School Direct is a way for graduates to train to become teachers while working in schools. Christ the King leads a group of schools in the Reading area. We work with the University of Reading and find School Direct a very successful way of training teachers and of meeting our own recruitment needs. 3 of our current teachers joined us as School Direct trainees (or on the Graduate Teacher Programme which was the precursor to School Direct).
From October, applications are invited through UCAS, for places to be taken up the following September. The first round of interviews is usually held before Christmas; subsequent rounds may be held in January and February. Further details of this process are on the "How to Apply" page.
Salaried School Direct trainees are employed for the year of their training as members of staff of the school. They are paid on the unqualified teachers' pay scale (currently £16,140 per annum). Non-salaried trainees pay for their tuition as they would if they were completing a PGCE at a University, but they choose to spend the bulk of their time while training in a school setting.
In the Autumn term trainees will normally spend each Friday at Reading University and the rest of their time in school. They will usually be attached to a particular class and will be given a variety of tasks. As the term progresses trainees will be given opportunities to teach groups and sometimes whole classes.
In the Spring term the trainees move to a different year group, and also have experience for 5 or 6 weeks of working in one of the other schools in our group. The amount of teaching increases until, by Easter, we would expect the trainees to be teaching 60% of the week. There are some days at the University in this term, but not as many as in the Autumn.
By the end of the Summer term trainees will be teaching 80%. During this term we will help them to find jobs, if we don't ourselves have a position to offer. The expectation is that School Direct trainees will go on to full time teaching jobs, and while this is not an absolute guarantee we will do our best to make sure it happens and our experience is that all our trainees who have successfully completed the course have gone on to teaching posts.