Course Summary
This primary teacher education course is designed for graduates who are committed to becoming primary school teachers. It trains you to teach children in the five-to-11 age range.
As a trainee you will learn how to teach the entire primary curriculum as well as choosing a particular route. The Primary PGCE with ICT and Computing route is designed to give you the additional expertise, confidence and skills to take on a leadership role in this subject in the future.
East London offers multicultural, multilingual and vibrant schools in which to learn, but your training at UEL will qualify you to teach anywhere in England or Wales.
Our PGCE team is made up of experienced practitioners who have worked in a range of primary and Early Years settings across London as classroom teachers, curriculum co-ordinators, advisory teachers and school leaders.
At UEL you will be part of a diverse community of students. We want to bring to east London a teacher workforce that reflects the local community and, in 2013-14, 24 per cent of our Primary PGCE trainees were men.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
You will leave the course with outstanding subject knowledge across the curriculum. You will have an understanding of how to plan and deliver engaging and motivating lessons and how to support your pupils’ progress.
You will learn how to identify the strength and needs of your pupils and make sure that everyone in your class is included and challenged.
You will understand how to assess pupils’ learning, how to spot the gaps in their learning and how to plan to fill those gaps.
Everyone on the Primary PGCE learns how to teach the whole curriculum. In extra sessions, you will also enhance your knowledge, understanding and practice of ICT and computing.
You will learn to think critically about the role of computing in the classroom and the new technologies and resources that are available.
You will find out how to engage pupils in computational thinking and programming skills and you will explore how computing subject leaders can support their colleagues with the use of technology across the curriculum.
“You grow to expect the unexpected in east London. When the unexpected confronts you in your teaching career, you’ll be ready,” says Andrew Read, Head of Primary Initial Teacher Education. “You get a rich experience in east London, in particular working with pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds and pupils for whom English is an additional language.”
HOW YOU'LL LEARN
There will be one keynote lecture per week, with follow-up seminars in which you will discuss aspects of teaching, such as behaviour management and pupil progress, with your fellow trainees.
During this initial period, you will spend Mondays in schools observing. Here, you will develop your understanding of learning and teaching by watching examples of good or outstanding practice.
In addition, you will spend 12 hours over the year developing your knowledge and understanding of ICT and computing.
Each session will have a specific focus and before each one there will be reading, tasks and research to complete.
You can also join a shared wiki space where members of the group will be able to keep in touch, upload tasks and share resources.
There are three blocks of full-time school-based training on the course, each eight weeks long. Your first teaching placement will usually start in the middle of October.
Your UEL tutors will decide where you go on placement and arrange for it to be as convenient as possible for you.
You will be teaching, not helping, on the placement. You will start off working with groups of pupils but your role is not to help the teacher – it is to support and increase the pupils’ learning.
You will have a school-based mentor (a teacher employed by the school) as well as a professional tutor from UEL who will visit you during each placement.
This is partly to moderate and assess the quality of your work, but also to give you support, guidance and feedback. In principle, your three placements will be in different schools. However, schools sometimes ask for trainees to return for a second placement.
Who will teach on this course
Gurmit Uppal
The teaching team includes qualified academics, practitioners and industry experts as guest speakers. Full details of the academics will be provided in the student handbook and module guides.
YOUR FUTURE CAREER
By working alongside schools and local authorities in our region, we are helping to meet the need for teachers in our local area and many of our students are offered posts by our partner schools. Some trainees have been offered jobs at schools where they have spent their placement.
Schools and local authorities have told us that they think our trainees are of a high standard. OFSTED’s 2012 inspection report quotes one school as saying, “They arrive in schools ready to start teaching and are well prepared for the rigours of the classroom.” 

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