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5 July 2019
Niall Gaffney, who undertook his teacher training at Bolton School under the School Centred Initial Teacher Training programme has won this year’s Manchester Evening News’ Student Teacher of the Year Award. The announcement came at an award ceremony held at the Hilton Deansgate in Manchester. Headmistress Sue Hincks and Head of French in Bolton School Girls’ Division Mr Christophe Fico attended the event along with Bolton School SCITT Coordinator Ms Marcia Teichman, who said: “Niall is a dedicated linguist. He is a fluent speaker of French and has made great strides developing his teaching of his second language of Spanish. He has shown himself to be a very personable and engaging member of the NML SCITT trainee group. He has been incredibly organised, positive, and determined. Niall has excellent subject knowledge, real presence and the ability to enthuse others and he is a fantastic role model for any languages classroom. His lessons were thoroughly planned with a range of engaging tasks and elements of differentiation to enable progress from all the pupils in the group. He shared the role of form tutor of a Year 7 group and managed the administrative duties willingly, developing a secure pastoral relationship with his tutees.
“The pupils enjoyed his lessons and responded superbly well to him. He managed them well and it is evident that he knows the individual pupils’ strengths and weaknesses. He had high expectations in terms of their learning outcomes and their behaviour. Niall strove to integrate knowledge gained from his training sessions into his everyday teaching and made excellent progress in his lesson planning. He gained a deeper insight into the exam requirements at GCSE and A-level and took every opportunity to be involved in marking and moderation. His NML SCITT tutors all agree that Niall the potential to be an inspirational teacher.”
Upon successful completion of the Post Graduate Certificate in Education with Qualified Teacher Status with the National Modern Languages SCITT and Sheffield Hallam University in June 2019, Niall will take up a position at The Co-op Academy North Manchester in Blackley from this September.
