Andy Todd obviously reckons the hassles of the travelling are worth it. Every day he drives with the traffic from Woodbridge, north-east of Ipswich, 45 miles down the busy A12 to Chelmsford. He’s 46, a former civil servant and personnel officer who is now training to be an English teacher at a group of schools around the Essex county town.

“The journey is worth it because this course has a good reputation,” he says. “For a mature student, it’s ideal: you’re treated like a member of staff, going to parents and open evenings, departmental meetings - everything that the teachers do.

“You’re also imbued with the ethos and spirit of education right from the start. I spoke to a lot of people about this. Some trainees on the graduate teacher programme told me they felt alone, left too much to their own resources. Here, the course is well structured, you’re observed by practising teachers so that you get plenty of feedback and plenty of time for reflection.”

His fellow student, Ellen Rae, agrees. She’s 30, has a degree in chemistry and experience as a PA and in catering. “I chose this course because it gives you the real fun of on-the-job training,” she says. “In science, it really matters if you miss out on a safety factor because a lesson can go horribly wrong. I know that staff are standing by to prompt me if I forget something important. They try to be as hands-off as possible and don’t intervene unnecessarily but they’re an important safety net for me.”

In the first two months, Mr Todd has already taken four lessons. Ms Rae is building up more slowly, taking 15-minute slots, working alongside experienced science staff. Most trainees here aren’t expected to take full lessons until Christmas.

The pair are among the 23 students taking PGCE courses to qualify with the Mid-Essex Scitt, a consortium of nine schools. This clumsy acronym - it means school-centred initial teacher training - is the seed-bed from which the training schools sprang (see “One Step Ahead”, page 20). In fact, two of its nine schools, Shenfield and Chelmer Valley, are also training schools.

Scitts started here in Essex, at the Colne school, Colchester, when Peter Upton, now director of education at the British Council, was head. He persuaded Whitehall that the right place to train teachers was in schools and the first programmes began in 1992. Now, one-third of teacher-training providers are Scitts.

“They are powerful partnerships that were conceived to work in parallel with the universities, not challenge them,” says Mr Upton. “They have drawn people into teaching who would not have gone the traditonal route and empowered teachers. They they have allowed them to extend their skills and embark on research and enhanced teachers’ professionalism.”

Such work demands a lot from teachers, who have responsibility for training others as well as managing their own workload. A professional mentor supervises the scheme in each school to ensure staff do not get overloaded.

At Chelmer Valley high school, Chelmsford, that job is filled by Joan Ball. “So much of the Scitt work overlaps with the professional development of our own staff that it makes sense that I supervise all staff development as well,” she says.

Each school specialises in certain subjects - Mid-Essex offers seven - with subject mentors in each school to supervise, but mainly advise, the students.

A lead subject mentor for the consortium takes weekly sessions with the students to tackle the theory of the subject. After a two-week induction, they spend four days a week in the classroom and one on theory. These lead mentors also organise termly meetings throughout the consortium where the subject specialists meet to iron out all the administrative and practical worries. As students spend time in different schools, these are useful occasions to compare notes and offer constructive advice to each other.

The science meeting held at Chelmer Valley last month would have left no one in any doubt how rigorous - but essentially supportive - the programme sets out to be.

Sue Hooper, an advanced skills teacher and science mentor for the Scitt at Mayflower school, Billericay, enthuses about the pleasure she gets from her mentoring work: “It’s such a treat to be able to discuss a lesson afterwards and get down the the nitty-gritty of what went well and what didn’t work.”

Rona Gottesman, science mentor at Chelmer Valley, agrees: “Most of my planning is in my head after a few years - talking through lessons with trainees helps me think the process through.”

Mid-Essex is particularly proud that its science trainees take all three separate disciplines up to key stage 4 - others, it seems, let them specialise after KS3. But then, they insist on quality here in Mid-Essex.

“We interview hard,” says Julien King of Helena Romanes school, Dunmow, and the lead science mentor for the consortium. “Last year, we sent four out of seven applicants away because their subject knowledge wasn’t up to it. Schools don’t have enough slack to mop up on their behalf.”

This year’s three science trainees, including Ellen Rae, will have to sit papers in the three main sciences over the summer to qualify - a stipulation laid down after the last Ofsted inspection.

Those who supervise Scitts seem pleased with Mid-Essex: “Our external examiner said that our students were well-imbued with the craft of the classroom,” says Anne Dobson, an experienced teacher who acts as programme leader for the consortium, who, with an administrative assistant, is the only staff member directly employed by the Scitt. “But when you consider they spend 34 weeks directly involved in the classroom, it’s hardly suprising that they turn out to be very competent.”

Dobson used to worry that the size of Scitts would preclude students from understanding the debate within their subjects, that there were too few contemporaries with whom to compare notes.

“In practice, our students are so integrated into working departments that they regard themselves as professionals almost right from the start,” she says.

But then, like training schools and the graduate teacher programme, Scitts have unearthed a different kind of recruit for the teaching profession.

Sandra Fox, 42, Chelmer Valley’s key stage 3 manager, typifies the intake. She passed through Mid-Essex three years ago after gaining a first with the OU while bringing up her family. “As a mature student, I needed to know what teaching meant on the front line.”

David Franklin, head of Chelmer Valley and the man who chairs the nine heads running the consortium, says: “The quality of the people who come in as trainees is getting better. Education is trying very hard to put itself forward as a career profession and people are quite choosy.”

Certainly, the nine schools get the pick of the students coming through which eases their recruitment worries.

The consortium started with five schools, expanded to seven and then to today’s nine. But how big can it get?

“There’s some talk of having associate schools who would offer specific areas of expertise,” says David Franklin, “but we have to be careful not to stretch ourselves too far. The whole thing is based on having good schools. We also have to watch the numbers we take, by department, by school, so that we don’t upset things - it’s a delicate balance.”