Quality Education

We are one of the largest teacher training establishments in the country with an extensive partnership network. We welcome over 700 trainee teachers onto our PGCE courses each year.

In October 2023, Manchester Met proudly retained the University of the Year title at the Multicultural Apprenticeship Awards and received the prestigious AdvanceHE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence. 

The pioneering ‘Birth to Three Matters’ framework set the national policy and training agenda and influenced the practice of every early years’ professional in England. It is still used by professional leaders and practitioners globally seeking training resources and an alternative approach to narrower official curriculum guidance. Our continuing programme of research in this area has transformed curriculum and pedagogy for the under-threes, in co-production with nurseries, families, local authorities, health professionals, and arts organisations.

Funding for a pilot project (2023) to develop experimental exhibition curation through the experiences of children aged under three and their families has been secured by researchers at Manchester Met. Backed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Things of the Least will generate a series of innovative gallery and live public experiences taking a fresh look at the relationship between museum artefacts and public life.

In 2021, the University was awarded funding from the Office for Students to deliver short higher education courses through a Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE), as well as improving the progression to careers in research for BAME students through its ASPIRE programme. The LLE will enable anybody to access up to four years of student loans to support bite-sized learning courses at the University. These short courses will allow people to build up learning over their lifetime with a choice on how and when they want to study and learn new skills. The ASPIRE programme is “an impactful package of learning and opportunity, reflecting the inclusive values of our University”. 

Teaching for Sustainable Development through Ethical Global Issues Pedagogy (2018-2019) investigated new teaching approaches that challenge the tendency in the ‘Global North’ to reproduce colonial systems of power. The research created a set of principles for practice and a professional development resource used internationally across curricular areas to address topics ranging from climate change and decolonisation to urbanisation and anti-racism.

National Saturday Club - During these sessions, Manchester Metropolitan University introduces young people to themes such as coding, mathematics, games, design, environment and sustainability, and offers the latest industry thinking and technologies.

60,000 students and over 160 schools will participate in our Education Endowment Fund (EEF) funded Whole School SEND review project (2019-2025). It will investigate the effectiveness of the review process on raising attainment in English at GCSE and measure its effect on pupil wellbeing, attendance and exclusions.

We have worked with Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) for more than 15 years, building on students’ informal understanding of context to generate a deep understanding of where mathematics comes from. Our research has shaping teaching practice in the UK, Norway, India and the Cayman Islands. Most recently, we led an EEF-funded randomised controlled trial involving more than 130 Key Stage 3 teachers and their students across England.

Our EEF-commissioned review of the impact of digital technology on attainment in schools and associated guide for teachers underpinned CPD run by Research Schools and consultants at over 132 institutions, from nursery to FE-level. It has shaped teaching for over 120,000 students in England, Wales, Spain, The Netherlands, Abu Dhabi, Madrid and Dubai and shaped school policies on digital learning.

Our researchers collaborated with Greater Manchester Combined Authority on the DfE-funded Pathways to Talking Project. It aimed to increase the scale and pace of the authority-wide speech, language and communication pathway implementation.  The pathway was designed to improve Communication and Language outcomes for all children in the early years and reduce the inequality gap by age 5 years.

Research into Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD) shaped both iterations of ‘Routes for Learning.’ The Welsh Government’s mandatory approach for all statutory provision, it enhances the support delivered to all children with PMLD in Wales and has been adopted internationally.

Initial Teacher Education for Inclusion (ITE4i) (2015-2018) was the first system-wide study of ITE for inclusive teaching in Europe. It investigated how to strengthen approaches to inclusive education within the Irish system of teacher education.  Inclusive pedagogy was embedded across the ITE curriculum in Ireland as a result. The revised programmes benefit the 1,300 teachers who train to teach in Ireland each year.

In 2021 Manchester Met opened the UK’s 4th dedicated public poetry library as a resource designed to reflect the diverse languages and cultural traditions of the regional population and to support health and education professionals using poetry to promote wellbeing and inclusive education in their work.

The Manchester Writing School (MWS) has a twofold mission for educational impact beyond our academic programmes: to widen access to poetry and to enable new writing in contexts from the primary school classroom to professional publication. Since its launch in 2018, their ‘How to Make a Poem’ MOOC has developed the practice of over 7000 writers from 18 to 90+ in 152 countries, many of whom have no other access to creative writing teaching.

Led by Manchester Writing School, the multilingual poetry competition Mother Tongue Other Tongue has engaged with 40,000 pupils between the ages of 9 and 17, across 77 participating schools. In 2019 the competition’s support for creativity and inclusivity in hyper-diverse urban communities was recognised with a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education.