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The first year of teaching is where careers are made or broken. At NCFE it's engineered to be survivable — and then successful. Here's exactly what a new educator gets.
Most teachers can remember their first year with a small wince. Handed a full timetable, a stack of registers and a cheerful 'you'll be fine', many are left to sink or swim — which is why so many leave the profession early. NCFE treats the first year as something to engineer, not something to survive. Here's what that actually looks like on the ground.
A named mentor from day one
Every new teacher is paired with a named mentor — not a form to sign, a person to sit with. That means observed lessons with real feedback (the useful kind, not the gotcha kind), a first-year development plan, and someone whose job includes your success. Pair-teaching in the early weeks means you learn the school's rhythms alongside someone who already knows them.
Onboarding that's more than paperwork
Induction covers the things that actually trip new teachers up: how the curriculum plans and lesson-design templates work, how the AI-enabled ERP handles diaries, attendance and parent communication, and how a grade team plans together. You're shown the systems before you need them, not after you've struggled with them.
- 1Pre-term induction — meet your mentor and grade team, learn the systems, walk the campus.
- 2First weeks — pair-teaching and structured observation, so you're never fully alone in front of a class you don't yet know.
- 3First term — weekly feedback, funded PD, and a development plan with clear, kind milestones.
- 4End of year one — a proper review that looks forward, not just back.
Training is funded and built into your week
New teachers get the same deal as everyone else: 50–75 hours of fully-funded professional development a year — no fees, no payment from you — with no service bond attached. Workshops, CBSE training and Saturday PD are built into the work calendar rather than piled on top of it. The specifics are on the Benefits page.
AI you're trained on, not thrown at
We're an AI-native school, but nobody is expected to arrive fluent. New teachers are trained on the tools in their first term — using them to draft worksheets, generate differentiated versions and take a first pass at marking, so the hours saved go back into teaching. If you've never used these tools, that's fine; if you have, you'll go further faster. See how teachers actually use AI.
“My previous school gave me a login and a timetable and wished me luck. Here I had a mentor watching my lessons and telling me what to fix — kindly — from week one. It's the difference between drowning and learning to swim.”
For freshers and career-changers too
Support scales to where you're starting from. We run a paid summer teaching internship for fresh graduates, hire ECCEd graduates directly into early years, and welcome career-changers with structured induction. If that's you, read switching careers to teaching and how to get your first teaching job.
A named mentor, funded training and a first year built to succeed. See the roles open across our four campuses.
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