Schools and colleges

We’re proud of the relationship we have with schools and colleges across Wales. We work with governors, senior leadership teams, teaching and support staff, and pupils and learners to create new courses and materials which can help professional development and improve student skills.

Here are some of the things we do:

Staff in schools and colleges

Training teachers

We’re helping develop the next generation of teachers with our new flexible Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). This includes a salaried route for school staff, eg teaching assistants, or a non-salaried route for people looking for a career change. There’s also a way for schools to get involved in the programme to support our student teachers.

Our Teachers Learning to Teach languages (TELT) programme has been set up to help primary school staff teach French, German Spanish or Mandarin Chinese, whilst learning the languages at the same time. This supports the requirement to teach languages at a primary school level as part of Wales’ new curriculum.

Free learning and microcredentials

Our free-learning site OpenLearn is packed full of free courses and information for teaching staff including:

our teaching assistant hub for staff in early years to secondary school
courses for school governors
a well-being and mental health collection (which can also be used by parents, guardians and students)
the take your teaching online course which can help teachers and lecturers with remote education, as well as a toolkit for moving your language teaching online.

We’ve teamed up with the Welsh Government and Cardiff council to produce more free resources on the Hwb website. Our Cardiff Commitment Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Pilot was a collaboration to support staff in their approach to blended teaching and learning pedagogy. This was throughout the coronavirus pandemic as well as in preparation for the new Curriculum For Wales. Hear from the partners and teachers involved:

Supporting pupils and students

There’s a world of free learning on our OpenLearn site which can help students with further learning and research for coursework. OpenLearn Wales is full of content developed by the OU in Wales, including a new course to raise awareness of Welsh citizenship – Understanding devolution in Wales.

We've partnered with all 12 colleges across Wales to support students into higher education. We put this booklet together for students which explains some more.

University Ready logo

We’ve worked with other universities in Wales to create University Ready – a new collection of resources to help people who are about to take the next step to university.

Finally, we run OU Ambassador and OpenLearn Champions programmes for organisations across Wales. Many of the people involved with these courses have a key role in student and pupil support including Heads of Sixth Form, Seren Coordinators, Welsh Baccalaureate leads, and Pastoral Support Tutors.