PGCE QTS Teacher Training Bursary Questions

I hear PGCE&QTS courses are the most difficult and intense courses on the planet as its like full time work and full time education combined at the same time with 7 out of 10 pgce students dropping out or failing within the 1st year from statistics. Hence the govt. desperation for teachers due to teacher shortages. How the bursary system works and how is it fair?:























I ask these questions because £6000-£26000 bursary is a huge amount assuming huge responsibility/liability on the student and I don't believe in free lunches as there is always a catch and after hearing pgce&qts course are the most difficult on the planet there bound to be catches unless someone can correct me wrong and it's all stress free.

From my knowledge,
Bursary's are paid in monthly instalments, divided over 10 months. If student stops attending, bursary payments will stop immediately. Student does not have to give back what they received.
If they fail the PGCE year, they do have to do it again and pay the £9250 unless provider allows the year to be free, but bursary is not given again and you don't have to give the bursary back.

I'm afraid I can't answer your first question, but I don't think it would ever matter to you as a student.

2) Most PGCE courses offer chances to resubmit assignments. AFIAK, no assignment would ever be a block to progression as this would be counter-intuitive for students. If you're really struggling with the PGCE element, most unis will allow you to separate this from the QTS, and just get QTS. In this case, as long as you're still working towards QTS, you'd still get the bursary.

3) Attendance is monitored because students need to do a certain number of days of training to get QTS and the uni needs to be able to prove this. "Training" includes uni based sessions as well as the school based ones. A certain amount of slack is build into the system to allow for student illness and school closures (e.g. due to snow). If you're unable to attend for some reason, you still get the bursary paid initially, but if you end up having to take a long term "leave of absence" with the aim of resuming next year, obviously your bursary payments stop. If your attendance ends up too low, you may have to do extra days in school at the end of the year to get QTS- but you'd be warned well in advance of this by your tutor.

4) Placements aren't pass/fail assessed in the way you're imagining. If you're struggling, most unis have a system where you'd be designated "cause for concern" or "special measures". This means that you're given an action plan to help bring you up to scratch, but you can transfer between placements whilst on an action plan. If it looks like you're not improving then you may eventually be "encouraged" to leave. You may also have to spend extra time in school, if you're not quite up to scratch at the end of your final placement. It's actually very, very hard for the uni to ask you to leave part way through the year, though and none of this would affect your bursary payments. If a school withdraws a placement, the uni would try to find you another suitable placement- but if for some reason they're unable to place you, you might have to take a suspension, but this is really rare and only really done with the student's agreement that they want to leave the course- if you wanted to stay, the uni would find a way to help you unless you'd done something criminal or which meant you weren't suitable to teach anymore.

5) Assignments are done throughout the year- passing or failing them has no bearing on you being allowed to continue your ITT course- most assignments are just for the PGCE component- you can fail this and still get QTS. If you failed something related to QTS, you'd be given help and support to resubmit. Regular attendance is expected- like I say, you have to do a minimum number of days to get QTS. If you weren't turning up, your uni tutor would obviously discuss this with you and talk to you about whether the course was right for you- you definitely wouldn't be able to get away with turning up once in a month without a serious medical reason- in this scenario, it's very likely the uni would push you into taking a leave of absence and picking the course back up next year (if you wanted to). At this point, payments would stop.

6) I don't really see how a dispute about attendance could arise- if you were absent enough for it to be a problem, it would soon be obvious. In school especially, it's very obvious if you're there or if you're not. There's very few large lectures where you could get away with e.g. someone else signing you in, even most uni days are done in small group seminars/workshops.

7) I'm not sure how re submissions work at other unis, but at mine, you're given a chance to resubmit anything outstanding over the summer- there's no fee for this. Your tutor works with you to get your QTS evidence ready, so it's only really the PGCE element you could fail. If you needed to resit a module of this, e.g. via distance learning in the following September, I think this would be possible (although not essential for teaching) but you'd probably have to pay on a per module basis.

The only situation where you have to pay money back is if you leave part way through a month, so if you leave say on the 15th and you were paid on the first, you have to pay back half that month's bursary- but unis will allow you a sensible timescale to do this.

