The Five-Year Gap: Why five years outside full-time employment should never be mistaken for five years standing still.

There is a particular question that appears with uncomfortable regularity during recruitment: “Can you explain the five-year gap in your employment?”

It is a reasonable question, at least on the surface. Employers want to understand a candidate’s professional journey, their experience and their readiness to return to the workplace. Yet the question often carries an unspoken assumption: that time spent outside full-time employment is somehow time lost. That professional growth stops when a salary stops, and that anything accomplished beyond the boundaries of conventional employment is of lesser value.

For five years, I was not employed in a full-time teaching or leadership position. During those five years, I had my children, completed a PhD in English Literature and wrote prolifically for educational publications. I continued researching, thinking, questioning and contributing to conversations about education, literature and children's development.

And yet, when I began applying for positions again, I repeatedly encountered negativity surrounding my absence from full-time employment. As though I had been doing nothing.

The work that doesn't count:

Before stepping away from full-time employment, I had built a successful career in education, progressing from classroom teaching into senior leadership. I had managed staff, supported teachers, developed educational initiatives and helped shape school improvement. I understood the complexity of school life, the responsibilities of leadership and the importance of creating environments in which children could flourish.

Then came motherhood.

Like countless women before me, I entered a chapter of life that required a different kind of commitment. Raising children demanded patience, flexibility, resilience and an extraordinary capacity to respond to competing needs. The irony was not lost on me that many of these qualities are celebrated in educational leadership, yet their development through motherhood is rarely afforded the same professional recognition.

I am not suggesting that motherhood should automatically be considered equivalent to employment. Rather, I question why it is so readily interpreted as an interruption to an otherwise meaningful career.

Why does becoming a parent appear to diminish our professional credibility rather than add another dimension to our experience?

A doctorate, not a disappearance

Alongside raising my children, I completed my PhD in English Literature at Northumbria University. My research explored the environmental emergency and the 'greening' of Ted Hughes's writing for children, bringing together literature, childhood, education and our relationship with the natural world.

Completing doctoral research is intellectually demanding under any circumstances. Doing so while navigating the responsibilities of family life required sustained discipline, independent thinking and an unwavering commitment to a long-term goal.

Research does not simply produce a qualification. It changes how you think. It teaches you to interrogate assumptions, evaluate evidence, construct arguments and remain curious when answers are not immediately available.

These are skills that I consider invaluable in education, particularly at a time when schools must respond thoughtfully to increasingly complex social and environmental challenges.

Yet during recruitment, the conversation frequently returned to the same thing: the gap.

Not the intellectual development. Not the research. Not the transferable expertise.

The absence from full-time employment.

Still writing. Still contributing. Still learning.

Throughout those five years, I also continued writing extensively for educational outlets, contributing articles on teaching, literature and children's experiences.

Writing kept me connected to the profession. It allowed me to engage critically with educational debates, translate research into accessible ideas and consider questions that extended beyond the immediate demands of the classroom.

In many respects, this period gave me something that the relentless pace of school leadership had rarely permitted: time to think deeply.

Time to explore the relationship between literature and wellbeing. Time to consider the role of nature in children's lives. Time to examine education not simply as a collection of policies, assessments and measurable outcomes, but as a profoundly human endeavour.

I did not stop being an educator because I was no longer standing in a classroom every morning.

My professional identity did not disappear because I had temporarily stepped away from a conventional timetable.

If anything, my understanding of education became broader.

What recruitment gets wrong

I recognise that returning to employment after an extended absence can present challenges. Curricula evolve, policies change and schools require professionals who can demonstrate current knowledge and practical readiness. Employers are entitled to explore these questions.

But there is a significant difference between assessing someone's readiness to return and treating their time away as evidence of professional decline.

Too often, recruitment seems to favour uninterrupted career progression over the richness of individual experience. A continuous employment history becomes shorthand for commitment, while a career break invites suspicion or demands justification.

This is particularly troubling in education, a profession that claims to recognise the importance of individual circumstances, diverse experiences and lifelong learning.

We encourage children to understand that learning takes place everywhere, that progress is not always linear and that success cannot be measured through a single narrow lens.

Should we not extend that philosophy to the adults who teach them?

Rethinking the gap

I have returned to classroom teaching with something different to offer. I bring my previous leadership experience, certainly, but also the perspective of motherhood, the intellectual rigour of doctoral research and the confidence developed through years of writing and reflection.

I am not the same educator I was five years earlier. I would argue that I am a more thoughtful one.

Perhaps the problem lies not in career gaps themselves, but in the language we use to describe them. A gap implies an empty space, an absence, something missing between two points of significance.

My five years were anything but empty.

They were years of enormous personal and intellectual growth, of sleepless nights, difficult decisions, completed chapters, published articles and children discovering the world around them.

So, when I am asked to explain my five-year gap, perhaps the better question is not what I was doing away from full-time employment.

Perhaps it is what I learned, what I achieved and what I can now bring back. Because five years outside full-time employment is not necessarily five years away from professional development.

And a career should never be judged solely by the years that appear neatly on a CV.