The Department of Education has been rated “outstanding” once again for our initial teacher education following a visit from the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED).
The last visit took place in 2018 when inspectors rated the Department’s training to be of the highest possible standard. In the latest visit, which took place just before Easter, OFSTED said: “The University of Oxford successfully realises its ambition to ensure that trainees are as well prepared as they can be to become excellent teachers. The innovative course design has an exceptionally strong subject focus. Trainees acquire highly developed subject specific knowledge and pedagogical understanding to teach complex concepts in an accessible manner to pupils, including those who are disadvantaged.”
The report highlighted the quality of education and training, leadership and management and overall effectiveness of the course to be outstanding in all areas.
Department Director, Victoria Murphy, said: “We’re incredibly proud of our research-based teacher education in Oxford and the latest findings from OFSTED show that we are maintaining the highest standards possible. I’d like to thank my colleagues who deliver such world class education.”
The Department offers the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) to students who want to teach English, mathematics, science, modern languages, geography, history or religious education in secondary schools. Currently there are 133 students on the course.
PGCE Course Director, Katharine Burn said: “We’re delighted that the inspectors recognised the quality in depth of our partnership with local schools, achieved by working in close collaboration with one another. The Department uses an internship model, which emphasises the need for a constant interplay between the research-based understandings of practice that the University can offer and the rich, contextualised knowledge of expert teachers.
“By jointly planning and refining the course each year, we ensure a supportive and coherent programme, with our students fully part of their schools from the very first week. We’re incredible proud of the course and of our students.”
Director of Graduate Studies, Velda Elliott said: “The way we run teacher education in the Department is, we think, exceptionally strong. We work with new teachers as they take their first steps into the classroom through to being fully fledged professionals, using the partnership model with schools which is highly effective.”
Our Department has a long history in initial teacher education, dating back to 1892.
The full Ofsted report is available now.
More information can be found out about our teacher education on our PGCE pages.
Sarah has a background in Biodiversity and Natural Resources Management and Rural Community Development.
She has been working for the past 8 years in the sustainable development sector. Aware of the importance of educating students about biodiversity, natural resources, and environmental issues to promote the sustainability of the environment and our societies, Sarah is currently conducting her DPhil in environmental education. She will be assessing the integration of environmental education in the Lebanese curriculum, assessing the status of students’ environmental awareness, and identifying ways to enhance environmental education via the Threshold Concepts framework and via partnerships between the developmental and educational sectors.
Supervisors
Jenny Wynn and Steve Puttick
Publications
- Karam, S., Kreidy, C., Bechara, N., Bou Harb, C., Abu Nasr, Y., and Hamadeh, S. (2022) Promoting Innovative Alternatives – The Urban Oasis Case Study, The Blessed Tree Magazine November 2022
- Abi Said M., Bou Shroush J., Karam S., Shaib H. 2022. Intestinal parasites of Apodemus mystacinus along altitudinal stratification of Ibrahim River – Mount Lebanon. Annals of Parasitology, 68(2): 227-239.
- Karam, S., Martiniello, G., Chalak, A., Abi-Said, M., & Hamadeh, S. K. (2021). Biosphere Reserves in Lebanon: Rifts between Conservation Discourse and Practice. Sustainability, 13(22), 12411.
- Tawk, S. T., Chedid, M., Chalak, A., Karam, S., & Hamadeh, S. K. (2019). Challenges and Sustainability of Wheat Production in a Levantine Breadbasket. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 8(4), 1-17.
- Chedid, M., Tawk, S. T., Chalak, A., Karam, S., & Hamadeh, S. K. (2018). The Lebanese Kishk: A Traditional Dairy Product in a Changing Local Food System. Journal of Food Research, 7: 16.
- Abi-Said, M.R. and S. Karam. 2017. Morphological, cranial study and habitat preference of Mus macedonicus (Petrov & Ruzic, 1983) (Mammalia: Rodentia) in Lebanon. Jordan Journal of Biological Sciences 10(4): 235-237.
- Karam, S. & Issa, D. (2015). Évaluation de la biodiversité sur deux sections du LMT. The Magazine of the Lebanon Mountain Trail Association, 4.
Motema studied Neuroscience as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in the USA and it is one of its courses, found interest in Education.
Motema then worked for various non-profit organisations in Lesotho and South Africa focusing on helping high school students from low SES backgrounds access opportunities to study in HE. In her Masters’ project Motema analysed Lesotho’s 2009 Curriculum and Assessment Policy. This analysis’ findings brought Motema to her current research interests which include gendered STEM education and decolonisation of education policies and curricula in Lesotho. For her DPhil project, Motema is interested in finding out the lived experiences of female Science teachers in Lesotho Secondary Schools especially focusing on the major changes in the Secondary school education system in Lesotho that have happened in the past five years as unique meeting points.
Supervisors
Ann Childs and Judith Hillier
Robert (Rob) Klassen joined the University of Oxford as Professor of Education in November 2023.
Rob was previously at the University of York, where he worked from 2012 as Professor and Chair of the Psychology in Education Research Centre. Before coming to the UK, Rob was Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Alberta (2004-2012). Before entering academia he worked as an educational psychologist and high school teacher in his hometown of Vancouver.
