8 risks of buying teaching packs online
Lesson notes, schemes, teaching materials and class tests.
Francisca Akoto · October 6, 2026 · 4 min read
Plenty of teachers buy their teaching packs online: lesson notes for the term, a scheme, a set of class tests, a folder of teaching materials. Some are sold on websites, and some are passed around on WhatsApp for free. With vetting on Monday and the weekend already full, it is easy to see why they sell.
A good pack can save you a weekend. Packs also carry risks, and most of them show up later, when the headteacher is reading your note or your pupils are sitting the test. Here are eight, so you can weigh them for yourself.
1. The weeks don't match this year's terms
The packs we have looked at are written for twelve-week terms. Once revision and exams are taken out, this year's first term has one teaching week more than that and second term two fewer (we count them in how to write a scheme of work).
In first term that leaves you a week with no note, and you write it yourself anyway. In second term you pay for two weeks of notes you never reach, and the topics in them are still owed to your class.
2. It may arrive incomplete
Teachers find gaps after they have the file. On one popular download site, teachers have been leaving the same kinds of comments for years: a pack labelled weeks 1 to 12 that starts at week 5, a class with weeks 1 to 4 missing, lesson plans with no strand or sub-strand, and French left out term after term. On another, teachers write in asking where week 8 is.
Those two sites give their packs away free. A paid pack can have the same gaps, and you may find them on Sunday night, when the missing week is the one due in the morning.
3. It may be from an old year
Packs get shared and resold for years. Some scheme files still going round are labelled for a 2022 "first semester". An old pack can carry indicator codes that don't match the curriculum your headteacher checks against, and you may only find out when the note comes back to you. (If the codes are unfamiliar, here is how they work.)
4. It doesn't know your class
A pack is written once, for every class at that level. It doesn't know how many periods you have, which topic you started with, or that half your class needed another week on fractions.
Within a few weeks, the pack and your class can be in different places. You can teach where your class is and hand in a note that says something else, or follow the pack and leave some pupils behind. Worksheets and teaching materials have the same problem: they are pitched at a class the writer imagined.
5. Your colleague may hand in the same note
If two teachers in your school bought the same pack, the headteacher reads the same note twice, word for word, with two names on it. The The same can happen across two schools in one circuit, with the supervisor who visits both. Nothing in the note has to be wrong for that to be an uncomfortable meeting.
6. Your pupils may have seen the test
A test pack is sold to anyone who pays, marking scheme included. That means other schools, extra-classes teachers and parents, and pupils have older brothers and sisters. Once a paper is that easy to get, you can't be sure your pupils are seeing it for the first time. A good score then tells you less about what they learned, and that is the one thing a class test is for.
7. Mistakes are yours to answer for
Your name goes on the note, and you teach from it. A wrong indicator code, a wrong fact or a wrong answer in the marking scheme is yours to explain, to the headteacher or to your class, whoever wrote it.
Often you can't see inside a pack until you have paid, and not every seller will fix a mistake or refund you. Under one seller's post in September 2026, a buyer asked for a refund and called the buyers "victims" of the seller's mistakes.
8. The cost adds up
Packs are priced per subject, per class, per term. A JHS teacher who takes one subject in B7, B8 and B9 buys three packs every term, nine in a year. A primary class teacher buys the whole class's subjects every term. Either way you pay for every week in the pack, used or not, and again next term.
If you write your own
teache can help with that. It drafts each week's lesson note from the curriculum for your own class, paces your scheme to this year's terms, and fills in your record of work from your notes. You check and change everything before it goes in. Your first 10 weekly notes are free, if you want to try it.