M+C Saatchi, Stone Dogs & Jungle Reframe Teaching as Ambition Over Sacrifice

Traditional teaching recruitment drives have long positioned education as a career chosen by those prioritising nostalgia (getting back into the classroom and giving back to the community) rather than graduates with professional ambition looking to climb the career ladder. With the sector facing a retention crisis, the Department for Education’s ‘Get out of the Everyday. Get into Teaching’ campaign provides a much needed repositioning to direct the path at graduates looking to pursue their passion, rather than those looking to fall back on plan B.

Its latest spot, created by M+C Saatchi with direction by MJZ London, post production and VFX by Stone Dogs and music and sound by Jungle Studios, does exactly that through the medium of contemporary dance and rap. In the hero film a young woman on her way to work at the local secondary school is inspired by the energy around her. She interacts with her students as they greet her through dynamic movement and dance, while the original soundtrack written by MC Deyah tells her story in a contemporary way. The final shot of her standing up to face her audience in a school assembly highlights the performative nature of teaching and its appeal to those looking for connection and excitement at work.

The accompanying OOH features real gen z teachers further positions teaching as bold and interactive, with its striking purple and yellow colour scheme and depictions of authentic classroom situations.

Senior strategist Kirsten Bray and senior creatives Max Lowe and Georgie Parchert from M+C Saatchi, Stone Dogs VFX supervisor Brian Carbin and Jungle’s sound designer Ben Leeves chatted with LBB’s Cathy Meyer-Funnell about how the brief was brought to life.

LBB> What was the brief and why was this idea the best fit for the campaign?

Kirsten> The brief was to bring more people into teaching at a time when the profession needed close to 30,000 new recruits every year. But many people associated teaching primarily with giving back, leaving many young people believing teaching wasn't a career for people like them.

Teaching's unique benefits become clear when you compare it to everyday jobs. So we repositioned the profession around the things our audience valued most and feared they wouldn't find in an ordinary job: progression, ownership, creativity and variety. Our platform, "Get out of the everyday. Get into Teaching," was built around these emotional drivers, reframing teaching not as a sacrifice but as a career that offers what many other jobs don't.

LBB> Talk us through how the rap came together. Why was the soundtrack so important to the storytelling?

Max> We actually approached it like a music project rather than an ad. Instead of writing a script and then finding a track, we created the track first. Working with music supervisors Wake The Town, we cast the net wide across producers, writers and music labels to find the right sound. Just like our casting process, we weren't looking for a particular style or artist - we were looking for the track that best captured the emotion of the story. The music became our protagonist's inner thoughts. The lyrics were never meant to explain teaching - they were there to express emotion. That distinction was really important because as soon as the lyrics become too literal, it starts to feel like advertising. Once the track existed, everything else followed from it. The edit, the choreography, the camera moves and even the ambient sounds were all built around its rhythm. It became the backbone of the storytelling.

LBB> What were the challenges of promoting teaching as a career path and trying to market it to a younger audience?

Georgie> One of the biggest challenges was that young people already have a very fixed idea of what a teacher looks and feels like. If we'd simply made another polished recruitment ad, we'd have reinforced that perception rather than changed it. We spoke to over 400 newly qualified teachers and realised that while the profession had evolved, the way it was being represented hadn't. They were creative, expressive, funny, ambitious people with lives and identities outside the classroom.

So our challenge became making teaching feel culturally relevant without losing authenticity. Every decision - from casting to styling, choreography and music - was about representing real personalities rather than teacher stereotypes. Our casting process was open from the outset, and we looked for the people who best embodied the spirit of the campaign.

LBB> Why was the idea of performance and choreography such a key part of the film and OOH images?

Max> Performance became a metaphor for teaching itself. In most careers, you spend years working your way towards recognition. In teaching, from day one, you're at the front of the room.

