Trainee Wellbeing & Support

Wellbeing Charter

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

Give them a voice.

• Give them the opportunity to share their views through the Student-Staff Committee.

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

Prioritise their wellbeing.

• Work with the disabilities team to support them in overcoming specific barriers to 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 they can seek support if needed.

• Assign them a personal tutor (Lead Mentor / Teacher-Learning-Tutor) to support them throughout their training.

Support them to organise their time.

• Give all dates in a timely way to enable them to organise their workload.

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

Support them to manage their 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 they inform us of anything that they might need support with over the course of the year. Please ensure that your trainee does this!