Help and advice required about going into FT education

**purpleprincess**

Basically, I have got 13 GCSEs grade A-C and I want to go to Uni to become a primary school teacher, how do I go about this??? Can I do it this year? Can I go straight to uni or do I need to do something before hand???

chezza262

hi - your grades mean any decent uni with a teaching course would love to have you so thats a good start. As a current student with friends on teaching courses my advice would be really think about if its what you want to do. You will have four years of hard work and probably very little money. If you havent had much class experience I would reccomend contacting local schools and explain to them that you're thinking about training and ask if you could help out in a class for a few days (looks good on UCAS form too).
Have a look at the UCAS website for info on applying and NUT site for info on training grants etc. I would imagine you would have to do an access course to get a qualification eqiuvalent to A level.

good luck

kittiwoz

You have a couple of options I think. You can either do an access introduction to education followed by a BEd or you can take any FE course, eg, access, GNVQ, in any subject that intrests you to enable you to carry on to degree level in that subject and then do a PGCE. The second option would give you more flexibility in that if you ultimately changed your mind about teaching you could put the degree to other purposes and you would also be qualified to teach in secondary schools and colleges. PGCE is also transferable into things like museum work which has a strong teaching element but is not actually teaching in a school. In that sense a BEd is a less valuable qualification than a PGCE. However if you are certain that primary teaching is what you want to do it is probably the better option for you. At the moment it saves you one year as a shortcut but it is likely that by the time you completed FE and a degree the PGCE will have been expanded to a two year course.

fatnan

My daughter went back to Uni as a mature student after doing an Access course. She completed a BA in Childhood and the Arts, which she thought would leave the door open if she changed her mind about teaching. She then went on to complete a 1 year PGCE. She helped out at her daughter´s school and also at another local school whilst she was at Uni, and she thinks it was this that helped her to get a job when she finished her PGCE.
She has now been working for two years, and really enjoys the teaching aspect, but if anybody had told her about the long hours involved, the marking and preparations etc which take up a lot of her time óff´, I don´t know whether she would have given up her secure and not-badly-paid job to train.
Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

vixarooni

perhaps you could do your a levels and then do HND, once completed you can do a top up degree (this will cost up to half as much as doing a three year uni course) and then once youve done a degree you can then do the training to be a teacher on the job.

Thats how i would do it. Easy, and costs 50% less than it would do

si1503

GCSEs (school) --> A-Levels (college) --> Degree (uni) --> Teaching Course

Choose subjects you are interested in teaching in.