“PGCEs don’t prepare trainees for the classroom.”

“We have to spend time undoing the damage that PGCEs cause.”

“PGCEs are worthless and outdated.”

Sound familiar?

I’ve heard all of these and so much more on Twitter and from colleagues. As a profession, we've turned on the process that trained us and introduced us to the job that we love so much. How has it become the done thing to bash your training course and those of the trainees you work with?

I do understand that there are a lot of issues with initial teacher education (ITE). But we are forgetting that a whole host of teachers are putting blood, sweat and tears into training the next generation of teachers. This endless criticism is completely dismissing both them and their work.

Plenty of training courses are fantastic. I graduated from my PGCE last summer and it was the proudest moment of my life. The training was hard and there were a lot of tears, but it was also full of brilliance and the days I spent in university were actually the most useful part. They didn’t teach me everything I would ever need to know to teach. They didn’t tell me exactly how to plan my lessons. They didn’t tell me exactly how to mark a piece of work or what to do when a child flips a table in my classroom.

But what they did teach me was how to think. They taught me how to be a critical, reflective practitioner, and it's been the foundation of everything I have done since.

I was consistently presented with different ways of approaching planning, assessment, marking, questioning, behaviour (and everything else). We would talk at length about the merits and drawbacks of different approaches. We were encouraged to go away and try out these approaches to decide what worked for us and in our contexts. Nothing was ever presented as fact or definitive, but we were given enough to make our own decisions and make up our own minds.

In written assignments, we were encouraged to be exploratory. To go and develop an opinion on something, to investigate what would happen if we taught something differently.

Fantastic teacher training

When I started one of my placements and I really wasn’t sure about it, I was told that it wasn’t about liking it, it was about learning from it. I grew to love the school but focusing on learning was absolutely right. Everything should be a learning opportunity. We had guest tutors/speakers from high schools, the primary education course, the drama PGCE and many other places; we were given access to so many different ideas and experts.

Those days at university were a chance to be with my peers, who had all been taught the same way. To reflect and digest and share our stories of trying things out. We would spend our lunch time discussing our week and what we had done. The whole day was always a chance to pause, discuss practice and current research, reflect and refine.

So yes, my PGCE prepared me to be a teacher. It taught me to think in a way that I will carry with me for the rest of my career. And yes, time in university can be valuable to trainee teachers.

Sometimes I wonder, did I get lucky? Maybe I just had a particularly good tutor? I did – phenomenal comes to mind – but I just don’t believe my experience was a one-off. I’ve spoken to lots of trainees from different courses and there are good PGCEs out there. A lot of university staff do an incredible job training teachers to be fantastic, reflective professionals.

By continually bashing ITE we are not only doing a disservice to those university professionals but also to the trainees whose PGCE courses mean so much to them. I know that this isn’t every ITE course and that there are issues that need addressing in some places.

But next time, before you give a sweeping statement to tell trainees that what they’re working hard for won’t matter, before you send a tweet to the world criticising ITE providers, please remember that there are good courses out there doing a good job and this needs acknowledging.

Perhaps, as a profession, we need to be part of the solution rather than just criticising from afar?

Vikki Hudson is a secondary teacher in Lancashire