PGCE - Current Students Thread

Oh absolutely, mines bad but i can just about push through it, but you seem to be struggling with yours a bit more

How is your workload? I have to do 10 lessons a week, and each should take anything up to 4 hours to plan (so i'm told), so I have to find 40 hours a week from somewhere just for the planning - madness! People work that much in one week.

I find I get too tired later at night, so can't do planning into the late night when you have to get up at 6:15 everyday - I'm just knackered. This makes it all impossible for me - on top of not wanting the rubbish attached to the job now

How is your workload? I have to do 10 lessons a week, and each should take anything up to 4 hours to plan (so i'm told), so I have to find 40 hours a week from somewhere just for the planning - madness! People work that much in one week.

I find I get too tired later at night, so can't do planning into the late night when you have to get up at 6:15 everyday - I'm just knackered. This makes it all impossible for me - on top of not wanting the rubbish attached to the job now

SHOULD take up to 4 hours to plan? Who is telling you that??


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Who says this? Can you tell the university as this is a ridiculous expectation, they could liaise with the school and help sort it out. You have, what, 3-4 months left...keep going!

See above post. What would you say is a correct expectation then? 1 hour? 2 hours? It certainly takes me at least two hours to sort out what I will do and write everything up. But becuase my planning is apparently not thorough enough, I am told I need to do more in depth planning, so in that case it will be pushing 3 or 4 hours.


There are not enough hours in the day to do this so it has become impossible to finish this dreadful course.

I'm on my PGCE now, and both Uni and my mentors have told me that lessons should take no longer to plan than they do to teach. So 1 hour lesson = 1 hour planning. You can't meticulously plan for everything because the nature of teaching is that it changes, so there is inevitably a load of wasted planning when a child asks you a relevant question that gets everyone slightly off topic (e.g. misconception type things) for 10 mins. So you just do an outline plan, your objectives and how you're gonna get the kids to meet them. You need to give broad timings, in 5 min blocks because everything changes, kids might get it faster than you planned, or they might take longer, so you need broad timings so you can adjust them if you need to.

Obviously, if you're being observed you might take longer and do more detailed plans, but for most lessons, you really shouldn't need 4 hours. Hopefully that's a bit helpful?

It is impossible to do it within 1 hour. I agree with what you are saying about teaching changing in the moment - 100%

This is part of the problem with education - nobody agrees on anything, teachers have too much to do, and we consequently are behind so many countries in terms with our education system.

Can I ask what subject you teach? Also, how much longer do you have on your placement? I know it may seem tough, but it really is worth completing it if you can. Another possible option might be to do it flexibly? I know my uni has let a fair few people who have struggled do this, it'll take them longer but let them keep a lot more of their sanity. I don't know if this is possible for your course though. Sorry I can't be more help really.

See above post. What would you say is a correct expectation then? 1 hour? 2 hours? It certainly takes me at least two hours to sort out what I will do and write everything up. But becuase my planning is apparently not thorough enough, I am told I need to do more in depth planning, so in that case it will be pushing 3 or 4 hours.


There are not enough hours in the day to do this so it has become impossible to finish this dreadful course.

I see teaching similar to learning to drive, everything is hard at first and you have to really think about every little thing. The more you do it, the more fluid it becomes, this is the same as planning lessons.

Ask exactly what the school wants, how can it be more thorough? What else do you need to add? Go back to basics. Tell your school based mentor, you're having trouble and this is what you want to do to address it. There is no point piling more work on until this is sorted. Have some lessons a week that don't need lots of planning, some that are just going to be OK and focus on a few that you put more effort in to.

It IS hard and on the PGCE you will spend most of your time either doing work or at least thinking about it, I've found actual teaching isn't like this, you don't have constant scrutiny (I found this extremely difficult!) and from my experience there is much more freedom, although admittedly this isn't always the case.

I really would encourage you to carry on, set some targets for planning, find out what they want and how you can do this. Work hard and don't take criticism to heart, they only want you to improve. Good luck!

If only it was easy to just say: "right, I will carry on"! I physically can't/won't do the stupid hours needed. I don't want to be snowed under with work all evening right up until midnight.

I don't enjoy the teaching, becuase I know everything is being watched by that teacher at the back, and you think to yourself during lessons what will be critisised rather than focussing on what is happening next. I also don't enjoy it becuase I am not allowed to use powerpoint, mathswatch, textbooks, etc. which makes the job more difficult, planning and prep becomes a real chore and feedback where you are given a large list of faults with barely any positives takes its toll, and takes up valuable time.

This is why so many of us have this sense of it all being impossible, and why there is a massive shortage of maths teachers nationally. so many leaving not only in the pgce year, but also in the first 5 years is no suprise to me at all when your life is made a misery.

Sounds like your school isn't supporting your needs, have you thought about deferring this placement and doing it somewhere else? (preferably somewhere you CAN use powerpoint and text books!) You could carry on with the academic side of it all it would just be the final placement. A few students on my PGCE took this route and did their final placement in Sept. See if this is an option for you. I would definitely think of this before dropping your QTS.

I completely empathise with your situation as I felt the same only this time last year. I also had a difficult placement with what felt like constant scrutiny and a definite lack of support. I've been there! I found it hard to be confident and teach how I wanted to when being watched. I just kept it in my mind that they wanted me to improve and usually think of OFSTED standards rather than the QTS standards! You aren't expected to know it all. Have you spoken to your course tutors for advice?

Don't lose your faith in yourself as a teacher or the whole education system because of a difficult placement/school. If you manage to get through this it will be SUCH an achievement and you will be so proud of yourself, your NQT year will be a walk in the park!

Something that may be a positive or negative depending on how you take it. The second placement is where it's supposed to up the anti. First placement was an introduction to teaching and second placement is suppose t prepare you for the real world of teaching (even though it's still not full timetable). My professional mentor told us something at the start of our second placement that I thought was a bit daft at the time, I thought this cause I didn't think that anyone could possibly still be on the course that didn't want to teach, however she said "if your not 100% sure this is what you want to do get out, it's not worth it. We were all told before our course how hard this would be, and if you really don't want to teach your just torturing yourself needlessly, i get that most people start with the best of intentions, but it's a terrible thing to do to both yourself and the kids if you don't want to be there.

It is for this reason that I am looking to defer my second placement until Sep/Next Feb, so I can be somewhere I can do this,like I did on my first placement. It also will hopefully get me somewhere closer to my house (1 hour travelling each way loses valuable planning time) and gives me a break to reassess what I want to do after the course, and to prepare resources etc so I am better prepared when I restart.

Hopefully this will save my derailed ambition to be a teacher and I can go on to do a great job somewhere!

That sounds like a really good idea. I'm glad you've figured something out.