School of Education

  • School Experience Centre

    Our School Experience Centre is a treasure trove of learning materials that you can borrow for your lessons, when you are on teaching placement.

    Resources available

    There are a range of books that cover the key stages, and a variety of resource packs that can be used for practical classes. We have musical instruments and a large catalogue of CD, CD-ROMS and DVDs to choose from. More information about what is available from the School Experience Centre and how to contact the librarian is below.

  • As with the material in the Main Library all items in the SEC are on LibrarySearch and are shelved by subject eg all resources on the Victorians can be found at 941.081. The location given will be the School Experience Centre, and each item will have a blue piece of tape on the spine to distinguish it . If you wish to find items JUST from the School Experience Centre you can restrict your search on LibrarySearch by limiting your search to 'School Experience Centre'. The LibrarySearch entry will also tell you which of the following formats to look in:

    • SEC Children's Book
    • SEC Children's Big Book
    • SEC Poster
    • SEC CD-ROM
    • SEC CD
    • SEC Resource Pack
    • SEC Maths equipment
    • SEC Reference
    • SEC Artefact (kept in the stack please ask a member of library staff to get this for you)
    • Fiction
    • Non-fiction
    • Picture books
    • Big books
    • Pupil and teacher textbooks
    • Reference collection - including reading and maths schemes, and other photocopiable resources.
    • DVDs
    • CDs and Cassettes
    • CD-ROMs
    • Artefacts
    • Resource packs
    • Posters/illustrations
    • Games and musical instruments
    • Equipment - including maths and science equipment

    The Library journal collection includes a number of titles of relevance to student teachers offering up to date information on practical and theoretical issues. All our holdings can be found on LibrarySearch by searching by title or keyword. This will indicate whether a print and/or electronic version is available. All print journals are reference only and are kept in the Main Library on the ground floor. Articles from journals may be photocopied. Some useful titles are listed below:

    Child Education and Child Education Topics
    Junior Education and Junior Education Topics
    Primary Geographer
    Primary History

    We have multiple copies of some picture books and junior fiction and it is possible to borrow more than one copy of an item to take into school if required. Sometimes there are Big Book versions of the same text also available to borrow.
    We have a growing collection of both wordless picture books and dual language texts available to borrow. You can find these by using LibrarySearch and searching by keywords wordless picture books or dual language.
    Most of the loanable material in the SEC can be borrowed for six weeks. One week loan items have an additional piece of yellow tape on the spine and reference books a piece of red tape. Reference books cannot be borrowed, but some titles may also have a duplicate loan copy so please always check using LibrarySearch. The LibrarySearch entry will indicate how many copies there are, which ones are reference or loan copies and how long the loan periods are. Education students may borrow 20 items at a time from this collection in addition to 15 items from the main library. Other users may borrow up to 5 items from the SEC, in addition to their normal loan allocation.
    Seating is arranged so that groups can sit together and discuss project work. There are two bookable group study rooms which have PCs with interactive whiteboards. These can be booked online via the Library home page. There is also a network of thirteen networked computers. A machine for  printing/scanning/photocopying in black and white and colour is located outside Group Study room 2. The DVD collection is housed outside this room and a machine for previewing DVDs is located next to the QuickSearch (catalogue) machines.
    Your Academic Liaison Librarian with responsibility for the School Experience Centre is Charlotte Olehnovics. Charlotte can be contacted on 01865 488220 at Harcourt Hill Library or by email at educationlibrarians@brookes.ac.uk (she works all day Monday, Tuesday afternoon/evening, and Wednesday mornings).