Starting my PGCE in secondary teaching was one of the most exciting, and honestly overwhelming, things I’ve ever done. Before the course began, I was worried about lesson planning, behaviour management, university assignments, and what teaching in a secondary school would actually be like.
Now that I’m at the end, I’ve realised that nobody starts as the finished product. A PGCE is all about learning, improving, and surviving those chaotic first few months.
If you’re about to start a secondary PGCE, here are the five things I wish someone had told me beforehand.
You do not need to know everything on day one
This was probably the biggest shock for me. I thought teachers walked into classrooms knowing exactly what to say, how to manage behaviour, and how to make every lesson perfect.
Reality check: your PGCE exists to teach you those skills.
There will be lessons that flop. You’ll forget worksheets, stumble over explanations, or spend ages planning something that takes students five minutes to complete. That’s normal. I learned more from the lessons that went wrong than the ones that went perfectly.
Give yourself permission to be a beginner.
Organisation will save your life
I cannot stress this enough. Staying organised makes the course so much less stressful.
During my first placement, I quickly realised that teaching involves juggling lesson plans, university deadlines, mentor meetings, observations, marking, emails, and endless paperwork. If I didn’t write things down, they disappeared from my brain instantly.
What helped me most was:
- Keeping one planner for everything
- Colour-coding deadlines and teaching timetables
- Saving all lesson resources in clearly labelled folders
- Prioritising to-do lists
- Planning lessons earlier than I thought I needed to
Future you will be grateful.
Behaviour management takes time
Before starting, I assumed behaviour management was something you either naturally had or didn’t. Watching experienced teachers made it look effortless.
Then I started teaching myself and realised it’s actually a skill you build over time.
One of the best pieces of advice I received was: be consistent.
Students respond far better when expectations are clear, and routines are predictable. I found that confidence often came when I focused on being calm, fair, and clear.
Also, don’t take challenging behaviour personally. Most of the time, it isn’t about you.
Protect your wellbeing early
Teaching can expand to fill every hour of your day if you let it. During my first few weeks, I stayed up late perfecting PowerPoints and overplanning every lesson because I wanted everything to be amazing.
Eventually, my university mentor gave me a piece of advice: “Good enough” is sometimes genuinely good enough.
Now I try to:
- Set a cut-off time in the evening
- Avoid working all weekend
- Make time for exercise and seeing friends
- Celebrate small wins instead of focusing only on mistakes
You’ll be a much better teacher if you’re rested and mentally okay.
Start looking at jobs earlier than you think, but don’t panic!
At the start of my PGCE, getting a teaching job felt really far away, but it soon comes around. If you leave it too late, your teaching and workload only increase, leaving you less time to prepare.
Schools begin advertising roles surprisingly early, and interview days can feel intense if you’ve never experienced one before. I found it really helpful to:
- Look at job adverts to understand what schools are asking for
- Practice common interview questions
- Watch experienced teachers teach different lessons
- Build up examples I could use in interview answers
- Keep copies of good lesson plans and resources
The earlier you start thinking about interviews and applications, the less stressful the process feels later on.
So to conclude…
Starting a secondary PGCE can feel intimidating, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. There’s nothing quite like the moment a lesson clicks, a student finally understands something because of your explanation, or you realise you’re becoming more confident every week.
You do not need to be perfect to become a good teacher.
Just stay open to learning, be kind to yourself, and remember that every experienced teacher was once exactly where you are now.
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