Fairfield High School
We have been a partnership school with the Robert Owen Group for many years. We began taking trainees for several reasons but the two main ones are to help provide trainees with a good and rewarding year of training, and secondly to help our teachers with their professional development.
We chose the Robert Owen Group because we liked,
- The variety of subjects they offered at 11-16 level
- The fact that it is a local organisation
- The idea of a mainly school-based method of training
- The idea that there are people available nearby when problems need solving
- The Robert Owen Group provides training for tutors if needed
The standard of the trainees we have encountered over the years has been exceptionally high. In fact, since we started we have employed no fewer than eight trainees that have been trained by the Robert Owen Group. I know also of many schools in our local area that have employed trainees from the Robert Owen Group. It has become one of the first organisations we go to when we look for candidates for posts that are vacant at our school.
For some schools and trainees, the fact that the Robert Owen Group is now a reasonably large organisation, might be a negative point when deciding which training provider to use. We have found the opposite. The schools used are split into clusters and so the poeple and other schools you deal with are within easy reach when and if you need to share problems and ideas. Regular organised times to meet other tutors or training managers, has meant that we can soon become aware of the way to go about providing continuity and progression throughout the process of training. Communication is very important between all the different people involved in the training and we have found that in recent years this is a particular strength of the Robert Owen Group.
Finally we have been very pleased with the Robert Owen Group and its ways of providing solid procedures for the training of prospective teachers. This together with its validation by Birmingham City University gives us the programme we consider to be best for trainees at our school.
Keith Willard,
Fairfield High School