This National Apprenticeship Week, an early-career teacher who took the postgraduate route and their mentor explain why more schools should consider apprenticeships.
When it comes to improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged children, continuity matters.
For pupils who experience exclusion, instability, or long stretches of disrupted learning, trust is hard-won, routines are fragile, and progress can evaporate if familiar adults move on.
For teacher trainees in settings where pupils need support with their social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH), the most appropriate path to becoming a high-quality teacher is often one that allows them to stay with the pupils they have come to know.
That is why the postgraduate teacher apprenticeship (PGTA) is so valuable in specialist settings like ours at EdStart, where relationships underpin everything.
Being able to employ unqualified teachers, support staff and teaching assistants and help them qualify as teachers has been transformative for our schools.
Edstart supports pupils with complex social, emotional and mental health needs across a network of centres in the north west. Behaviour can be volatile, so positive learning outcomes depend on composed staff and consistent relational work.
Predictable adults, predictable lessons
Predictable adults support predictable lessons, which lowers anxiety and increases engagement, especially for pupils with neurodiversity or high levels of school-related stress.
Staff who know their pupils’ triggers, histories and ambitions can de-escalate issues quickly and keep learning on track.
The PGTA route helps our schools preserve that stability while growing a pipeline of qualified teachers who truly understand our context.
The model works because it blends evidence-informed study with immediate application. Apprentices learn a strategy one week and test it the next, with pupils they will continue to teach after they qualify. In an SEMH classroom, that tight theory-practice loop is crucial.
In specialist settings, techniques that read well on paper are different in practice, such as when a “minor disruption” is not a whisper across a desk, but a shouted interruption that risks tipping the room.
The immediacy and context-specific training that apprenticeships provide make it easier to adapt practice quickly and see what sticks with the pupils in front of you.
Mentoring makes it work
Mentoring is the hinge that makes this work. Our relationship as trainee and mentor has been collegiate rather than remedial.
Conversations are frank, rooted in shared knowledge of pupils and underpinned by trust which we started building before the apprenticeship year started.
In our experience, this kind of mentorship is not about telling trainees what to do. We are constantly working together.
Senior leaders understand this and protect the time and space trainees need to excel, including by ring-fencing study time and external training commitments.
The PGTA also helps schools with workforce planning. Many specialist settings struggle to recruit teachers who want to – and are ready to – succeed in such an environment. Training strong internal candidates who already show the right values and resilience reduces risk.
The route also provides trainees with a contrasting placement in a mainstream school. Exposure to other settings is vital, and apprentices benefit enormously from an alternative placement that stretches subject pedagogy and behaviour repertoires in a different context.
Returning to pupils who already trust them
Bringing back ideas on areas including curriculum sequencing and literacy routines strengthens practice in the home school. Crucially, the apprentice returns to pupils who already trust them, so new strategies are embedded faster and with fewer false starts.
There are, however, conditions for success. Schools must invest in skilled mentors with time to observe, coach and champion their trainees. Leaders need the confidence – and the clout – to ring-fence study time and protect release for weekly training.
And the apprenticeship should sit within a whole-school development culture, so that a trainee’s gains are shared across departments and cohorts rather than locked in one classroom.
Stability changes what pupils believe is possible. When a trainee trains, qualifies and remains, trust grows and learning follows.
Our message to school leaders considering the PGTA is simple. When training is rooted in continuity and backed by great mentoring, pupils feel it – and outcomes follow.
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