Initial Teacher Training ITT – Secondary (11-16) Programmes

The principles of curriculum design are key to ensuring pupils make good progress in their respective subjects; enhancing pupils’ skills and knowledge through a clearly sequenced, ambitious curriculum prepares them for further and higher education.  Our secondary (11-16) trainee teachers have learnt how to plan, sequence, deliver, and evaluate ambitious lessons in maths, languages, and computing, and participated in research into cognitive load theory, working memory, and interleaving.

Fig. 1 The Science of Learning - Strong Maths

Assisting reduction of the cognitive load means that pupils can more effectively utilise their long-term memory, and teachers use retrieval tasks to prompt pupils to recall key definitions and terminology, framing and contextualising new learning. Trainee teachers also do this – recalling prior knowledge, skills, and behaviours that ‘work well’ when teaching – and use interleaving in their teaching practice to promote fluency and facilitate deeper learning in their subject specialist area.  This is even more important in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic which resulted in some pupils missing opportunities to attend school, creating gaps in their knowledge.

If you feel that you have the skills and subject expertise to train to teach languages, maths, computing, or English in the secondary (11-16) sector, and are interested in finding out more about getting into teaching, please contact one of our subject expert team:

Jo Hornby – Lead for ITT – English specialist

Georgina King – Maths specialist

David Marrs – Languages specialist

Zaheen Dasu – Computing specialist

The University of Bolton has been voted 1st in the Northwest for Student Satisfaction for the fourth year running*. The university experience that we offer is welcoming, inclusive and always puts the needs of our students first. With small class sizes and expert lecturers from the field of teaching and education, we can offer you the opportunity to experience #UniAsItShouldBe.

You might also be interested in a recent case study into curriculum sequencing:

Curriculum sequencing for primary and secondary - Case study - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Jo Hornby – University of Bolton -  Lead for Initial Teacher Training

*Complete University Guide 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019