Choose Your Own Adventure: How VA Work Gives Teachers Ultimate Career Flexibility
What if, for the first time in your teaching career, you could actually make the choices?
Choose your working hours. Choose your clients. Choose where you work. Choose how much time off you take.
After years of following someone else's timetable, curriculum, and rules, imagine designing a career that bends around your life instead of forcing your life to bend around your career. This isn't wishful thinking - it's exactly what skilled teachers are discovering through virtual assistant work.
Let's explore every dimension of flexibility that VA work can offer you.
Schedule Flexibility: Your Time, Your Rules
The Teaching Reality: 8:30am start (but we know how much earlier it so often is). Lunch at 12:15pm (if you manage to squeeze one in!). Break duty on Wednesdays. Staff meeting after school on Thursdays. Parents evening until 8pm. Weekend marking. Holiday lesson planning and classroom prep. Your time has never really been your own.
The VA Adventure: What if Tuesday mornings were for the gym because that's when you have the most energy? What if you could start when it suits you and finish work early to collect your kids from school? What if you could take a proper lunch break without wolfing down a sandwich while photocopying? What if you could say ‘yes’ to a spontaneous day out, meeting a friend for coffee, or attending all of your child’s school performances?
As a VA, you become the architect of your own schedule. Some teacher-VAs work traditional hours because it suits them. Others work split schedules - mornings and evenings with afternoons free. Some front-load their week and take long weekends. The beauty is in the choice.
Location Independence: Your Office, Anywhere
The Teaching Reality: Your daily commute to the same school, and often the same classroom and the same view. Whether it's a glorious sunny day or you're feeling the need for a change of scenery, your work location is mostly fixed from September to July.
The VA Adventure: Picture this: responding to emails from your garden on a sunny morning. Taking client calls from your local café. Working from your parents' house when you're visiting for the week. Or even working from a different country if that's your dream.
Location flexibility doesn't just mean working from home (though that's wonderful too). It means having the freedom to change your environment based on your mood, your needs, or your life circumstances.
Financial Flexibility: Beyond the Pay Scale
The Teaching Reality: You know exactly what you'll earn this year, next year, and - pretty much - in five years' time. Pay rises come annually in tiny increments. Want more money? You'll need to take on additional responsibilities (and these don’t always come with a pay bump) or wait for promotion opportunities that may never come.
The VA Adventure: VA work shatters the income ceiling that teaching imposes. You can increase your earnings by:
Raising your rates as you gain experience and expertise
Adding new services that command higher fees
Taking on more clients during busy periods
Taking on associates to support new clients
Creating passive income streams through courses or templates
Choosing premium clients who value your expertise
The freedom to set your own rates means you're finally paid what you're worth, not what a standardised pay scale dictates. The average hourly rate for VAs in the UK ranges from around £30-£35 per hour, with full time VAs earning around £59,651 in 2024 on average (according to the UK Virtual Assistant Survey, published by the SVA). You can find out more about the figures here.
Creative Flexibility: Do What You Love
The Teaching Reality: Teach the prescribed curriculum. Use the approved schemes of work. Follow the school's behaviour policy. Assessment methods are determined for you. Even your classroom displays might need to follow school guidelines.
The VA Adventure: Imagine focusing solely on the parts of teaching you actually enjoyed. Love creating resources? Become a content creation specialist. Excel at organisation? Focus on project management. Brilliant with people? Concentrate on client relations and customer service.
Your VA services can evolve with your interests and strengths. Start with admin support and gradually specialise in areas that energise you. Through all your amazing skills, you can enjoy variety whilst also specialising in the work you love and in what you do best.
Teacher-turned-VA, Cath explains, “the vastness of skills those leaving education have, are so well placed to shape a niche and flexible working with variety, pace and choice.”
Client Flexibility: Choose Your People
The Teaching Reality: Your classes, colleagues, and leadership team are assigned rather than chosen. While you may love working with your students, you have limited control over the professional relationships and working dynamics that shape your daily experience.
The VA Adventure: For the first time in your career, you can choose who you work with. Difficult client making unreasonable demands? You can politely decline to renew their contract. Found a client whose values align with yours? You can prioritise working with them.
This isn't just about avoiding difficult people - it's about surrounding yourself with clients who appreciate your work, respect your boundaries, and inspire you to do your best.
“One of the best things about my role is the client meetings and the relationships that you build up with other people,” shares former Drama teacher, Nicola. “I still have all of that personal interaction that is going on alongside what I’m doing. I like the fact that I can take things off people's plates and you do get gratitude for that, even though they're paying me for this service.”
Family Flexibility: Finally Putting Your Family First
The Teaching Reality: School needs come first. Your own children's assemblies clash with your teaching schedule. Sick days feel like guilt trips. School holidays don't align with your partner's time off. Your family gets the tired, stressed version of you.
The VA Adventure: Imagine being genuinely present for your family because you're not mentally preparing lessons during dinner or marking work after bedtime. Picture actually enjoying school holidays because you're not dreading the planning required for next term.
VA work allows you to be flexible around family emergencies, school events, and changing needs without having to justify yourself to anyone.
Boundary Flexibility: Protecting Your Energy
The Teaching Reality: Open door policies mean constant interruptions. Lunch duties sacrifice your break time. After-school events extend your day. Emails arrive at all hours with "urgent" requests that could wait until morning.
The VA Adventure: You set the boundaries. Decide your communication hours and stick to them. Choose whether to take rush jobs or maintain steady workflows. Determine how many clients you'll take on and what services you'll offer.
This isn't about being difficult (although as teachers, we often find ourselves prone to people pleasing and struggling to say no) - it's about creating sustainable work practices that let you show up as your best self for your clients. Your time is yours, so you can take the time to focus on your own well-being and happiness.
The Transition: Your Flexible Journey
The beautiful thing about transitioning from teaching to VA work is that even your transition can be flexible. You might:
Start slowly with one client while still teaching
Go part-time in teaching while building your VA business
Take a career break and launch your VA business
Move to supply teaching or tutoring for ultimate flexibility while establishing clients
There's no single right way to make this transition, and that's exactly the point.
Your Adventure Starts Now
Every day you stay in a career that doesn't offer the flexibility you crave is a day you're choosing someone else's adventure over your own. The path from teaching to VA work isn't just about changing jobs - it's about reclaiming your right to design a career that serves your life, not the other way around.
The teachers who've made this transition aren't superhuman. They're not risk-takers by nature. They're simply people who decided they deserved the flexibility to:
Work when they're most productive
Choose who they collaborate with
Earn what they're worth
Be present for their families
Pursue work that energises them
Create boundaries that protect their wellbeing
Ready to start writing your own flexible career story? The Teacher to VA mentorship programme is open and we’d love for you to join us. We’ll walk you through everything it takes to set up your own VA business, with a supportive community behind you every step of the way.
Your adventure is waiting. If you’re looking for something that offers flexibility, freedom and fulfillment, this could be the perfect path for you.
