The University of Hertfordshire has been welcoming from the moment I stepped onto campus - the staff are friendly and willing to help if you have any issues and the place itself is incredibly inviting. The advanced warning with assignments, where lecturers go into detail about expectations/grading/break down what is required is so helpful and means you can get clarification well in advance of the deadlines. Communication with individual lecturers has been rapid and always positive - you are never made to feel bad for asking. They also have a really good support system where lecturers will check in on how placement is going and how you are coping with workload, providing you with advice and support with a lack of judgement and only intending to help improve your experience. You can access all resources on the University's online system Canvas ahead of lectures and catch up if you missed anything - there is a good amount of text per slide, which has helped me to keep up with the lectures more so than when I did my undergraduate. I feel like I have been able to fit in here much better than where I studied for my undergraduate degree. In terms of improvements, there was a very slow process of being allocated a placement school (due to some issues with securing places), which meant I felt very anxious leading up to placement and then only being notified of my place two days before going to the school. Having more advanced notice of this would be helpful in dealing with the stress. Otherwise, this has been a great experience for my PGCE and I would recommend studying here for other students (although be warned - there is a lot of work that you will have to do for a PGCE, so make sure you truly want to do this course - if you do, this is definitely the place to do it)!

This is a very intense course - it is mostly done through placement, with four days at your placement school and one day at the University. There are also three weeks called ITaPs - these are supposed to be a chance to focus on key elements of teaching and practice on other trainees before implementing strategies in lessons. University days are split between lecture days and subject knowledge days on campus, which are helpful to explain how to teach as well as inform how your subject is taught (providing helpful resources to use in your own lessons). There is plenty of time to talk to lecturers after lectures finish and the staff are always keen to take questions, responding quickly to E-Mails and addressing queries. Although I would say quite a lot of the lecture days and ITaP weeks could definitely be done online rather than getting everyone onto campus, I do think that the subject knowledge days are incredibly useful and it is nice to hear the experiences of others on the course and consider how different people approach teaching your subject. There is a lot of work for this course because of planning and assignments, which I think the University and schools often do not coordinate - one side believes their work takes priority and so is dismissive of the other side, which can make it difficult to juggle the different forms and lesson planning that needs to be done. Otherwise, it is a great course and works really well - it is clear to see why they are so highly ranked.