Preparing to teach in September: A back-to-school checklist

September is the most leveraged few weeks in the school year. Whatever you set up in those first sessions, the routines, the expectations, the energy of the room, tends to define what the rest of the year feels like. Get it broadly right and you spend the next ten months working with the grain of what you established. Get it broadly wrong and you spend the same ten months wrestling against it.

This is a checklist for the run-up to September, written for early career and returning teachers, though most applies to experienced teachers too. The aim is not everything you could do but the things that genuinely make a difference, organised so you can work through them at a sensible pace.

A quick caveat. Every school is different. The specifics of your behaviour policy, seating arrangements, first-day routines and platform setup will vary. Treat what follows as a framework to fill in with your school's expectations.

Most teachers go in once or twice during the final week of the holiday to set up their room. The temptation is to use that time on visible work, putting up displays and organising books. Those things matter, but they are not the most leveraged use of your setup time.

The highest-leverage things you can do before term starts are: Knowing your classes by name and need, having the first three to four lessons of each class actually written, and having a clear plan for how you will introduce your routines on day one. Everything else is supporting infrastructure.

Get your class lists as early as you can and read them properly. Note pupils with SEND, EAL, looked-after status, medical needs, and anything else on the system you would want to know before the first lesson. These notes are often scattered across systems, so ask the SENCO or your head of department for the consolidated view if there is one.

For each class, build a rough mental model. Where are they coming from in terms of prior attainment? What did they study last? Are there obvious gaps from the previous teacher's notes or the scheme of work? You are not trying to be exhaustive, just to walk into the first lesson with a sense of who is in front of you.

Spend ten minutes learning to pronounce the names you are not sure about. There is no faster way to start a year well than calling a pupil by their actual name on day one without fumbling it.

The first few lessons of each class are where you set the tone, and they are also the lessons most likely to be undermined by you running out of planning time in week one. Write them now, in detail, while you have headspace.

What "in detail" means: Knowing what every minute is for, having the resources printed or queued, having the questions you will ask written down, and knowing what the homework looks like before the lesson runs. These are not lessons to wing.

A useful exercise is to write the lesson plan, then write the three things that could go wrong and what you will do if they do. Most first-lesson disasters come from being surprised by something you could have anticipated.

There is a tendency to spend setup energy on the visual look of the classroom. Bright displays, neatly labelled trays. None of this is bad, but it is not what makes a classroom function well.

The functional setup decisions that matter most are: The seating plan, the location of resources you will use every lesson, the visibility of the board from every seat, and the route from the door to your desk. If a pupil walks in on the first day, finds their seat without confusion, picks up materials without you pointing, and can see the board clearly, you have done most of what classroom setup is for.

Displays are useful when they are working displays, things pupils refer to in lessons, like keyword walls, success criteria, exemplar work. Decorative displays you put up and never reference again are mostly decoration.

Have a seating plan on day one for every class. The plan does not need to be optimal, because you do not yet know the class. It needs to exist, so pupils have an assigned place rather than choosing their own.

Assigned seating signals that you have thought about the room and that decisions about who sits where are yours. Letting pupils pick and then trying to move them later is meaningfully harder than starting with an assignment and adjusting once you know them.

A reasonable default for the first few weeks is alphabetical or attainment-mixed. After two or three lessons you will have information to design a better plan, and the principle that you set the seating is now established.

Your school has a behaviour policy. Read it, then read it again. Then write down the specific consequences for the specific behaviours, in the order they apply, on a card you can keep near your desk for the first half term.

This sounds obvious. It is the thing newer teachers most often fail to do, because the policy looks vague when you skim it. What happens then is that in the moment, when you need to issue a consequence, you hesitate or escalate inconsistently, and consistency is where the policy gets its power.

Know the names of the consequences, the sequence in which they apply, who you contact for senior support, and the timeline for resolving an incident. If your school uses a behaviour tracking system, know how to log entries before the first lesson, not during it.

Beyond the school's policy, you will have your own classroom routines. What you do when pupils come in. How they get out equipment. How you take the register. How they ask a question. How they hand work in. How they leave the room.

Write these down. Then for each one, write the version you will teach pupils on day one, in the precise language you will use. Routines you have not phrased explicitly tend to come out fuzzy in the moment, and pupils interpret fuzziness as flexibility.

The first lesson of each class is largely a training session in your routines, and that is fine. Spending most of the first lesson on how we start, what equipment is on the desk, how you signal a question, is not wasted time. It is the most leveraged twenty minutes you will spend with the class all year.

Different teachers approach the first lesson differently and there is no single right answer. What follows is a shape that tends to work well, particularly for newer teachers.

Start on the door. Greet pupils as they come in. Direct them to their seats by name from the seating plan. By the time the bell goes, every pupil is in their seat with the right equipment out.

Introduce yourself briefly. Who you are, what you teach, and the one or two things you want them to know about how the year will go. Keep it short.

Walk them through your routines. The specific things you expect when they come in, how they signal a question, what equipment they should have, how the lesson will run. This is the slow part. Do not skip it because it feels boring; the boredom is the point.

Do some real work, even on day one. A short, accessible task that lets you see who the strong starters are, who is hesitant, who is quiet. The work does not need to be ambitious; it needs to give you information about the class.

End cleanly. Establish how you dismiss the class. Standing behind chairs, no one leaves until you say. The way the lesson ends is the last thing pupils take with them, and it sets the expectation for every subsequent lesson.

The checklist below is structured roughly in the order you would want to tackle things. Treat it as a guide; some items will not apply to your school context and you may need to add items that do.

The first fortnight is when your routines and expectations actually get embedded. Pupils will test, in small ways and occasionally in larger ones, what you mean by the things you said on day one. This is normal; the test is the embedding.

The most important thing in this period is consistency. Every time you say "we line up outside before coming in" and then let one pupil get away with not lining up, you have weakened the routine. Every time you apply the consequence the policy specifies for late homework, even when the pupil has a story, you have strengthened it.

This is also the period in which you start to notice the pupils who need more from you: The pupil meeting expectations but barely, the pupil quietly struggling with the work, the pupil whose name keeps coming up in staff briefings. Note them. Speak to colleagues. Build the picture early. It is much easier to support a pupil in week three than in week seven once a problem has set.

Pre-term setup eats time. Some of it is necessary, some of it is work-anxiety speaking. The non-negotiables, knowing your classes, writing the first lessons in detail, knowing the behaviour policy cold, having a real plan for day one, are worth the time. The other things, perfect displays, colour-coded folders, are worth time only insofar as they make the term-time work easier.

Get enough sleep in the last week of the holidays. Eat properly. See people who are not teachers. The school year is long, and going into it already tired sets up the kind of fatigue that compounds. The September version of you matters less than the December version of you. Plan accordingly.

If this is your first September in the classroom, the first few weeks will feel intense. They feel intense for everyone, and the pace settles. Your mentor and head of department are there to help; use them earlier rather than later when something is not working.

The one thing experienced teachers consistently say they wish they had done differently in their first year is be more consistent with the boring routines from day one. Lining up outside. Doing the register the same way every time. Applying the small consequences for the small misdemeanours. The consistency is the work. Once embedded, the rest of teaching gets easier.