pension333: Secret Teacher: our school is closing, so what's next for my career?

As an older staff member on a sinking ship, Secret Teacher has found job seeking as a mature candidate a challenging and frustrating experience

As another New Year came around with the attending "same old, same old" feelings, I had to remind myself that this year it isn't going to be exactly the same at all. In a school that's closing where everyone's job will soon be up for review, it's more like "different new, different new". And no doubt when the axe falls on me this year, my head, who dislikes confrontation so much she excuses herself when you bump into her in the corridors, will hopefully get the school secretary to do the necessary.

I have been looking for jobs, wearily checking any site for those seeking work in my area and with my price tag. It feels like climbing Mount Everest with a dodgy knee. Or being one of the Grumpy Old Men, sitting over a minute icehole, through which only the tiniest minnow could be caught.

The two jobs that I have managed to acquire through the application process in education so far have both been in leaky ships. It reminds me of the Marx brothers line: "Who'd want to belong to a club that would have me as a member?"

The first job I got was actually a mistake. My mad head of department thought I was the candidate with the computer knowledge, only to find out later that finding the on/off button proved to be a bit of a challenge to me.

But the idea of being selected for a role throws up all sorts of emotional curve balls from childhood when being picked for netball teams, or sporting events. It was usually left to the two worst, me and the other girl, and the teams haggling over who was going to be the lesser of two evils.

Now with teaching applications you don't know why you've not been picked because no one has the decency to tell you. Every application I send electronically seems to float off without a trace, maybe washed up on the shores of an outpost in cyberspace where all the loser applications bob around like discarded plastic bottles.

However, on the one occasion a school did get back to me, it was even worse. I was told I wasn't picked for an interview because it was a particularly strong field - the implication being of course is that I belong in a weak field.

It's difficult to rouse the energy to even fill in an application form. After spending an interminable time remembering your CV chronologically and typing it into a dodgy electronic format that is not compatible with your computer, any energy you have left for your sales pitch (sorry, the statement) reads like a third-grade English essay. And then I did this and then I did that and so on and so on. In the nightmare that is an older teacher making a job application, there's an inevitability to it all that feels frankly discriminatory and depressing.

I was given some sample winning statements from a colleague who believes in God and thinks we're all going to be all right, although the evidence for this seems to be pretty thin on the ground. Reading these actually made me lose the will to live because the kind of confidence it takes to blow your own orchestra of trumpets these days at best makes you sound like an ego inflated pub bore, and at worst like Nancy Dell'Olio after she was eliminated from Strictly Come Dancing last year.

For us 'twilight years' teachers, those hard won TLRs and threshold awards, have just made you virtually unemployable. Especially if you teach a subject that's not been picked for the English Baccalaureate Certificates. Of course, you could be really masochistic and go for a managerial position, but most of us value our health too much.

And forget about your 'transferable' skills. Trust me they're about as transferable as an unattended parcel at a tube station, no one wants to touch them with a bargepole. Younger teachers beware. In the immortal words of Courtney Love: "Some day you will ache like I ache."

But one thing about being in a school that's closing is that when your security blanket is ripped away and you're Linus shivering in the cold, you're forced to think creatively about where your future may lie.

Instead of waiting to be picked, I have begun to make some choices about what I want to pick and it is scary but sometimes empowering. My colleagues hanging on in there, some adapting like true Darwinians by offering to teach other subjects or hoping that in being the last person standing, they will become an SLT in charge of three kids, are delaying the inevitable. Like the Fall of Rome, a society that exists to remain secure is doomed to failure.

Carl Jung called the process of becoming oneself 'individuation' - you work towards the person you were always meant to be. No one is ever 'finished' and we are all on our own separate journeys. So maybe 2013 is going to offer something new after all.

This week's Secret Teacher works at secondary school in the south east of England.