Teach First - how can I help?

[Frlrlrubert]

I'm moving schools and my 'replacement' is going to be a teach first trainee.

My current school are pretty clueless about teach first, it's the new MAT that have decided this.

She's straight out of uni, doing a Science placement with a Psychology degree, and I can tell she's really nervous about her subject knowledge (she's in this week).

I'm going to give her my KS3 revision guides and stuff, as I'm going to a 13 and up school.

I feel really bad for her taking such a massive leap and landing in such a shithole! The staff are lovely but the school has been badly managed and isn't in a good place.

What can I do now / leave in my room / suggest to my colleagues for September to help her out.

If you've done teach first of had teach first trainees what suggestions would you have to make it less daunting?

I don't have any advice, sorry, but as a trainee this year (not TF), I just wanted to say that you sound lovely.

You do sound lovely. I think that Teach First is sink or swim though.
However if you leave a tidy room with no outdated rubbish lurking in the cupboards that would be a help. Throw away any broken or outdated resources so that she doesn't have to spend time wondering if she can. And if a set of stationary resources are kept in your room then make sure she has the supplies she needs. I still remember with horror the TOTALLY empty stock cupboard I was left with in my NQT year many years ago. It had been stripped by the previous teacher who was moving classrooms and took everything with her. I was too naive to know this was not decent practice in that school and it left me very short of resources for a term until the deputy realised what had happened.

I've just found out that the room reshuffle isn't quite so simple, so she won't have my room, but I'm thinking I'll leave her a 'starter kit' with pens and rulers and scrunchies (science practicals) and other stuff to lend out.

I had some time with her on the last day and advised her to think about how she's going to deal with things like getting their attention for transitions and a kid with no pen so she can be consistent from the off (that was my biggest mistake I think, I had a really hard time as an NQT because I didn't know what I was doing and there's a lot of inconsistencies across the school).

I gave her a set of the textbooks we use (HoD was out that day) my KS3 books and my old print outs of ADHD and ASD strategies. I think like a lot of us, she wasn't really prepared for the reality of bottom sets and SEN that we get in mainstream.