We wanted to capture the energy that exists between a teacher and their students. Throughout the film, our protagonist's movement grows in confidence and scale, sending energy through the school. The students feed that energy straight back, creating a continuous exchange that elevates everyone. But we also wanted to show that teaching isn't a solo act. Through conversations with hundreds of real teachers, we heard how important the support of colleagues is. So we built in quieter moments of vulnerability and camaraderie between the teachers, reminding the audience that behind every confident classroom is a team lifting each other up.

Altogether, it allowed us to visualise the emotional momentum of teaching while borrowing from the language of music videos and performance culture to make the campaign feel modern.

LBB> How did you cast the film and the images?

Georgie> For the photography, we cast from an open pool of over 400 real teachers, getting to know them and featuring those who truly embodied the campaign. We took the same approach with the film. Our casting process was open from the outset and focused on finding the very best person to tell the story. Angela Marie Hurst stood out immediately. Her relationship with movement was instinctive and completely her own. Every gesture felt authentic rather than performed, perfectly capturing the emotional journey we wanted to tell. Choreographer Benjamin Jonsson and his team then built on what was already there. Just like the teachers we'd met, Angela’s uniqueness couldn't be manufactured.

LBB> The tone of this spot feels quite different to other adverts promoting teaching, why was that shift important?

Max> Recruitment advertising often tells people why they should choose a career. We wanted people to feel why someone would choose teaching before we'd explained anything at all. Rather than borrowing from the conventions of public sector advertising, we borrowed from the language of music videos, fashion and film. That gave us permission to tell a more emotional story, using music, movement and character to draw people in before revealing the message. It was a conscious shift away from talking about teaching and towards showing what it feels like. If we wanted to change perceptions of the profession, we couldn't just say teaching was different - we had to make it feel different.

LBB> What was your thought process when deciding where VFX should support the story rather than announce itself?

Brian> The VFX approach for these films was developed collaboratively between the director, production company, agency creatives and Stone Dogs. Wherever possible, the goal was to keep the work practical and the visual effects invisible, allowing the performances to remain front and centre. In many cases, that meant selecting the strongest performance from multiple takes and using VFX to seamlessly add or remove elements, adjust background extras, or maintain continuity from shot to shot without drawing attention to the work itself.

LBB> Looking back, is there a VFX moment that audiences probably won't notice, but that made a significant difference to the finished film?

Brian> The auditorium scene is the first one that comes to mind. On the day, the agency had just 35 student extras and a very limited window to make them fill a 300-plus-seat auditorium. We explored several approaches with the production team before deciding the most convincing result would come from doing it practically and comp it all together with VFX.

Once we timed all the plates, we rotoscoped each student and adjusted wardrobe details where needed to avoid obvious repetition. We then matched the camera's depth of field and composited our teacher back into the final crowd shot. The finished shot feels completely natural, which is exactly what we were aiming for.

LBB> What was the brief you received regarding music and sound? What challenges did you initially feel when embarking on this?

Ben> It's a track led piece, the brief was to make the rap feel like part of the action, not vocally stand out on top. We wanted a feel that the music was part of the flow. Kinda effortless, much like the lead’s performance. The challenge was how to make it incredibly subtle - little changes to the music levels can have a big effect. The performance of Deyah is so natural, and clean, that the sound design has to work around it.

LBB> How did sound design enhance/blend with the rap style of this piece?

Ben> The biggest part of the sound design is going in and out of her world. We build with sound design and exterior street sounds to create a little energy and then cut when the beat drops and she starts dancing, the atmosphere all falls away to hardly anything. Just very subtle muted underscore sounds. This takes the viewer with her into her world.

Then the reverse is true at the end, when we come back into reality sounds quickly when she lands on the stage. In front of a hoard of kids. This way, the main rap of the track with the beat is left as our hero in the sound bed.

LBB> Anything else we should know?

Georgie & Max> The assembly hall in our film is the same one featured in the ‘Love Actually’ iconic school nativity scene. Thankfully, there were fewer lobsters this time.