If you are passionate about working with children in the 0 - 5 age range, you might like to consider training to become an Early Years Teacher, able to teach children aged 0 -5 in a nursery or reception setting. Plymouth CAST schools are partnering with Best Practice Network to provide training opportunities to gain Early Years Teacher status across our schools from September 2020.
To be eligible to apply, you need to hold a degree, plus English, Maths and Science GCSE grade C (or equivalent). If you have a degree but don't have the required English, Maths and Science qualifications, it will be possible to do equivalency tests in each of these. You might be a parent looking to return to work after having children, a recent graduate looking for an alternative route to working in education, or a member of staff already working in one of our schools.
The training costs of the course are fully covered, so there is no need to take out a loan or incur debt to do the training. There are two training routes. There is an employment based route, where you are employed by a school to work in an Early Years setting, and paid a salary during training. If you are a school offering a trainee an employment based route, you are eligible to receive £7,000 from the DfE towards the cost of the salary.
If you do not have employment in a school, but still want to train, and have the relevant qualifications, there is a student based route, where you are classed as a student, and are eligible for a small bursary. (£5,000 if you gained a First class honours degree, £4,000 if you gained a 2:I degree, and £2,000 if you gained a 2:II degree). Early Years Teacher status qualifies someone to teach children aged 0 - 5, but it does not qualify someone to teach across Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. It is possible however, to do further study and convert Early Years Teacher status to Qualified Teacher status.
If you want to apply to train to become an Early Years teacher, a link to the online application portal can be found here Apply for Early Years Initial teacher training. If you are asked to enter a code, please use PLYM.
