My name is Daniel Shankland and I’m currently in my second year of studying Primary Education with QTS. Although the world is going through a trying time with the pandemic, Liverpool Hope University has not let that hinder our progression and development.

Whilst we are all missing being on campus and having face to face learning, we have been given lots of things to keep our learning going at home. Each week we still have seminars and lectures uploaded onto our Moodle for us to engage with. We’ve had several opportunities for drop-in sessions with our tutors – a chance for us to ask questions on anything that has been uploaded online.

Our tutors are checking in on us to make sure that we’re doing well. We’ve been sent bulletins from our year head containing relevant topics to read up on, links to training based around the content of the seminars and lectures whilst also sending us things to help look after our mental health and wellbeing. As well as all of this support that we’re receiving we are constantly reminded from all our tutors that they’re only an email away if we need them. On top of this, we’ve had lots of free online training links sent to us too, that really help our teaching development and also enhance our CV’s, which will be great when we’re applying for our first teaching job!

We had to finish our final assignments online and there was support around this too. We had lots of content put onto Moodle to help aid the assignments as well as Zoom meetings with tutors to discuss assignments and the opportunity to ask any questions. There was also a link to a Google Doc where people could ask questions and the tutors would answer, this was accessible for the whole cohort so we could see if someone had already asked something we might want to know.

In terms of placement, we’ve already completed our second-year block placement so thankfully we don’t need to worry about this during the current circumstances.