marking gets done in frees and the seating plan is right from day one. Two weeks later you are running on adrenaline and a cereal bar, and the plan is a rumour.

This isn't a discipline problem. It's a load problem. The first fortnight of a school year is the single most front-loaded stretch of the job: new names, new groups, new baselines, new duties, new systems, and a curriculum that starts on Monday regardless. Everything you postpone in July arrives at once, and it all feels urgent because none of it has happened yet.

So the useful question isn't "how do I do all of it?" It's "what actually has to be right in week one, and what can be roughly right until October?"

Three things genuinely have to be right early. The first is names — you cannot manage a room you can't address. The second is routines: how they enter, how they start, how they ask for help, how they leave. Set those in the first three lessons and they'll hold the term up for you. The third is a rough read of where each class actually is, which you get from one low-stakes retrieval task, not from a formal baseline assessment you'll then have to mark.

Almost everything else can wait. The perfect display can wait. The beautifully differentiated resource bank can wait. The knowledge organiser for a unit you teach in November can absolutely wait. Doing them now doesn't make September better; it just moves your exhaustion earlier.

The other thing worth protecting is your first scheme of work. Not polishing it — having it exist. A sequence you can see end to end, even in draft, is what stops the term becoming a series of Sunday-night improvisations. This is the part that used to eat a full weekend and now shouldn't: aime can build the sequence for your curriculum and year group in the shape your subject actually wants, so you spend the weekend editing something rather than starting from a blank page. Whether you use that or a colleague's old plan, the principle holds — start from something, never from nothing.

And plan one deliberately unremarkable evening in week one. Not a reward for finishing, because you won't finish. A fixed point you defend, so the fortnight has an edge to it. The teachers who are still standing in November aren't the ones who worked hardest in September. They're the ones who paced it.

The year is long. The first two weeks are not the year — they're just the loudest part of it. Get the names, the routines and the sequence. Let the rest arrive when it's ready.