Are you interested in a career in secondary teaching?

he School pupils with a tutor at a 2011 Maths summer school

If you have a passion for your subject and you want to inspire the next generation, teaching could be the career for you.

Our PGCE programmes for secondary teaching here at the University of Bristol are rated ‘Outstanding’ in the most recent Ofsted review. The PGCE is demanding and hands-on, but you’ll be supported and guided to become an excellent qualified teacher, opening up a wealth of career possibilities. (more…)

Most secondary schools don’t have to teach the national curriculum. It should be revised and restored – or discarded

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Lorna Smith, University of Bristol

Each year, when new PGCE students arrive at the University of Bristol to start their journey towards becoming English teachers, I ask them to study the national curriculum. This is the statutory document prescribing what children aged from five to 16 are taught at school.

I do this despite that curriculum appearing increasingly irrelevant. It is rarely – if ever – seen in the schools in which our student teachers train, despite it being the only document mandating what council-maintained schools “must teach”.

Academies – self-governing schools receiving direct government funding, rather than being council-maintained – are exempt from the curriculum. As of January 2023, 80.4% of secondary schools are academies or free schools, accounting for 80.2% of secondary school pupils.

The importance of the curriculum will change if a Labour government comes to power at the next general election. The party has promised a review of curriculum and assessment – and that all state schools, including academies, will be required to follow the “core national curriculum”.

It may be, though, that the national curriculum has outlived its usefulness. A more radical approach could be to dispense with it altogether. (more…)

The Education Policy and Research Service (EPRS) Top Ten for 2022-23

By Helen Aberdeen, Director Education Policy and Research Service (EPRS) School of Education, University of Bristol

For many who work in education, the summer break provides a welcome breathing space to clear those little jobs which we have been meaning to do for ages. It also gives us some time to look back and reflect.

As Director of our Education Policy and Research Service (EPRS), I have had a busy year – in a good way. In addition to summarising 110 research and policy reports, we have developed a new EPRS toolkit based on the Core Content Framework for Initial Teacher Training – we will be officially launching the toolkit in September, hoping to persuade many ITT institutions of its usefulness. (more…)

Keeping a diary can improve teachers’ wellbeing – here are some ways it can work for all of us

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Lucy Kelly, University of Bristol

Teachers in England are struggling. A recently released government report on the working lives of teachers found that teachers’ wellbeing levels are lower than the general population. More than half of the 11,177 teachers and school leaders surveyed said that their job was negatively affecting their mental health.

Teacher wellbeing should be addressed at a structural level. If the government wants teachers to enter the profession, and continue in it, then changes around pay, working conditions and support for teachers’ mental and physical health need to happen.

In the present moment, though, there are also steps teachers can take for themselves to prioritise their wellbeing. My research focuses on how keeping a diary can be useful to teachers. It can give them a safe place to define what wellbeing means for themselves and to explore what it means in practice. What’s more, there’s no reason why this practice couldn’t be helpful for others, too. (more…)

More ethnic minority teachers are needed in UK schools – but teaching can affect their mental health and wellbeing

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Terra Glowach, University of the West of England; Malcolm Richards, University of the West of England, and Rafael Mitchell, University of Bristol

There is a major shortage of new teachers in England, and this includes teachers from ethnic minority backgrounds. Research from 2020 found that 46% of schools in England had no Black or ethnic minority teaching staff at all.

But the treatment of ethnic minority staff in schools raises ethical concerns about recruiting them into a workplace which puts significant burdens on their mental health.

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“Leaky spaces for Climate Change Education are not enough for Bristol’s young people”

city hall, BristolBlog by Mrs Michelle Graffagnino, Senior Lecturer in Education, and Dr Nicola Warren-Lee, Senior Lecturer in Education.

After attending a Bristol Education Partnership Climate Change event at City Hall in Bristol, Nicola and Michelle recall the brilliance of the student contributions, the passion of the senior leaders and the ambiguity of the attending DfE representative.

City Hall in Bristol is impressive.  Even more so on a crisp autumnal morning full of enthusiastic school students armed with posters, and a cohort of beginning geography teachers ready to take their first steps into a microteaching event on climate change curriculum improvement in October 2022. The Bristol Education Partnership (BEP) had organised a climate conference to showcase individual schools’ climate change initiatives and to bring students to take part in workshops on different areas of climate action.  The School of Education, PGCE Secondary Geography group were there to support discussions on how the curriculum that students follow could be changed, improved and linked together. (more…)

Mindset

Blog post by George Mitchell, MFL PGCE student; School of Education, and Sport Psychologist

The mindset is our beliefs and how we can make sense of what goes on around us. This mindset plays a part in shaping a lot of our behaviours and the way we handle situations. When developing our mindset, we can intentionally evaluate, modify, and refine these beliefs, and therefore move it along the continuum from fixed towards growth mastery. (more…)

Teacher motivation and student learning in India – which is the chicken, and which is the egg?

Blog post by Rhiannon Moore (PhD student, School of Education, University of Bristol) and Anustup Nayak, (Project Director for Classroom Instruction and Practice, Central Square Foundation)

What do we know? Teacher motivation and student learning

Teacher motivation is a commonly discussed topic within policy and research in LMICs. Such discussions tend to have two main points of focus: firstly, that teacher motivation is worryingly low; and secondly, that this is having an impact on student learning. In this blog, we are particularly interested in exploring the latter of these two points. We largely focus our discussion on teachers in India, where our experience and research suggests that it may be helpful to consider this relationship as a two-way cycle instead of an input-output process. Thinking about teacher motivation in this way can change the way we think about both teachers and students, asking that we challenge the often over-simplified picture of a poorly motivated teacher whose behaviour inhibits their students’ learning, and instead start to consider teachers as dynamic agents whose own needs may not be being met. (more…)

Introducing ‘Rehumanising Teacher Education’: a website for teachers and teacher educators

Blog post by Dr Janet Orchard, School of Education, and Nidia Aviles Nunez, School of Education

With a (contentious) market review of teacher education in England currently underway, we are reminded that in many parts of the world the place of critical reflection by teachers is increasingly called into question. Teacher ‘training’ is becoming increasingly pre-occupied with content and academic attainment as the sole purpose of schooling, with schools increasingly positioned as competitors within educational systems focused solely on assessing their performance through targets and measurable outcomes. As a result, education systems are undermining attention to those fundamentally human concerns that characterise teaching and through which teachers educate their students.

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