| Summary: | This longitudinal study takes an interpretive approach to investigating the personal and professional journey of six outstanding early career teachers. Aspects which will be investigated include the ITT pre-selection procedure, an examination of the university based training programme, the contextual features of the trainees' school experience and the participants’ own beliefs that impact on their professional identity development through the training year and into their induction as newly qualified teachers (NQTs). The qualitative methodology used shares characteristics with a case study approach and utilises procedures associated with grounded theory. Data were systematically gathered over a three-year period including documentation collected at key transition points throughout the training year. A culminating semi-structured interview produced an illustrated timeline of the year charting participants’ increase or decrease in confidence in the training environment with time. A similar time-line was produced to summarise the NQT experience one year later. The collected data were analysed, coded and categorised, and the explanations and theory that emerged from this process were grounded in the data. Two principal investigations support the main thesis. The first is located at the beginning of the teaching journey and focuses on the importance of subject knowledge on trainees’ outcome achievement (DfE, 2011a). The second study follows trainees into their first teaching post and considers factors supporting or impeding successful transition into teaching. It acts as a pilot for the main investigation. This thesis provides a comprehensive and nuanced view of how beginning to teach is experienced and interpreted by potentially outstanding trainees. It paints a complex picture of the relationship between biography, beliefs, preparation and context in the process of learning to teach. The study contributes to the literature on the recruitment, education and retention of beginning teachers in the scarcely researched area of outstanding trainee achievement and its impact on transition into the workplace and early career progression and retention. It highlights the need to develop a shared understanding amongst policy makers, teacher educators and schools regarding the multiplicity of factors that influence and determine the development and transition of early career teachers giving an insight into the complexity of the 'outstanding teacher' achievement.
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