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Taking on a Teach First graduate

Teach First recruits and trains high-quality teachers to work in schools facing the greatest challenges, using the latest research to raise learning outcomes for our poorest children. Emma Lee-Potter explains

Up until four years ago Tinsley Meadows Primary Academy struggled to recruit new teachers.

The school is in a deprived area of Sheffield, not far from the M1 motorway, and around 96 per cent of its 650 children have English as an additional language (EAL). It is in the bottom 20 per cent of deprivation on the IDACI index (income deprivation affecting children index) and 31 per cent of pupils are eligible for Pupil Premium funding.

“There are endless stories of poverty in our area,” explained Deborah Sanderson, executive principal of Tinsley Meadows. “But Teach First has brought us staff. Before this, nobody ever applied to our school. We’d get one or two people applying but that was all.”

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