Some things have been put to me regarding my return to work next year. I don't really know if anyone can help, but I need to get all of this out of my head and with any luck that may help me find some clarity and make a decision.

The background - I teach maths in a private school. I have taken maternity leave for the entire 2009 school year and will return to work when school resumes in 2010.

Problem - the school has been fairly badly mismanaged by the previous principal (he took a leave of absence for term 1 but instead of returning, decided to resign). In trying to maintain student numbers by not tossing out the trouble makers we've lost a lot of good kids. Numbers are down, the school's reputation is in the toilet, they are in debt, and just to make things really good, the current financial climate is seeing a further reduction in numbers.

During the course of this year and next, they need to make around 10 teachers redundant. There's already one gone from the maths faculty who will go at the end of term three.

Fortunately, being on maternity leave, my position is safe and I have a job to return to next year. We are planning on having me go back full time while DH becomes a SAHD (his job issues are a whole other thread - his employer will shortly be moving so that he'll have an hour and half drive each way instead of the current hour, my school is only 10 minutes away). I have the choice of not returning full time, but the financial straits of this year make that one of insanity. If we can have DH at home and avoid childcare fees we get much more family time this way.

Now... I was called in to work last week for a meeting to talk about arrangements for next year. I'm told there's a possibility that I may need to teach out of my faculty area... they looked up my teaching qualifications and have noted that I'm qualified to teach science, including senior physics. Strange, but no mention of the fact that I'm also qualified to teach senior chemistry and my degree was in chemistry, not maths, and maths is actually my minor teaching method, so it certainly shows what they are thinking.

Now we strike a few more problems. I haven't taught science since my first two years straight out of uni. I was the ENTIRE science faculty at a school putting their first year 9 and then year 10 through as well as going through registration in my second year there... that's when my health problems began and I resigned for health reasons, found a job teaching only maths and have never looked back. I was a beginning teacher with no support, no assistance in setting up for practical work, no assistance in programming, etc, etc, etc. It was hell.

It was mentioned that they may need me to teach either year 7 science or senior physics next year. Great, back at work after a year off and jumping in at the deep end with stuff I either hate or have never taught before... EEP!

I was told to go away and think about it for a while and let them know... What I'd like to do is come back and teach extension maths. It means longer days as there's a lot of off-line teaching, but it also gives me more holes in my timetable so I think I can cope with that. There's no way I could cope with teaching extension maths as well as trying to get my head around science courses that I'm completely unfamiliar with.

I'd love to say no to teaching science (at least for next year, I'd feel a bit better after I've got back into the swing of teaching). There are issues with the head of science not being firm/strong enough with either staff or students. I don't like the way the science faculty allocates marking (one person does all marking for the entire year, unlike maths where we share the marking amongst all people who teach the course) so I'll either end up marking all year 7 science or none at all.

There's a teacher in the science faculty who is rather slack (got the year 9 exams marked the day the reports were due which meant all year 9 science teachers were late, and this is not unusual). Another problem - he's the physics teacher. The person employed to replace me for the year was required to teach some senior physics and this put this teacher's nose seriously out of joint (and it will get worse if I come back teaching physics - he's been incredibly selfish of resources this year, which will make life hard). I suspect it's a move to try to push this teacher out... that if they can get a permanent staff member in who can teach physics they can make this teacher redundant in one of the next batches of teachers to go...

It's all incredibly hard and complex. It was put to me in such a way that it's entirely up to me whether I take on science teaching or not, but I suspect that if I don't it will put me in the firing line for a future redundancy - particularly if there's a science teacher happy to teach maths (the physics teacher will, but there's even more problems there that I'm running out of time to do into)...

I don't think this has helped at all... if anyone managed to get to the end of all of that and make sense of it - any advice?

BW