The Vacancies You Won't See Advertised: A Weekly Treasure Hunt for Hidden TA Jobs

Somewhere on a school website you have never visited, there is a teaching assistant vacancy with your name on it. No sponsored ad, no Indeed listing, no shiny banner. Just a PDF tucked under 'Our School > Vacancies' that has been sitting there for eleven days while the headteacher waits for the right three applicants to turn up.

That is not a rare glitch. It is how a decent slice of school support recruitment genuinely works in the UK. Schools are small hiring operations on tight budgets, and many of them treat advertising as a last resort rather than a first step. The upside for you is simple: if you know where to look, you can be reading about a role while most of the competition is still scrolling the big boards.

Why so many TA jobs stay under the radar

A few things are going on. Academy trusts increasingly run their own recruitment portals, so a role at one of forty schools sits on a trust page rather than a national site. Small primaries often update their own website and quietly tell the local community. Internal cover arrangements get made permanent without a formal advert at all. And a school that already has a reliable supply TA in the building would rather offer them the post than spend money on advertising.

None of this is dodgy. It is just recruitment that happens at human scale. The trick is to stop treating the big job boards as the whole map.

The 45-minute weekly routine

Treat this like a treasure hunt with a fixed time limit, so it never swallows your whole evening.

Monday, 20 minutes. Open a note or spreadsheet and work through the websites of every school within a sensible commute. Ten to fifteen schools is plenty. Look for a vacancies page, a staff page, and a newsletter archive.

Wednesday, 15 minutes. Check trust-level career pages, your local authority's jobs bulletin, and the government's free Teaching Vacancies service, which many schools use because it costs them nothing.

Friday, 10 minutes. Check social channels — local parent groups, school Facebook pages, community noticeboards — then send one speculative email and log it.

Same routine every week. Boring, repeatable, and oddly effective.

Your checklist of places to look

• School websites: hunt for 'Vacancies', 'Work With Us', 'Staff', 'Our Team' or 'Join Us'. Some bury it under 'About Us'.
• Multi-academy trust career portals: one search can reveal roles across a dozen schools.
• Local authority job bulletins: still a real route in many areas, especially for maintained schools.
• The DfE's Teaching Vacancies site: free for schools, so smaller settings do use it.
• School newsletters: staffing changes and 'we're growing our team' hints often appear before any advert.
• Parent-facing social groups: headteachers sometimes post there first because it reaches the school community instantly.
• Local community boards: libraries, leisure centres, church and parish magazines, supermarket noticeboards.
• Supply agency bulletins: agencies often hear about long-term TA needs before the advert goes live.
• Trust governor minutes: published online, and occasionally revealing about planned staffing growth.

Reading a school website like an insider

Use the site search box and type 'vacancy' — it beats clicking through menus. Then check the staff page against the vacancies page: if a class page has no named TA and the school is advertising for one, that is useful interview context. Newsletter PDFs from the last term are worth a skim, particularly anything about expansion, new Reception places or extra SEN provision. Those are the situations that create TA posts.

Also note how a school asks you to apply. Some want an online form, some want a covering letter to the head, some insist on the local authority application form. Getting that wrong is the easiest way to be quietly filtered out.

Three email scripts you can borrow

Adapt these, keep them short, and never send the same one to forty schools on the same afternoon.

Speculative approach:

Dear Mrs [Name],

I hope you don't mind an approach out of the blue. I'm a teaching assistant with experience supporting children in [Key Stage 1 / EYFS], and I'd love to be considered if a vacancy comes up at [School]. I've attached a short CV and I'm happy to complete your application form if that's preferred. I'm local, available from [date], and can do supply cover at short notice while a permanent post is being arranged.

Thank you for your time, [Name] and [phone number]

Polite follow-up, two weeks later:

Dear Mrs [Name],

Just following up on my note of [date] about teaching assistant work at [School]. No need to reply if there's nothing yet — I'll keep an eye on your vacancies page. I'm still very interested and happy to help with cover in the meantime.

Building a relationship with the school office:

Hello [Name],

I've registered with [agency] and I'm keen to do supply at [School]. Is there a preferred way for me to let you know my availability each week? Happy to send it every Monday morning if that helps your planning.

Track it properly

Keep a simple sheet: school, contact name, date contacted, what you sent, date of follow-up, and the result. Diarise a follow-up at two weeks and a gentle re-approach at six weeks. Nothing looks more organised than a teacher being greeted by name by someone who last wrote in October.

A quick word on manners

Don't mass-BCC a whole town, don't ring the office at 8.45am when children are arriving, and don't ask about pay before you've said hello. School offices are the gatekeepers of every TA job in the country, and they remember faces and tones of voice.

The roles are out there, often unadvertised and often filled fast. Half the battle is knowing that they exist at all — and being the person who checked the website on Wednesday.