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It’s not about 
you
. It’s about their job and whether 
you can do it. 
KEY POINTS
■
Set aside time to think about your interview.
■
Have a mock interview, if possible, with someone 
experienced. 
■
Video yourself talking as if to an interview panel. 
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GOOD TEACHERS ARE READY 
FOR INTERVIEW DAY
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GOOD TEACHERS ARE READY
FOR INTERVIEW DAY
It’s interview day. You’ve arrived on time and had a tour 
of the school. You’ve taught a lesson to a class and made 
a brief presentation to a panel which might be made up 
of the same people as will carry out your formal interview. 
In many schools you will also have met, or been interviewed 
by, a representative group of children. Each of these we 
deal with separately. 
Now you face, towards the end of the day – in some cases, 
at the end of a two-day process – the formal decisive 
interview. 
By now you’ve already made a significant impression on 
the panel. They think they know you pretty well, after 
your written application, your prepared lesson and your 
presentation. It may be that the job is now yours – so long 
as you do not insult the chair, recite ‘Eskimo Nell’, take a 
call from your bookie or laugh maniacally as you remove 
items of your clothing. 
Or the reverse may be the case. You may have gone down 
so badly up to now that you face an uphill task. 
But – and this is important – there is no point trying to 
guess because there’s every chance that you will guess 
wrongly, and good panel members certainly give nothing 
away. They take their responsibility more seriously than 
that. Nobody, for example, is going to give you a thumbs-up 
behind the others’ backs after your presentation. 
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Good ideas for good teachers who want good jobs
Any apparent sense of where you stand at any point before the final 
decision is likely to be wrong, and you must put it aside. 
Experienced advertising executive, Jeremy Bullmore, puts 
his finger on the reason for this in his advice column. 
Dealing with an enquirer who feels badly served by 
interview, he makes the crucial point that no interviewee 
can judge his or her performance against that of other 
candidates. Only the interviewers can do that, as they try 
to find the person best fitted for the post. ‘The only 
comparisons the interviewee can make are with other 
interviews that he or she has already experienced.’
1
Whether you feel you’ve done well, or badly, in any 
individual interview (or any part of the selection process), 
this bears no relation to the only comparisons that really 
matter, which are the ones being made between candidates 
by the selection panel, and of which you can know 
nothing. 
So