PGDE Secondary (Business Education) (Taught)

Are you a graduate in a degree related to accounting, economics or business management? Are you looking for a new, inspiring, challenging, socially empowering and rewarding career? Have you thought about teaching? Consider our one-year PGDE Secondary (Business Education) course that will prepare you to teach business education in Scottish secondary schools and beyond.

Retraining and working as a teacher can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Not only does it offer you a quick and easy route to a new career, but it also offers you the opportunity to make a real difference in young people’s lives, whilst utilising skills and knowledge that you will have already acquired in your career journey so far.

Whether you're a recent graduate or an experienced professional seeking a career change, teaching offers a rewarding path to make a real difference in young people's lives while building on your skills and experience. If you're passionate about business education—particularly social justice, sustainability, and wellbeing—now is the time to gain the skills to transform young lives. Learn to help students evaluate the social, ethical, and global factors shaping local, national, and multinational organisations.

As a graduate of our unique course, you will help prepare young people to face the challenges of 21st-century citizenship in these fast-changing times.

The PGDE Secondary (Business Education) course will engage you in a critical understanding of contemporary ‘real world’ issues.

You will learn how to underpin your inclusive teaching practices with key themes of social justice, sustainability, and health and wellbeing, and to consider children’s rights critically, as well as how to plan for inclusive practices that enable all young people to participate.

More generally, you will learn how to engage young persons in ICT for business contexts, develop effective communication strategies, and build their financial awareness and understanding of human relations strategies, as well as their knowledge of enterprising life and employability skills, all of which are necessary for participation in twenty-first-century global citizenship.

Researching theories of leadership, organisational learning, and change will enable you to engage young people in the skills of independent learning, research, critical analysis, and problem-solving.

You will also learn about the role you can play as a business education teacher to drive forward the discipline within its contemporary social, cultural, and political contexts.

Professional enquiry is an important aspect of the teacher’s role. On our course, we will teach you how to conduct research in your classroom, enabling you to make evidence-based decisions to support pupils’ learning.

Course Modules

• Reflective and Critical Practice (Placement modules) (40 credits): This module has a particular focus on professional values and the roles and responsibilities required of a teacher in relation to the 2021 GTCS Standards (SPR). This module is assessed by observation of teaching practice in Schools at SCQF Level 10.

• Business Education in the 21st Century (40 credits): This module aims to equip you with the skills to teach BGE and the senior curriculum within Business Education departments in a secondary school context and to engage critically with research to inform your approaches to transformative learning in schools. Assignments are research based and one is a recorded presentation, with the other being a written submission. Both elements must be passed to achieve this module.

• Education: Theory, Practice & Research (1) (20 credits): This module will develop your critical reading and writing skills in the context of classroom-based research and enquiry through building a literature review as a focus for your practice-based research.

• Education: Theory, Practice & Research (2) (20 credits): This module will develop your skills in conducting classroom research.  You will create a research plan for classroom research and present this to a live audience.

Structure and exit award

PGDE (120 credits) with the possibility of 80 credits at Master's Level 11. You must complete the full PGDE.

Teaching, learning and assessment

The course is structured between 18 weeks of teaching at QMU University (which is a mixture of mostly face-to-face and some blended learning) and 18 weeks split between two secondary school placements.
Teaching consists of independent and collaborative learning in workshops. You will engage in research and produce three written assignments and one Individual presentation, all of which will be either assessed at Levels 11 (Master’s degree level) or Level 10. Teaching practice is assessed in schools in accord with the GTCS Standard for Provisional Registration.

Assessments are designed to:

• optimise accessibility for students with a range of strengths and abilities;

• provide variety of opportunity to be challenged and to excel;

• engage students in the importance of being literate and communicative in a range of formats and media; and

• model and demonstrate assessment procedures for student teachers so that they can incorporate this into their own teaching practice, for example: the importance of assessment; transparency of approaches to assessment; value of providing a range of assessment formats; and ways and means of providing feedback and feed-forward.

The PGDE shares the pedagogic approach of the other courses in QMU’s Division of Psychology, Sociology and Education, foregrounding:

• critical thinking;

• student collaboration;

• independent learning;

• involvement with global real-world issues;

• interprofessional, interdisciplinary learning;

• practical experience, experiential learning and critical reflection;

• practical upskilling in food and textiles;

• peer/group work;

• enquiry-based learning;

• debate and contention; and

• outdoor learning activities.

Placements

Placements are an invaluable way of building on your theoretical learning and by applying this in practice, seeing the evidence of how teaching Business Education can benefit young people.

You will complete an 18-week placement in two different secondary schools in Scotland.

Placements are allocated based on schools’ availability, usually within a 90-minute radius of a student’s term time address.

Professionally accredited courses provide industry-wide recognition of the quality of your qualification.

• General Teaching Council for Scotland

To work as a teacher at a state school in England or Wales, you will need to achieve qualified teacher status (QTS). This is offered on this course for the following level:

• Has qualified teacher status