 Hello everyone, this is Ross at Teacher Toolkit. It's the summer holidays and thousands and thousands of teachers all over the UK will be quite rightly having a very relaxing summer holiday. But I post this video for newly qualified teachers because although they'll be having some kind of summer holiday, they'll be very nervous at this time of year about starting out in their new skills from September. So I want to just share some very simple tips and some pieces of advice for newly qualified teachers in terms of how to get ready for the year ahead. My tip number one for NQTs, if you have an opportunity to get into your school before the start of September, then I would highly recommend that even if it's just for one hour, because many of you will be wanting to get into your classrooms to decorate and lay out tables and get to grips with all the different things that you need to understand in your classroom. Displays, table layouts, logging on to the computer system, where you're going to keep your resources. But one little tip I would give to all NQTs is while the school is empty, walk around the entire school building. Get to know where the cupboards are, where the corridors lead to, where the room numbers are, what code that stands for. Because when you've got two or three hundred kids or in some schools, two thousand, it's very, very difficult to get around the school. If you've got to go to a different classroom or you've got to get to a different venue with thousands of people around, it's very easy to feel overwhelmed. So my tip number one, while the school is empty, go and visit your school. Get in and walk around the corridors and get to know where all the rooms are, where the assembly hall is, where you need to be for your tutor group so that you can feel much more comfortable in September when everyone's there. My tip number two for NQTs, get into your classroom before September. Spend half a day there, get your tables arranged, get your displays up. Get all your resources together so that you know where everything is. Because when you've got 30 kids in front of you and if you're a primary teacher, you'll be with them all week. If you're a secondary teacher, you're going to have 30 different kids every hour. It's going to be extremely challenging to control and to entertain and to teach and to impart knowledge and whatever else you're required to do. It's going to be very difficult to do that with all the anxiety you feel. So by having a very comfortable environment known where all your resources are, then you're already a step ahead. There's one issue for some groups of teachers where you might be teaching in several classrooms. So that's going to be even more difficult to achieve if you don't really have a base. In my experience, I used to work in sometimes five classrooms throughout one day. So find yourself a little box where you can take the most essential resources with you, but find yourself a base, whether it's in the staff room or in a department office, where you can have all the resources to hand so you can pick them up and move them to another classroom. Because if you don't have those essentials around you, then you're going to make your job in the classroom even more harder. My third and final tip for all newly qualified teachers in the classroom this year is a philosophy I learnt from studying design at university, which is the KISS Theory, which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. And if you think of all the brilliant designs in the world, they have a very simple philosophy or approach to their designs. And there's a reason why they are successful. So I adopt this technique in classrooms. If you're delivering instructions or explaining something to a student or a class even, try and keep your instructions simple. That's not to say that you shouldn't give depth and detail and explanations and target questions and all those simple things, but as a newly qualified teacher, one of the best techniques I learnt was to just deliver the instruction, keep it simple focus so that students could get on with the activity. And then if you have one or two students that need further explanations or there's a couple of students calling out, deal with those separately and get students onto the task. That allows you to deal with your own anxiety, ensure students are on task, and then you can deal with the one or two students that need extra intervention. That would be my final tip. I hope you've found these very useful. There's a lot more information on my blog at teachertoolfit.co.uk. I'd love to hear your thoughts and any ideas and tips you'd like to hear. We'll see.