Wellbeing & Support

Wellbeing Charter

We are committed to placing wellbeing and mental health at the heart of our decision-making and supporting you to make positive choices for your own wellbeing during your training year and beyond. The wellbeing charter sets out our commitments to you. We aim to:

Give you a voice.

• Give you the opportunity to share your views through the Student-Staff Committee.

• Give you regular opportunities to provide feedback to the PGCE team.

Prioritise your well-being.

• Work with the disabilities team to support you in overcoming specific barriers to your learning.

• Prioritise mental health support with a named member of the welfare team attached to the PGCE.

• Agree clear communications guidance.

• Provide opportunities for regular drop-ins while on placement so that you can seek support if needed.

• Assign you a personal tutor to support you throughout your ITE year.

Support you to organise your time.

• Give all dates in a timely way to enable you to organise your workload.

• Provide a weekly training plan to help you prioritise activity and ensure you know what is coming up.

Support you to manage your workload.

• Carefully sequence assignments to reduce the impact of these when they coincide with peak placement activity.

• Focus on utilising and adapting existing high-quality resources and schemes of work.

• Adopt a staged approach to lesson planning so that demands reduce over time.

• Emphasise a flexible approach when responding to children’s work; self-marking, peer-marking, verbal feedback, live marking.

• Continually review our placement documentation to ensure this is necessary and purposeful to both trainees and school-based mentors.

Teaching is the best job in the world, but it can be demanding and present challenges. It is therefore important that you inform us of anything that you might need support with over the course of the year.

If you find yourself struggling to meet the expectations and targets set, the following advice and process is offered to support you, and your school-based mentor, in overcoming the challenges faced.

There are basically 3 steps to this process, and very often, reference to the proposed solutions and ideas offered within Step 1 are sufficient to identify the issue clearly, and find solutions which resolve matters. Should the issue require an Extra Support Plan or a Cause for Concern to be raised, you should speak with your University Lead Mentor (Teacher Learning Tutor), and the University's Programme Directors, as soon as possible.