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Back to school for five OEs

08 May 2018

This September, five Old Edwardians will be returning to school, but with a difference. They will be continuing a long tradition of KES alumni bringing their skills and energy back to the Midlands, by training to be teachers.

Andrew Macarthur (2012, School Captain), Tim Woolley (2012), Sam Neale (2013), Max Smith (2013) and Joe Light (2014) will be training with King Edward's Consortium (KEC), teaching a variety of subjects, from languages to mathematics. The trainees will be placed in two of the Consortium's 20 partner schools - a mixture of comprehensive, selective, mixed, single-sex, 11-16 and 11-18 - ensuring they receive a contrasting set of experiences that are representative of Birmingham's varied educational landscape.

Andrew Macarthur, who will be training to teach mathematics, said: "After university, I spent 12 months working in a school in New Zealand, where I rediscovered the vibrancy of life in schools. Coming back to England, I was pleased to be offered a place on the Consortium scheme, especially as everything suggests outstanding support is offered to trainees throughout and beyond their training year.

"Recent graduates of the programme have been happy to talk to me about their own experiences and to provide tips before the start of the course and current KES teacher Jessica Amann (herself a former Consortium trainee) was a patient and friendly guide when I was trying to decide which route to take. The fact that I will now be able to call the Midlands home again for the next few years is an added bonus."

Joe Light, who will be training to teach Spanish, French and Russian, said: "I chose KEC because it was a way of ensuring that I got the best chance to teach what I wanted to teach and in a way that I wanted to teach. The people I was in contact with before starting were by far the most helpful and the most interested in me as a person, rather than meeting subject quotas, and this is something that I know many have come to expect from members and establishments that fall under the King Edward's banner, in Birmingham as well as the rest of the country.

"My teachers at KES sparked a genuine intellectual interest in me and I wanted to have the opportunity to extend that legacy and impact to the next generation and teaching with KEC seemed to me to be the best way to do that."

KEC is one of the leading teacher training institutions in the country, rated Outstanding by Ofsted in 2012 and named the best School-Centred Initial Teacher Training provider in the UK in The Good Teacher Training Guide 2017. The Consortium trains around 30 teachers every year, and has a 100% graduate employment rate.

Find out more about King Edward's Consortium.