From PGCE to first classroom: a practical guide for new teachers entering the sector

Every year roughly 4,500 newly-qualified teachers leave Uganda’s teacher-training colleges and education faculties looking for a first post. The route from a freshly-printed PGCE or BEd to a confirmed classroom is structured, but rarely explained end-to-end. This piece does that.

We cover four steps in order: registering with the Ministry of Education and Sports (the licence number you will be asked for in every interview), preparing a CV that schools actually read (one page, subject mastery up top, the lesson observation note from teaching practice as the closing line), interviewing well at a Ugandan school (the demonstration lesson, the parent-meeting question, the salary-expectation answer), and surviving the first term (the timetable shock, the marking load, the staffroom politics nobody warns you about).

Throughout, we draw on interviews with new teachers from the 2024 and 2025 cohorts, head teachers who have hired both well and badly, and our own classroom observations. Whether you are looking at government, private, Cambridge or IB schools, the structure of the route is the same. The expectations differ; the steps do not.