The 9/10 project: working towards getting 9/10 students to recommend us to a friend

At Anglia Ruskin University, postgraduate applicants to become trainee primary and secondary teachers take part in a face-to-face interview process. This takes place eight or nine months before they join us, with some sent rejections immediately and others ‘held’ until places are offered from February onwards. The only contact they have is through Admissions and as this is mainly their queries about when their offer will be confirmed it is not necessarily perceived as a positive experience. Applicants do have the opportunity to meet their peers and the academic staff on the precourse day in July. A number of prospective applicants are unable to attend and therefore miss out on this opportunity. They are mailed the documentation from the event. Those missing the event will therefore not have met their peers nor been briefed on the course. This project aims to keep all these applicants, engaged with our Department from application stage onwards, well before they start to study, by offering a set of interactive learning materials online, modelling aspects of school life. We aimed to do this by developing an interactive website with two of our Essex partner schools, Maylandsea Primary School and Cornelius Vermuyden Secondary School.