University of East London
"The UEL Initial Teacher Education Partnership aims to develop outstanding teachers for schools and colleges and their communities. We foster evolving teacher identity through innovative, creative and critically engaging experiences that will enable our beginning educators to engage with transformational change excellence and leadership throughout their careers".
The UEL Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Partnership trains 500 Primary, Secondary and Post Compulsory teachers each year and has been doing so throughout the past two decades. UEL is the largest post 1992 university offering teacher training and education in London. At UEL we offer routes into teaching through: PGCE, PCET, Secondary and Primary, School Direct Salaried and Non-Salaried, Postgraduate Teacher Apprentices, BA Primary with Education and QTS and a small cohort of BSc Computer Science with Education and QTS.
The wonderfully diverse and cosmopolitan nature of East London is reflected by the vibrant multicultural community training to teach at UEL. Our staff provide strong role models for our student body and we aim to develop similar role models for school pupils and college students, redressing the under representation of certain groups in the teaching workforce. A key strength of training to teach at UEL is our community focus. We are proud that we recruit people from the east London community (whilst not excluding others), who then go back into this community to teach in our local and highly diverse, schools. Most east London schools are Ofsted rated Good or Outstanding, and many are significantly staffed by UEL ITE graduates. Many UEL trained teachers are senior leaders and headteachers in schools.
Our aim is to develop a strong teacher identity in all our trainees. Our highly qualified ITE tutors and school-based mentors do not foster a ‘copy me’ approach to teaching, that is specific to a particular school, academy or trust. Instead we are working with our trainee teachers, to support their developing confidence and a teacher identity that works for them and their pupils, that will enable success for years to come – wherever they end up teaching. We firmly believe at UEL, that emerging teacher identity is underpinned by educational theory and a trainee teacher’s understanding of this. It is vital they can articulate a theoretical rationale behind the pedagogic choices they are making in their classroom or learning space. Therefore, the theoretical balance with the practice of teaching is positively engaged with at UEL within our ITE curriculum. Our curricula approach is research informed, and we enable our students to engage with the research agenda by conducting school placement-based action research focused work as part of their developing teacher role.
Areas covered |
Greater London and Essex Core training is at the School of Education and Communities, University of East London, Stratford Campus |
Courses |
Primary 3 – 11 Secondary 11 – 16 Post Compulsory Education |
Routes |
Primary QTS and BA (Hons) Primary QTS and PGCE Secondary QTS and PGCE PGCE in Post Compulsory Education and Training (PCET) School Direct Salaried and School Direct Non-Salaried – Primary and Secondary Postgraduate Teaching Apprenticeships Assessment Only Click here for an explanation of the different routes into teaching |
Website |
https://www.uel.ac.uk/teacher-training |