Teacher Training - your questions answered! video transcript

I'm Jo Byrd, I'm the Programme Leader for the BEd (Hons) degree here, the undergraduate one and the MEdu Integrated Master's Degree. So we do the primary education. These courses are for anyone who wants to be a primary school teacher, and it really is about being a primary school teacher. But of course, after that, you can go on and do other routes because of the nature of our course, it does have a 100% success rate in employability. So all our students go on to be primary school teachers. After that they can move on into other areas, of course, they could go into research. We do lots of research training on the course. They could go into policy and development. They could go into school support work. So they're actually local authority advisors put in a number of schools, so many different career paths, but they'll start off as a primary school teacher.

In terms of coming to Derby I think what we offer is a very personalised approach. Our partnership schools we've worked with for years and we have very good relationships and it's a small, tight community. What Derby offers is a city, but in a more compact area. So what it's got is all the things that a good city would have in terms of nightlife, in terms of shopping, in terms of experiences and the parks are fantastic too. But it's also in walking distance. It's a very friendly city. Students who aren't from Derby, we have lots of local students, but those who aren't from Derby, talk about how friendly it is and often end up staying here as well and working at partnership schools, so it's a great place.

They should expect to work very hard. They should expect to be challenged. They should expect to have some down days, but have some amazing days. We offer lots of amazing opportunities and they will grow. They'll grow as people and they'll grow as professionals too and we strive ourselves to ensure that our students become thinking teachers. So, we do want you to work hard, but it's rewarding to do that. I think our smallest school that we work with has 16 pupils and our largest school has over 850. So to do the undergraduate degree, there will be three different placement experiences. If you do the postgraduate route you'll have two different placement experiences. So you'll work in a variety of different schools and we'll track that to make sure that the students have very different experiences and on top of that, we do invite our students into schools and they work with our placement schools on voluntary basises to, and then we send our students into different settings or different educational settings. So it could be the zoo. It could be the prisons. It could be hospitals. There's lots of different environments where they'll experience what it's like to educate somebody in that environment. If you know you want to be a teacher, then I can recommend Derby to you definitely.

Teacher Training - your questions answered! video

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