Advice for applicants – What to expect in your interview with NITE
Thursday 23 January 2025
4 min read
Hannah Sisley shares her advice on preparing for your interview with NITE
Hannah joined NITE in 2021 after working as a music teacher in various settings for 10 years. Hannah currently specialises in admissions for our iPGCE with iQTS course, communicating with and supporting applicants and trainees all over the world. Here she shares her advice on preparing for your interview.
Who will interview me?
Your interview for any of our initial teacher training routes will be conducted by a member of the team at NITE via Teams. Depending on your phase and subject, your interviewer might be one of our University Lead Mentors, one of our course management team, or one of our subject specialists. Every interviewer has Qualified Teacher Status themselves and will have, at one time or another, been a teacher.
Have your ID ready
At the beginning of the interview, we will ask to see a copy of your ID as we need to check that we’ve got the right person sat in front of us. After this, our aim to make you feel at ease: while our job is to check that you’re suitable to train to teach, there is much more to this than ensuring you have the required subject knowledge. We want to get to know you and understand why you’ve chosen this career path. We may ask you questions about things you’ve written in your personal statement or we may delve into something you’ve said during your presentation or in answer to one of our questions.
Your presentation
The presentation section of the interview is roughly five minutes long and is your opportunity to show us what you know about your chosen subject and for you to demonstrate your passion for teaching. If you’re currently working as an unqualified teacher, this may come more naturally to you than those applicants who have less experience of the profession. Don’t worry – this is all considered. Each interviewer takes time before your interview to read your personal statement and to gather information on which course you’ve applied for and whether you’ve got experience within schools or not. Having no experience within schools is not something that will rule you out. But, if this is you, it can help if you prepare for the interview by reading up on the national curriculum for your phase or subject, even just for the purpose of knowing where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
Sharing your screen
The screen share portion of the interview is not as nerve-wracking as it may sound. This is largely an online course, from application to graduation, so we must make sure that who we are interviewing is the same person that has been communicating with our Student Selection team and has written the personal statement. We will ask you to write your answers to three questions while sharing your screen, but it’s important to note that we don’t watch you like a hawk while you do this as we understand that you make the most mistakes when someone is watching you type! You will have five minutes to complete this task and one additional minute to fix any typos.
We want you to succeed!
We will ask you lots of questions, this is an interview. But the purpose is not to catch you out; we really do want you to succeed. We understand that interviews can be nervous affairs and that’s okay; just be yourself and answer as best you can. Don’t be afraid to ask for a question to be repeated or rephrased. Remember too that this is an opportunity for you to ask us questions. It is always a good idea to have thought of some questions as part of your preparation in case your mind goes blank when we ask you.
