Unique partnership to train teachers for Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes College and Two Mile Ash Initial Teacher Training Partnership are collaborating in order to train more teachers and fill gaps in city classrooms. Nationally, government targets for teacher training have been missed for the past seven years with many schools struggling to recruit staff.

The collaboration will enable individuals who want to become teachers to take a part-time Access to Higher Education course at the College to prepare them to study for a BA Hons in Primary Education with QTS at Two Mile Ash Initial Teacher Training Partnership.

Kieran Grimes is the Adult Learning Lead at the College and he says,

“We’ve worked with Two Mile Ash on an informal basis for a couple of years and the partnership has been incredibly effective so we thought it made sense to create a formal pathway. It will mean people taking an access course with us will be able to see their future mapped out in front of them right from the start.”

The course will be part time so it can be accessible for people who are in work. The aim is to enable would-be teachers to do all their training in the city and be ready to work in schools at the end of it.

“This is in part another side-effect of the pandemic,” Kieran says, “in that people have become much more confident online than they were and that’s allowed us to take a blended approach to the course. All the Access course lessons will be online and recorded so they can go back to them if there’s anything they didn’t understand first time around. Access course Students will need to come to a face-to-face session once a month but the plan is to hold those on Saturdays, again to accommodate people who’re in work.”

It’s expected that the courses will be popular with a variety of people including those already working in schools like classrooms assistants, returning parents and people who’ve always wanted to teach but never thought they had the right qualifications to train.

“Applicants will have to be really motivated,” Kieran says, “because it’s a lot of work, but then so it should be if we want to produce the best teachers we can for the city’s children. We’ll start them off with a short distance learning course which will all be online, just to make sure they can cope.”

Sarah Hand is the Head of Initial Teacher Training at The Two Mile Ash Partnership and she says, “We are delighted to formalise what has already been an incredibly effective relationship with Milton Keynes College. We are excited to broaden the range of opportunities we offer our potential trainees in order to continue to attract a wide range of individuals who will, with our support, become some of the very best newly qualified teachers in the area. We are an Outstanding and established training provider and are proud of our relationships with partners that enable us to provide responsive opportunities for all our students.”