SCITT Blog June 26

Confidence doesn’t come before you start. It develops because you start. 

Every year is different. Every cohort brings something you didn’t expect. This one brought a lot. 

At the end of a year of PGCE training, I find myself reflecting not on the structure of the course but on the people who made it what it was. This year has meant stepping into so many different roles: trainer, listener, cheerleader, occasional referee. Sometimes all four in the same afternoon. 

We threw everything at them. Pizza lessons. Gallery walks. Rally robins. Teaching each other about adaptive practice with a level of passion that, at points, needed careful refereeing. But what surprised me every time was what happened when they started talking about their own students, their own classrooms, what was working and what wasn’t. The room would change. People leaned in. Ideas started flying. 

That’s not something you can plan into a session. 

Our trainees may have started the year full of doubt — am I good enough, will I cope, will I find my people — but if you’d seen them in October, doing a Kahoot retrieval quiz on memory and how the brain works, you’d never have known. The determination to top that leaderboard was something else. The competition was fierce (and not just from the PE lot). I’ve seen less intensity in penalty shootouts. The laughter that followed was just as valuable as the learning. 

Almost every trainee begins with the same question. What I’ve watched, over and over again, is that confidence doesn’t come before you start. It develops because you start. 

Mentors have been central to that. They’re the steady presence in schools — the people who help trainees navigate the reality of classroom life and offer the kind of wisdom that only comes from actually being in the room. Teacher training works as a partnership, and this year that felt real. 

Alongside the noise and the laughter there have been quieter moments. Wellbeing visits that weren’t about lesson plans. Conversations where people showed more strength than they knew they had. One trainee said, “I wasn’t sure I could do it at the start. Now I can’t quite believe how far I’ve come.” 

That says it better than I could.