Search results for: Wales

Troops to Teachers (TtT) is a UK governmental scheme introduced in 2013 to facilitate ex-military service personnel to re-train as teachers. This narrative study explores the accounts of a sample of new TtT trainees at the onset of their training and considers their motivations for career changing, potential transferable attributes and skills, aspirational teacher identities and anticipated challenges. Emerging from these rich narratives is a strong, shared commitment to the trainees’ chosen new career. Self-discipline is identified as a professional quality to take into teaching from military service, whilst maintaining discipline in the classroom is more commonly regarded as an area of concern and challenge, rather than as a transferable skill set, challenging core governmental expectations of the Troops to Teachers initiative. However, the importance of and a desire and commitment to continue to ‘serve’, is widely held, reflecting a particular narrative refraction of the TtT trainees. This provides potential for further, perhaps longitudinal study, as the troops become teachers. The study affirms the potential for further investment in a wider recruitment strategy for career-change teachers more generally, as providing an experienced and motivated professional workforce for schools.

This study explores trainers’ approaches to organisation and delivery; levels of confidence in delivery; and wider views on the place of spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) in primary schools and in initial teacher training (ITT). The authors conclude that this survey has provided new evidence about the practices and challenges facing those who are training primary teachers in universities and in School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT). The authors argue that the promotion of strands relating to children’s personal, social and emotional well-being is essential if children are to fully flourish as human beings.

After a description of home education, Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) is applied to the situation of home educators who join a neighbourhood home education group, a community of practice. This paper is based on an empirical study undertaken in aid of understanding the learning process of parents as they strive to become ‘home educators’. Data comes from thirty-four in-depth interviews of home educating parents who had been home educating for more than three years.