Virginia Kerr has been a TV reporter, a news anchor, a social media strategist with a TikTok following approaching a million and a YouTube educator who built a seven year business teaching storytelling from a converted laundry room … and so much more … . At fifty-two, with that career already stacked high with achievement, she has decided to become a full time high school teacher, taking on audio and video production classes for teenagers who mostly have no idea who she is or what she used to do.

Virginia is candid about walking into a school where nobody knows her despite decades in front of a camera and a level of local recognition most people spend a career chasing. She talks Paul through the discomfort of becoming a first year teacher, "I feel like a rookie who's gonna get hazed," she admits, before adding the line that anchors the episode, that the twenty two year old version of her could never have made this move, but the fifty two year old finally can.

Chat moves through why Virginia left television, the exhaustion of chasing numbers on social media and the moment she realised constant reinvention had been leading somewhere all along. She reflects honestly on an old instinct to prove herself through titles and promotions, and how none of it ever brought the purpose she was chasing. "Our stories are our superpower," she says, describing why she stopped trying to sound like an expert and started sounding like herself.

Paul and Virginia talk at length about authenticity in front of a class and how the skills of building an audience translate, or fail to translate, into building rapport with fifteen to seventeen year olds. Virginia describes the balance new teachers are told to strike early on, projecting enough authority that pupils take instructions seriously, while still being recognisably human once trust is established. She is candid that she is holding some of her natural openness in check in the first weeks, partly because her own son is in one of her classes.

There is a strong thread centred on wellbeing running throughout the episode. Virginia describes cutting news and social media scrolling from her routine and the surprising effect that had on her cortisol levels according to her doctor. She credits a teacher she admires online, CJ Reynolds, for the idea of protecting your mindset before you walk into a room full of teenagers and cites the writer and career changer Lucy Kellaway on the particular humility required when decades of professional respect count for nothing on day one in teaching.

Paul draws out the practical realities too, five classes of up to thirty pupils, projects built around storytelling rather than technical process and the logistics of pupils leaving the classroom to film unsupervised around the school site. Virginia explains why she is flipping the traditional curriculum for the subject, leading with narrative and purpose before technical editing skills, and how she plans to use video from pupils she already knows from her time as a substitute teacher and school social media coordinator to bring lessons to life.

This is a conversation about courage, about starting again in public and about what it actually takes to move from high visibility work into a classroom of thirty teenagers who, in some cases, could not care less how many followers you once had. Anyone thinking about a late career change into teaching, or already living through one, will find plenty here that’s valuable, informative and just plain absorbing.

New episodes of Education Matters land regularly, so subscribe and follow wherever you listen to make sure you never miss a conversation like this one.