Interview with Paula Mountford

Why did I join the Department?

My present role is the director of initial teacher training at York. I have worked for the Department for quite a few years in a number of ways. When I was a teacher I worked with Ian Davies on the History PGCE. For the past five years I have been the director of the programme and working full time here. I am a teacher, I trained here and did my PGCE here years and years ago. I have been lucky enough to stay in touch with the Department, particularly focusing my work on teacher training.

What makes the Department special?

I think York provides a really supportive environment for both staff and the trainees that my section of the Department works with. It is very well resourced in terms of the library and resources etc. and is in very beautiful surroundings that we work in.

The Department itself is connected together, it has a lot of very supportive people and it is quite a creative place to work.

York provides a really supportive environment for both the staff and the trainees that my section of the Department works with. The different sections of the Department are very much connected making it a very creative place to work. The Department has excellent resources and is set in very beautiful surroundings.

Education is enormously important and what is particularly valuable about this Department is that it is made up of different sections and those sections work on their own but there is also a really powerful interconnectivity. The work I am particularly involved with is the work linking with the community, that’s the immediate York community, the wider North Yorkshire going way up to Middlesbrough over to Leeds and down to Doncaster. We are a powerhouse of achievement of high standards and of creativity here in York. We are taking that message, that work and the role modelling and we are sharing it with the immediate local community and the much wider local community so that’s really important in terms of sharing and being a standard and a role model.

What has the Department achieved over the past 50 years and what does the future hold?

Over the many years that we have had teacher training here at York we have trained brilliant teachers for the next generation and we have made a valuable input into individual children’s lives, whole classes, whole schools which has therefore had a knock on effect in whole communities.

I would like to see the Department of Education go from strength to strength, engaging with technology, engaging with changes that are happening in schools and society. I would very much like to see teacher training staying a crucial part of the contribution that this University makes because of the value and importance of the work connecting us with the local community but also connecting us with other areas of research that we do in the Department.