Rob’s primary research interests are in building an understanding of teacher motivation and development across the career span and across countries. His current work aims to develop and test theory-informed technological interventions related to teacher and school leader recruitment, selection, and development.
Rob has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters, and books. Recent projects have been funded by the ESRC, the ERC, GIZ, and the World Bank, with recent projects in the UK, Australia, Africa (Morocco, Kenya, South Africa), and Europe. He has served as advisor to education ministries in England, Africa, Australia, Europe, and South America. In 2023 he founded the spinout company, TSP, in collaboration with the University of York. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the American Psychological Association, and has served on editorial boards for the British Journal of Educational Psychology, the Journal of Educational Psychology, and the Oxford Review of Education.
Representative research includes:
On teacher recruitment: Klassen, R. M., Rushby, J. V., & Wang, H. (2023). Can an online scenario-based learning activity influence preservice teachers’ self-efficacy, person-vocation fit, and career intentions? Computers and Education, 207, 104935.
On teacher retention: Wang, H., & Klassen, R. M. (2023). Longitudinal relations between teachers’ utility values and quitting intentions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 127, 104109.
On teacher selection: Klassen, R. M., & Kim, L. E. (2021). Teacher selection: Evidence-based practices. Springer, ISBN 978-3-030-76186-8.
Laura is currently working on the FoSTER project which seeks to understand the range of ways that schools support teachers to engage with and in research across the UK and Ireland.
This involves conducting a survey of teachers’ engagement with/in research, followed by detailed case studies of schools who are successfully supporting teachers to engage with/in research. Laura is also a practising primary school teacher and is studying for an EdD Education at the University of Birmingham. Her research uses a constructivist grounded theory methodology to explore children’s lived experience of the maths mastery policy, through the lens of social justice.
The British Educational Research Association (BERA) has named the University of Oxford’s Teacher Education and Professional Learning group as this year’s joint winner of its prestigious Public Engagement and Impact Award. The team receiving the award are John Furlong, Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger and Trevor Mutton.
The award is in recognition of the way that research undertaken by the group over many years has supported a radical re-conceptualisation of initial teacher education (ITE) across the whole of Wales. These reforms have shaped the experiences of all trainee teachers in Wales, (approximately 2,700 per year) and have had a major impact on hundreds of participating schools and their partner universities. In both schools and HEIs there is now a significantly greater emphasis on increasing capacity to undertake and use research.
The Director of the Welsh Government’s Education Directorate notes that the reforms have resulted ‘in a strengthened ITE provision, and a deeper collaborative architecture across our school and university systems.’
Underpinning research
Oxford’s rich history of research on the professional education and training of teachers dates back to the 1980s.
Successive studies have addressed questions such as:
- What skills and knowledge might student teachers only learn through direct experience in schools?
- What is Higher Education best placed to contribute to teacher learning?
- What sort of partnership between schools and HEIs is needed to provide this training?
Key research leading to the changes in Wales included Hagger and McIntyre’s (2006) Learning Teaching from Teachers and Furlong’s (2013) Education: An anatomy of the discipline, which drew together much of the earlier work undertaken by the team. This led directly to the study commissioned by BERA and the RSA (2013), Research and Teacher Education, chaired by Furlong, which included an important, widely-cited paper by Burn and Mutton (2015) on the development of ‘research informed clinical practice’ in teacher education. Their emphasis on tightly-integrated forms of university-school collaboration as essential to the successful implementation of research-informed practice became a key element in the Welsh reforms.
Details of impact
In 2014 Furlong was appointed as an independent adviser on ITE to the Welsh Government. Drawing explicitly on Oxford research, Furlong’s subsequent report (2015) recommended the complete reform of ITE with the establishment of a new accreditation system, new partnerships between HEIs and schools, a changed approach to ITE inspection by Estyn (the education and training inspectorate) and a significant strengthening of, and investment in, educational research to underpin ITE provision. These recommendations were adopted in full by the Welsh Government.
Accreditation
Drawing directly on the Oxford research, Furlong led the development of a new accreditation process. New Criteria insisted that all ITE ‘should be based on learning that is both rigorously practical and intellectually challenging at the same time’. New legislation made the criteria mandatory and established a Teacher Education Accreditation Board (TEAB). Furlong was appointed the first chair of the TEAB and Hagger a member. Hagger became Chair in 2019.
The new Criteria required Lead Schools to accept ITE as a core responsibility and universities to assume a clearer role in making available knowledge that is not always accessible in schools: knowledge from research, from theory and from good practice internationally.
Estyn
In 2020, Estyn aligned its inspection frameworks to the new Criteria, as the Chief Inspector of Education and Training in Wales notes ‘often using the language of the Criteria and its vision, to support key concepts’.
Research Capacity
In universities, all ITE teaching staff must now have qualifications at a higher level than the courses on which they are teaching, and must be ‘research active’, taking leading roles in assimilating, conducting, publishing and supervising research. As one head-teacher makes clear, schools too are developing greater research literacy: ‘Teachers have also needed to develop a very conscious understanding of research practices, pedagogical methodologies and subject depth’ which were ‘new territories for many schools in terms of our theoretical understanding’.
Read the announcement of the award on the British Educational Research Association’s website