Things I Wish Were On My PGCE But Weren't: Number 1 Official bodies and their roles

I remember a feeling of being bombarded with acronyms when I did my teacher training. The GTC, the TDA, the DfES… it was enough to figure out what each on stood for, never mind their role in education. Then there were all the subject specific bodies: for Music it was NAME, FMS and Youth Music. Then on top of that there were all the unions: NUT, NASUWT and ATL.

It would have been so useful if part of some lecture could have been dedicated to explaining all of this. I found out about the GTC and the fact that we had to pay fees to it from my mentor in my first placement. I found out about the DfES through an internal training course in my first post.

Learning about them was just left to pot luck and my own study. What if I had never found out that I had to register and pay a fee to the GTC? It wasn’t my mentor’s responsibility to tell us: she had just made an offhand comment about how she didn’t understand why we had to pay fees. That’s how I learned about it.

I know that things like the Standards Site have been disbanded now. I didn’t even know what it did in the first place. But you can’t just shove people into a situation and expect them to pick everything up as they go along like that: the knowledge people develop just won’t be consistent enough.


Read the full series