Postgraduate Secondary PGCE Programme Information

Mentor memos summarise the actions needed each week in one place.

• Mentoring Memo Week 2
• Mentoring Memo Week 3
• Mentoring Memo Week 4
• Mentoring Memo Week 5

All student teachers have attended the following professional studies sessions between Monday 7th September and Thursday 10th September.

Welcome to the Programme by Dan Dennis
Key messages: student teacher have been told how the programme is built: professional studies lectures, subject studies workshops, four periods of Intensive Training and Practice, and target-setting on placement in two contrasting schools. All of this is mapped to the Phased Expectations and the ten Curriculum Questions, which go beyond the ITTECF minimum. They know that weekly targets from their General Mentor against the Phased Expectations begin in Phase 2, that Part Two of the Teachers' Standards applies at all times and that a placement can be terminated for breach, a safeguarding concern or lack of progress affecting pupils. They have been told to use the full working day, to expect and keep track of a lot of feedback, and to approach disagreements about subject teaching with humility and to bring them to subject studies. The detail of phases, review points and assessment is being sent to them by video this week. Remember to use the Curriculum Questions as the shared language for targets and reinforce the expectation that the school day is used fully for planning and preparation if they are not teaching or observing.

Welcome to the Profession by Michael Sweeney
Key messages: Student teachers have been introduced to the partnership's priority on disadvantage using Liverpool deprivation and attainment data, and to the groups most at risk of underachieving (SEND, low socio-economic status, EAL, social care, young carers). They have been taught to interrogate data rather than accept it. Expect them to ask about your school's context and disadvantage profile early; help them connect what they were shown to the pupils in front of them.

Teacher Professionalism Workshop
Key messages: Student teachers have worked through case studies on professional boundaries - dress and school ethos, relationships with parents, confidentiality, staffroom conduct, social media, and how to handle professional disagreement - and considered each against Part Two of the Teachers' Standards. They have also reflected on what integrity and being self-critical mean for them as a teacher. In your first meeting, it is worth asking what they took from the session and setting out your school's own expectations alongside it, so they hear a consistent message from both sides of the partnership.

Safeguarding 1 by Lynn Sampson-Chappell
Key messages: Student teachers know the definition of safeguarding and how it differs from child protection, the DSL's role, how to receive a disclosure (listen, don't promise confidentiality, record, report), and the boundaries of one-to-one contact, physical contact, social media and mobile phones. They have also completed a level 2 online certificate and the DfE Prevent course. What they need from school is the induction: your child protection and staff behaviour policies, the DSL's name, and your reporting procedure, in the first days of placement.

How Do Pupils Learn 1 by Andy Newland
Key messages: Student teachers have been taught the cognitive science underpinning the curriculum - working and long-term memory, limited capacity, the worked-example effect, intrinsic and extraneous load - and have been taught to engage with it critically, including its limits and the role of emotion and motivation. They may arrive with more questions than certainties, which is intended. Help them see the principles in your practice (small steps, worked examples, retrieval, reducing distraction) and how they play out in your subject specifically.

Assignment Briefing by Heather Hatton
Key messages: Student teachers must choose one subject-specific teaching strategy (guided by their subject lead) and evaluate it critically through research, policy and inclusion, 2,250 words, due 16 November. They will need school context (anonymised) and will end with two SMART targets for a sequence of lessons using the strategy. Their subject lead approves the focus, but you can help by suggesting opportunities to observe and discuss that strategy in your department. Part two of the assignment later in the year requires student teachers to teach using that strategy to different classes.

Professional Resilience 1 by Paul Skinner
Key messages: Student teachers have been asked to see the year as development, to anticipate its pressure points (the run-up to Christmas in particular), to identify their own strengths and sources of support, and to protect time for rest. They know how to reach university wellbeing and crisis services. What they need from mentors is early notice of when placement workload peaks, realistic expectations on planning and marking, and a mentor who asks how they are as well as how the lesson went.

University-led student teachers attended the following professional studies sessions between Monday 14th and Thursday 17th September. School-led student teachers cover the same material in Phase 1 and Phase 2a.

Key Stage 2 Transition by Michael Sweeney
Key messages: Student teachers have looked at what changes for pupils between primary and secondary - one teacher and room to many, larger social groups, a broader curriculum, more independence - and at the evidence on how transition affects attainment, belonging and exclusion risk. They have considered the specific challenges for pupils with SEND, for pupils eligible for pupil premium and what the evidence says helps: chances to voice concerns, familiarisation, rehearsal, and giving pupils agency. They have worked through case-study pupils and have been asked to speak to staff on placement about how this year's Year 7 transition has gone and what the school would do differently. If you have a moment in the first weeks, that conversation - with you or with your Year 7 lead or SENDCo - is what they are looking for.
Key literature: Systematic literature review of primary-secondary transitions: International research - Jindal-Snape - 2020 - Review of Education - Wiley Online Library.

