advice please on becoming a Junior school teacher

[jimmyjamas]

My sister works as a classroom assistant at a junior school and really loves her job however, the pay is not very good so she feels she would like to train as a teacher.

Can she do it through the open university? She wants to keep working so doesn't want to go to UNI full-time, and do a degree in something relating to child development.

Have any of you done this or similar? Thanks in advance for any information.

Yes she can do a degree through the open university and then train as a teacher through the Graduate Teacher Programme if she needs the money (you get paid as a unqualified teacher for the year - about the same as the top end of a classroom assistants salery I think).

There may be other options as well but I am not upto date on them all - maybe look at this page

She should also be able to do a foundation degree in teaching and learning part time her local further ed college should do it, them she can do an additional one year top up course to be a teacher. I'm doing my PGCE by part time distance learning. There are also courses that will take into account her previous experience and fast track her through some parts of the course (Edge Hill).