I hope this helps answer your questions. The PGCE year is of course pretty stressful but tbh getting paid was one of the easier bits! It's also not like most undergrad courses, where failing one assignment can be a big deal- the tutors really want you to pass and there are loads of chances to do so.

Ok just to clarify the university will send the ITT student to 2 school placements totalling 120 days minimum and divide that by 2 = 60 days per school or approx 2 months per school correct? To get QTS I gotta do 120 days minimum to get the full bursary whether I fail or don't do any PGCE correct?

Note the academic year starts in september and end in July spanning over 10 months and 120 days school is approx 4 months in schools. So that leaves 6 months for PGCE element correct? So if a ITT student attendance is not good for Uni days PGCE and fails PGCE but manages to do the minimum 120 days for QTS then is the student eligible for the full bursary?

When you say Training includes Uni based Sessions in your answer point number 3 do you mean the 120 days includes this? I thought Uni based sessions are the PGCE element of the course separate from the QTS schools 120 days work experience correct?

Also can I use my prior 4 weeks of school experience prior to ITT application to compensate any missed days from the 120 days and still get QTS? Also am I obligated to do more than 120 days if the provider asks me to? Finally when you to do extra days at the end of the year to make up missed days then shall I assume these days are in the 6 weeks summer holidays where there are no students in school? If there's no students in school then how do you work in that environment or shall I assume work will be easier because there's no students?

How does one fail the QTS part and get a chance to resubmit it? I thought QTS is the physical work experience part where the PGCE is the written theory part right?

You mean if I fail the PGCE year then I am obligated to do it again whether its at a cost or free?

So, first of all, obviously schools don't open on weekends, so 120 days is 24 weeks, or closer to 5 months- given that schools obviously have holidays, this will take more than 5 months of the year to complete. Unis then schedule more than 120 days, to take into account the fact that people get ill, schools have slightly different term dates, and people may have other issues that occasionally prevent them from being in school (e.g. caring responsibilities, school shuts for snow or some other reason). I think my uni scheduled something like 3 extra weeks- and unless you had a good reason, you're expected to be in schools on these days.

Any extra days were added on after the end of our final placement, which finished in June, so there are still students in school. Any INSET days you attend count as school training- but AFAIK, your school experience days can't be used to make up the time in school.

So, it ends up being more like 5-6 months in school, 3 months in uni + school holidays.

Your placement isn't usually split evenly between the two schools, and usually it won't all run back to back. For example, at my uni, we did a bit of time in uni to start with, then a short placement, then 2 weeks back in uni before Christmas, then all of the spring term in school, with a few uni "recall days", then two weeks after easter in uni, another short school placement, and then a few weeks after that back in uni.

You can get away with missing slightly more of the uni days, but if your attendance to uni sessions was actually poor, I imagine you'd be asked to justify this, and might be asked to leave/take a leave of absence if it was really bad. The uni also won't just let you drop out of the PGCE element without a good reason in most cases- you'd generally be expected to at least start out attempting it, and if you didn't submit/resubmit at all, then questions would be asked.

Getting QTS isn't just a case of turning up at school, either. To get QTS, you have to collect evidence of what you've done in school in a "teaching folder"- there's a lot of admin involved in this. You also have to do some level 6 assignments to get QTS- these are pass/fail rather than graded, but it is possible to fail them! At the end of every placement, I had a session with my tutor to go through my QTS evidence so far, as well and he told me what to add/get during next placement. At the end of the year, this is submitted to an external exam board- who can say the evidence isn't sufficient and you'd have to redo it or possible get extra evidence.

It's worth noting that passing your placements requires more than just turning up as well- if your school doesn't think you're up to scratch, they can put you on "cause for concern/special measures" and school/you/uni agree an action/improvement plan to help you get better.

From this post, and sorry if this is unfair, but it sounds a bit like you're trying to game the system to get the bursary? If so, no judgement, but I know a few people who tried to do this, and it's worth noting that none of them made it to the end of the course. If this is what you're thinking of trying to do, then I'm happy to discuss this with you on the thread/via PM, but it's honestly not an easy option!

Full judgement from me. Having attempted to train a student that was playing the game for the bursary. It’s an incredible waste of everyone’s time and so damaging to the students. We had ours removed from our school as it was horrendous.

