The Mid Essex ITT Curriculum
What are the aims of the Mid Essex curriculum?
The overarching intent of the Mid Essex curriculum is to produce committed, optimistic, research-engaged and effective secondary teachers. Our curriculum map and assessment indicators show how the content has been judiciously chosen to reflect these core values.
The Mid Essex Curriculum, the Core Content Framework (CCF) and the Teachers’ Standards
Our curriculum fully incorporates the five core areas of the CCF - behaviour management, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and professional behaviours - which mirror the eight Teachers’ Standards. We have also introduced our own components to the curriculum, going beyond the CCF.
Trainees are assessed against our Assessment Indicators during the course and then assessed against the Teachers’ Standards at the end of the course.
What informs the content of the Mid Essex curriculum?
Much of the curriculum has been designed with the intention that knowledge and experience are blended and developed through classroom practice. Trainees are taught the essential declarative knowledge (‘learnt that...’ statements) they need to know at our core training.
In addition, trainees are set both School-Based and Stage-Based tasks. Each subject discipline has its own identity, which is informed through content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
How is the curriculum sequenced?
Our curriculum has been judiciously chosen and sequenced so that it flows coherently and is divided into distinct stages. Our three compulsory days of induction training in July provide trainees with a firm grounding in the professionalism component of the CCF, as well as providing them with all statutory training to ensure that they are ready to start in their placement schools.
In the early stages of training - ‘Secure Foundations’ - our curriculum is front loaded with high expectations and behaviour, moving on to pedagogy and later on to curriculum and assessment. Our spiralised curriculum ensures these are revisited during the ‘Revisit and Practise’ stage, when trainees are at their B placement, and again in the final term.
As trainees develop their general and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge and combine this with the opportunity to apply this knowledge in school, more challenging content and a broader range of topics are introduced.
This is combined with an increasing teaching load so that trainees have more opportunities to apply what they have learnt in core training in the classroom. In addition, each subject discipline has its own identity which is informed through both content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
Each subject has its own subject handbook to reflect this and its own curriculum determined by the Lead Subject Tutor.
In addition, trainees are set both School-Based and Stage-Based tasks relating to applying the ‘Learn How’ to statements from the Core Content Framework in their teaching. Furthermore. Each subject discipline has its own curriculum intent and identity and is lead by a Lead Subject Tutor who provides weekly Subject Expert Training deconstructing the mornings core training through a subject lens.
Our curriculum has been judiciously chosen and sequenced so that it flows coherently and is divided into distinct stages. Our two compulsory days of induction training in July provide trainees with a firm grounding in the professionalism component of the CCF, as well as providing them with all statutory training to ensure that they are ready to start in their placement schools from September.