PGCE (History)

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2025 places the University of Oxford’s Department of Education as first in Britain for Degrees in Education for the thirteenth year running. Over many years, it has consistently received the highest possible designation (Outstanding) from Ofsted in inspections. The University of Oxford’s Department of Education has a long history in initial teacher education, dating back to 1892.

The department works in partnership with over 37 secondary comprehensive schools in Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties, with most being within 30 miles of Oxford. The programme has been developed with colleagues from Oxfordshire partnership schools and covers the key professional skills of:

• lesson planning and preparation
• assessment, recording and reporting
• responding to individual learning needs
• classroom and behaviour management.

The course works on an internship model (the Oxford Internship Scheme) which recognises the different roles of university and schools in teacher education and the need for a truly collaborative partnership. Such collaboration involves joint responsibility within the partnership for the planning, delivery and assessment of the programme. Student teachers are known as interns during the PGCE course.

In addition to being awarded the PGCE qualification, successful interns are also recommended for Qualified Teacher Status, which indicates that they have met the requirements of the Government’s Teachers’ Standards.

The course is committed to enabling you to teach history in rigorous ways while taking account of the learners’ needs, desires and dispositions, across a range of different contexts. It is based on a strong set of partnerships built over a long period of time with local schools. This partnership extends to include visits to local museums, a local case study and visits to a number of London schools to explore EAL and diversity issues. The department has a real passion for history and young people and are looking for candidates that share this passion. This course looks to support successful history teaching based on the use of engaging and rigorous historical enquiries that link substantive historical knowledge with critical historical thinking.

Course development evolves in response to feedback from all PGCE partners, combining insights from up to date research with the perspectives of PGCE interns and their mentors. The course integrates teaching experience in partner secondary schools with practical university-based workshops and helps you develop teaching skills and a critical understanding of learning and teaching across a range of different contexts.

The curriculum programme is organised around six broad themes:

• exploring your preconceptions about the nature of history and about effective teaching and learning;
• the context of history teaching today, including the nature of the history curriculum itself (Key Stage 3, GCSE and post-16), the relationship between history and citizenship education and the wider professional context of teachers’ work;
• managing history classrooms;
• planning for learning – exploring the range of decisions that you need to make in planning for single lessons and longer schemes of work, examining the range of goals and activities possible, and the ways in which you can select and tailor your objectives and learning tasks to ensure that all pupils are engaged and can make progress;
• carrying out your plans; and
• evaluation: of both your own teaching and the pupils’ learning in history.

In school you will be involved in all aspects of a teacher’s role. You will observe experienced teachers, and discuss your observations and your own developing ideas and practice with them; you will plan and teach collaboratively, and design and develop resources for that teaching. You will work both with individuals and small groups of pupils, as well, of course, as taking responsibility for teaching history to whole classes.

In the University you will work with other history interns in seminars and workshops using a wide variety of approaches intended to develop your own repertoire and understanding of effective teaching and learning strategies, informed by both practical and research-based, theoretical perspectives. One key aspect of the PGCE programme is the space to share knowledge and understanding of the variety of contexts.

The course begins with an orientation experience in September spending three days in a primary school of your choice.

This is followed by the first week in the University of Oxford’s Department of Education. The rest of the autumn term is made up of ‘joint weeks’ with two days spent in the University and three days in school. You will be attached to the same state secondary school for the majority of the year, which makes it possible for you to get to know teachers and pupils in the school and to understand the school’s policies and practices.

The spring term consists primarily of school experience and for the summer term, interns move to a second school so that they have the opportunity to consolidate and extend their understanding and experience of learning and teaching.

This course structure reflects the internship model in that it is designed to:

• enable interns to become fully integrated into one school over a long period;
• enable interns to learn about their own teaching in the context of the wider school, rather than focusing initially on their own classroom and only later widening their view;
• allow schools to offer coherent and challenging professional development programmes over the course of the long placement, and in the short placement focus on preparation for continuing professional development;
• enable school-based mentors to see interns’ development from the start of the course to a position of competence; and
• offer interns the opportunity to encounter a new school context at a time of the course when they are ready to make critical comparisons.