Even more full judgement;

Yes there is a catch - you have to be in it 100% and sign a declaration. Even those who are 100% committed struggle. Attendance is of course monitored very strictly. What do you think happens when you have supposed to have planned a lesson and you don't turn up?

Please don't do the course just for the bursary. You will get found out very quickly. Your fellow students, your lecturers, your colleagues are not stupid. You will possibly even get caught out at the interview (best case scenario for all involved). If not, they will find out soon after, remove you from the course, and you will probably break even because of the tuition fees! Good luck!

if you are foolish enough to go through with this, please document your experience. I can't wait to hear about your first 10 hour day. There are better ways to make money than this.

Ok coming back to this thread and these questions may be asked a 1000 times already so apologies in advance:

- Does the govt give the lump sum bursary to the uni provider before the 1st term starts? If so then if student withdraws early from course or uni provider asks student to leave early from course then how does the govt audit the bursary where the uni does not misuse it for personal gains?

- Uni provider said if student fails placement 1 then student cant progress onto placement 2 next year. If that is the case then the student won't be getting any bursary payments at all in 2020 correct and can only do the PGCE part of the course right and just doing the pgce part won't allow the student to continue getting the monthly bursary?

- If student starts placement 1 late in November instead of the usual October then how will that affect the 10 monthly bursary payments from Oct to Jul?

Thanks,

Placement 1 is usually october till christmas. So this 'action plan' must be planned up in good time before christmas obviously right?

Ok if placements falls last minute like you said or if uni fails to secure a school placement for student then can student still get monthly bursary as it's not the students fault? Let's say for example student monthly mortgage/rent and bills are due in early February but uni fails to find placement 2 for student then does that mean student won't be getting bursary payments and risk being in debt with the bills and the bank even though its not the student fault but the uni fault instead? How a matter like this can be settled legally where student suffered losses?

If placement 1 is started 1 month late in November instead of usual October due to whatever reason such as late enrol conditions or school dropping out last min and finding school gain then how will these affect the 10 monthly bursary payments from Oct to July when there is no attendance to placement 1 yet due to probs like this?

1) This will depend a lot on your uni's policies, but the action plan could be put in place at any time. It could carry over between placements. You shouldn't be failed close to Christmas with no prior warning though.

2) You would still get the bursary in this situation- but you'd usually only be without a placement for a few days- being stranded without a placement for more than a week is very unusual.

3) As I said previously, you'd start at uni in October. If you were attending uni regularly, doing assignments etc then you would start getting bursary payments. If you were slightly late starting placement one, but you had been attending uni, you should be able to get bursary payments, but like I say, this would usually be a very short term situation.

If you enrolled late, your first payment might be late- you'd need to discuss this with your uni to find out exactly when you'd be paid.

I honestly wouldn't worry about random hypothetical scenarios. If there's a real life problem you need help with, and you're not prepared to share details on TSR, I'd suggest contact your SU or uni's financial support office.

Ok the situation is that the uni said that my placement 1 is delayed till 4th of november and its their fault however they said I wont get monthly bursary because i'm not in school doing QTS. They said I can continue attending uni once a week to continue doing the PGCE part of the course but wont be getting bursary as I am not in school. Do I still have the right to claim bursary if I am just doing the pgce only?

Generally speaking does the university have the right to hold onto a student's bursary payments till I am in school? I suppose to get my 1st monthly bursary payment at the end of this month but won't be due to i'm not in placement 1 yet.

The university also said if placement 1 is failed then a student cant move onto placement 2 meaning if placement 2 cant be done then that means no bursary right? Is this statement true

I remember there's a post earlier in this thread saying as long I work towards my QTS I will get bursary however all I can do now is PGCE and I still paying over 9 grand in tution fees but not getting no bursary? I didn't took out a maintenance loan cause I thought the bursary will cover my expenses but now the uni is playing around with my bursary and I am going to struggle with bills and rent.

When you say very rare in your response then how are these rare events settled at the end?

Finally starting placement 1 late in nov will mean my bursary payments will start from nov and finish in august when school finishes in july? Please help its confusing.

Does the university have total power and can can dictate a student bursary even though the money is not theirs and instead belongs to the govt?

If there is a dispute to bursary then how does a student deal with this?