Our current training room is situated within Stamshaw Junior School, Portsmouth. It is a one year course that qualifies successful primary trainees to teach children aged 5-11 years, and early years trainees to teach children aged 3-7 years.

From September 2025, we will also be delivering training from a training room on the Isle of Wight.

This is a full-time PGCE course; Trainees spend 70% of their time in local schools and 30% in our training centre participating in workshops.

Trainees have the opportunity to observe good teachers at work and be able to work alongside them, gradually developing their own teaching skills. They receive high quality mentoring, together with support from the SCITT team to enable them to develop into a competent and confident early career teacher.

Portsmouth SCITT Consultants and Expert Colleagues, as well as the SCITT team undertake much of the training. This enables excellent continuity for the many trainees who subsequently take up their first teaching appointments in the locality. Now the programme has been running since 2000, many ex-trainees are taking on the role of mentoring new trainees.

Trainees can qualify under either the Professional or Postgraduate route; the Postgraduate route also awards trainees 60 Masters Level credits.

Portsmouth

What many of our trainees have found especially motivating is the excitement and stimulation of learning to teach in Portsmouth. Many of them feel it is not just a job. The course helps them grow personally.

The city includes areas of social deprivation, and this means teachers here need high levels of commitment and skill. They have to expect a lot of themselves and of others. Trainees usually feel that meeting the challenge brings a powerful sense of achievement and reward.

A strong feature of the course is the mutual support that the trainees give one another. There will only ever be a maximum of 36 within the cohort – a good size for cohesion and diversity, whilst small enough to be friendly and for everyone to know each other personally.  Trainees forge lasting friendships and their learning about team work serves them well when they graduate to become Early Career Teachers.

Isle of Wight

Portsmouth SCITT are delighted to be bringing our outstanding initial teacher training to the Isle of Wight for 2025/26. We have partnered with high-quality schools across the Island to deliver our hands-on, bespoke training and will deliver our engaging sessions in our Island-based training room

This exciting new venture brings our highly regarded training to the Island for the first time and gives residents the unique opportunity to gain a PGCE with qualified teacher status without regular travel to the mainland. Our course will follow the same structure as our Portsmouth based course and will be delivered by a mixture of our Portsmouth-based team as well as expert colleagues from the Island.