Primary PGCE school placement

[Viba]

Hi everyone. Hope you all are enjoying the sun and half term. I need your help. I am a mature student undertaking distance learning primary PGCE and currently on my first placement. I have to find my own placement and I am looking to undertake my second placement in Sept 2013. I am in Birmingham, can anyone help me? Any advice is appreciated. Thank you

I would look at every school in your area and write to them giving details of the expectations of the placement, duration, and your teaching commitment etc. It may help to give some brief details of your existing placement in terms of what you've taught, yr groups, kind of thing. You may find it tricky and have to contact lots of schools as I'd imagine many will have links with the ITT uni's in the area.
How did you find this current placement? Do they have any schools they have links with or contacts that might help?

Thank you Suze28. I am writing detailed letter with letter from my university, however not having much luck. The school I'm current at is an independent school. Unfortunately, the schools I've previously worked with are either need to improve or special measures. My luck.

Your second post reads a bit strangely, like English isn't your first language perhaps? If you are writing to schools, maybe ask someone to proofread the letters first to make sure they are grammatically correct and scan right, to increase your chance of getting a placement.

(If you are perfectly capable of writing a nice letter and just have a lazy or eccentric posting style, then apologies and please ignore me!)

Thanks Brainz. My letter has been proofread, however I might get my uni tutor to double check it. Every little advise helps :-)

Ensure you address them to the Headteacher. Check you have their name correct - I still get mail for my 2 predecessors (one of whom is dead). Anything with their names on goes straight in the bin.

We get a large number of requests for placements of various types, as do most of the schools in our area.
They get read out in a staff meeting and we all bid for the student if we want to. I agree that giving detailed information will up your chances, as well as stating anything you could offer as an extra for the school, expertise or enthusiasm for sport or drama for example.
Grammatically accurate English in all correspondence will also be a useful indicator to the school.

Euphemia, it's a distance learning course. So I'd expect the student to be more proactive about acquiring a placement.

Thank you everyone. I will keep trying.