The GSOE works in partnership with 70 schools to provide secondary initial teacher education (ITE) courses.  It offers Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) training in Citizenship, English, Geography, History, Mathematics, Modern Foreign Languages, Music, Religious Education and Science. There were 227 trainees on the PGCE course at the time of the inspection.

Professor Tim Bond, Head of the GSOE, said: “We are very proud of the report and are delighted the hard work of staff and students has been recognised and rewarded.

“As a postgraduate school our teaching programmes span postgraduate teacher education, masters degrees and doctoral programmes. This teaching draws on the strength of our research, together with the distributed expertise of our academic staff.”

Key strengths of the programme highlighted in the report include:

• the effective procedures to recruit well-qualified, reflective trainees with the personal qualities and intellectual capacity that gives them the potential to be good and often outstanding teachers;
• the high quality of personalised support from both the provider and partner schools that ensures that trainees’ individual needs are met so that they make consistently good progress;
• the use of a formative tool that supports high-quality verbal and written developmental feedback from both University-based and school-based trainers;
• the very effective use of current practitioners from within the partnership to support the professional studies programme which effectively demonstrates to trainees ways of putting their theoretical knowledge into practice;
• the positive impact of University expertise on the professional development of teachers within the partnership schools and the wider local community;
• the strong support for the provider from schools in the partnership who value the supply of high-quality teachers.