Please note that beginning teachers will not be in school on Friday 08 May

Job Interviews

Please may we remind everyone that beginning teachers are entitled to up to three days’ absence for interviews. These absences must be recorded in ePortfolio in the usual way. Time taken during the school day to visit schools is permitted, if kept to a minimum. This must be counted as non-contact time and made up by beginning teachers in their own time. School visits should not take place at the expense of teaching time and should be kept to an absolute minimum. Wherever possible, visits are encouraged to take place after the school day.

This Week

As this week is a three-day week for beginning teachers, their timetable need not consist of 70% teaching, as indicated on p36 of the handbook, if other restrictions in the timetable make this difficult. Please aim to get as close to 70% as possible and do remember that the weekly review will need to take place on Thursday because the beginning teachers are not in school on Friday.

Everything else remains the same this week, so please feel free to refer back to last week’s post for further details.

Reminders

• Planning: This should be completed on the university template, include the appropriate detail and an evaluation of the lesson. It is then saved to the beginning teacher’s OneDrive folder. Planning for the formal observation lesson should be uploaded to ePortfolio as usual.
• University Tutor Visits: These continue this week. Further guidance can be found here.
• Lesson Observations: We continue to encourage mentors to note the time of each teaching moment during the lesson observation on the form. See this update for more guidance.
• Formal lesson observations: must be video recorded on the university iPads. Further details can be found on this page.
• Delayed Debrief: A reminder for mentors that there is no longer a formal approach. Further details are in this post.
• PDAs: Beginning teachers should continue with these activities found in the PDJ.
• Please could all mentors and beginning teachers ensure they have read and are familiar with the contents of the Primary Entitlement Document. Thank you.
• Beginning teachers should begin completing the appropriate Professional Development Activities (PDAs) found in the Professional Development Journal (PDJ).