Understanding Data by Michael Sweeney
Key messages: Student teachers have been introduced to the four kinds of data schools hold - attendance, pupil information, behaviour and rewards, and academic achievement - and what the common codes and measures mean: SEN status (N/K/E), PP/FSM, EAL, LAC, CIN, CP, the SEN need codes, reading ages, KS2 scaled scores and CAT standardised scores. They have practised reading a class data sheet and been warned, through case examples, that data tells only part of the story and that assumptions need checking with the people who know the pupil. They have also seen how behaviour and rewards platforms (Class Charts, Arbor) and markbooks are used by pastoral and subject teams, including question-level analysis. What they will need from you: access to class data for the groups they teach, help interpreting your school's particular systems and codes, and a conversation about how you use the data to plan, seat and support pupils.

Teacher Identity by Dr Gillian Pieser
Key messages: Student teachers have explored where their ideas about being a teacher come from - their own schooling, subject, media images of teaching - and been told that placement, mentors and the transition into the profession will confirm, challenge or change those ideas, which is normal and expected. They have considered why identity can feel uncertain early on (different methods and values between people and schools; pupils not yet responding to them) and been introduced to the idea that professionals are able to explain why they do what they do, drawing on research and theory as well as experience. The message they left with: uncertainty is part of the process, talk about it, and be able to justify your practice. If your student teacher seems unsettled by differences between what they expected and what they see in your department, that is what this session prepared them for; a conversation about why your department does what it does will help more than reassurance.
Key literature: Full article: Who I am in how I teach is the message: self-understanding, vulnerability and reflection (contact Gillian if you struggle with accessing this research).

Introduction to Assessment by Paul Skinner
Key messages: Student teachers have been introduced to the purposes of assessment and the link between curriculum and assessment, and to the main types - summative, formative, diagnostic, criterion-referenced, ipsative, norm-referenced and institutionally evaluative - with the distinction between assessment of and for learning made explicit. The emphasis was on formative assessment: Black and Wiliam's principle that assessment is only formative when the evidence is used to adapt teaching, the Assessment Reform Group's ten principles, and a toolkit of classroom techniques (retrieval and "do now" tasks, hinge questions, cold calling, whiteboards, exit tickets, peer and self-assessment against criteria, low-stakes quizzing) alongside feedback and feed-forward conventions (WWW/EBI, two stars and a wish). They have been set Wiliam's Embedded Formative Assessment chapter 2 as reading. They will be looking to recognise these techniques when they observe you and to try them in their own early teaching; pointing out where you check understanding in a lesson, and how you decide what to do with what you find, is the most useful follow-up.
Key literature: Embedded Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliam (2011), Chapter 2. (contact Paul if you struggle with accessing this research).

Classroom Culture by Michael Sweeney
Key messages: Student teachers have considered the classroom culture they want to create and how it sits within whole-school culture. The core message was Bennett's: behaviour must be taught, through a clear vision and consistent routines (with Dix and Lemov alongside), and how you handle challenging moments is what builds culture rather than a separate matter of "behaviour management". They have looked at the evidence on teacher-pupil relationships and a warning that relationships come through the quality of teaching and leadership, not from wanting to be liked; and they have been told what to look for in your school - routines, shared language, rewards and behaviour systems, how staff and pupils interact, what happens outside lessons - and to lean on the school's systems rather than improvise. The most useful follow-up is a walk through your behaviour policy and routines, and being explicit about the small consistent things you do in the first minutes of a lesson.
Key literature: Running the Room, Tom Bennett (2020) (contact Michael if you struggle with accessing this research).

Fundamental British Values by Dr Shereen Shaw
Key messages:Student teachers have been taken through the four Fundamental British Values - democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance - and asked to see them not as something to evidence on a lesson plan but as the way a classroom is run: inviting discussion and disagreement, applying expectations fairly and consistently, helping pupils make informed choices, using names correctly and maintaining dignity during correction. The session linked this to belonging, drawing on the evidence that pupils who feel they belong attend, engage and achieve more, and on the tutor's own research on Britishness and identity in schools. They left with four questions: how will every pupil belong, how will pupils have a voice, what values will pupils learn from watching them, and what practical strategies will they use. If you can show them where FBV lives in your school beyond the poster - in behaviour systems, in how disagreement is handled, in subject content - that will make the session concrete.
Key literature: Britishness, Identity and Belonging in Education, Shereen Shaw (2024) (contact Shereen if you struggle with accessing this research).

Phonics and Early Reading by Dr Liz Parr
Key messages: Student teachers have been taught how reading develops - the Simple View of Reading, Scarborough's rope, the Reading House - and what systematic synthetic phonics is, including the terminology (phoneme, grapheme, blending, segmenting) and the simple and complex alphabetic codes, so they understand what their Year 7s have already been taught in primary and what the phonics screening check and KS2 reading test measure. The secondary focus was on the pupils who arrive still struggling: research showing that four or five in an average Year 7 class have below-average word reading and a similar number below-average comprehension; going beyond reading ages to diagnostic assessment; the interventions schools use (Fresh Start, Lexia, That Reading Thing); and quality-first strategies in every subject - highlighting and modelling tricky vocabulary, morphology and etymology, choosing and pre-reading curriculum texts, checking comprehension, and building a reading culture. This is framed under Curriculum Question 4. What helps most is showing them how your department identifies and supports weak readers, who the school's reading lead is, and how you teach subject vocabulary and handle reading aloud in your lessons.
Key literature: Reading in Secondary School.