What does your role entail? 

My current role at Harris Initial Teacher Education is that of Professional Tutor. This entails working with a variety of academies across the Harris Federation, observing and supporting trainees on placement and working with their mentors to identify the best ways to help the trainees develop their teaching practice.  I am also responsible for leading on the delivery of the Master’s Level PGCE in partnership with Kingston University and I am also the ITE Lead for the RE with Citizenship subject strand, something which I find both challenging and rewarding as I support the trainees to stay informed of the latest discussions and developments in these subject communities.  

What are your credentials/experience to your current position? 

As an experienced Teacher Educator and ITE Course Lead, I have worked across a wide variety of training routes, providing support and training both for beginning and experienced teachers as a university tutor / senior lecturer in Education, a local authority advisor and independent consultant. Prior to joining Harris, I taught in London schools across a range of subject areas with a particular focus on Citizenship and Religious Education. I hold a Master’s degree in Psychosocial Studies and Education with a particular focus on Initial Teacher Education. As a Local Authority Consultant, I advised primary and secondary schools on SMSC, Citizenship and PSHE, promoting mental health and well-being among students and staff and promoting critical literacy, active citizenship and social justice. 

I have also sat as a member of the Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship and have co-written and edited, with the English and Media Centre, an anthology of short stories and novel extracts entitled, Diverse Shorts: Literature to Promote Critical Thinking. 

What is the highlight of your role? 

The highlight of my role is visiting trainees in our academies and seeing their practice develop across the training year as they become critically reflective teachers, applying and adapting learning from our core and subject-specific training sessions to suit their particular context and the learners in their classes.  

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other - Paulo Freire