It’s your first long school placement. You and your mentor are both apprehensive and excited - because making mistakes can be painful. And yet you know that such experiences can help you learn.

When you’re a student on teaching practice, it is not just your own failures that you need to worry about. Staff in your practice school can sometimes presume too much about your capabilities; or you may find that the school is not giving you enough opportunities to find things out for yourself.

Being “the student” and making your mark is a difficult situation to negotiate at the best of times and it is bound to be hard to put your stamp on the school.

You’re never left alone Say your class teacher never leaves you alone with the children. You are glad at first. Other staff say your class is really difficult. While your teacher is there, the children are quite sensible with you. She sees a good deal of your teaching and can give you constant feedback.

But now it’s getting towards the end of your placement. You are terrified of being left with the children. You are equally terrified that you have not had a chance to deal with the little horrors without her.

The best move is to take your anxieties directly to your teacher. If this doesn’t work, explain the problem to the member of staff with particular responsibility for students. You are not complaining. You are trying to make sure you can learn.

Who’s boss? You’re not There are more classroom assistants in primary classrooms than ever before. Some of them are very experienced and highly skilled. Suppose the one in your class has a strong personality. In many ways, he or she knows more than you at present.

In the absence of the class teacher, the pupils seem to regard the assistant as the real teacher rather than you. It is proving hard for you to establish your own presence and authority.

If you possibly can, raise this directly with the assistant. Be quite open about your anxiety, acknowledge their knowledge and experience without being too fulsome, but make it clear that you need them to hold back so that you can establish yourself with the children.

Again, if this approach fails you may need to talk to your class teacher or a senior member of staff, and ask them to help.

They’re taking advantage

So school colleagues may prove to be too much of a good thing. But what if the opposite happens? On Tuesday evening of your first week, the class teacher casually announces that she is going to be away from Wednesday to Friday on a course. “You’ll be alright, won’t you!” she asserts cheerfully. You are less sure. But it’s a compliment in a way. It will be good also to get the feel of the class by yourself. So you agree. It should earn you some extra Brownie points.

On Monday of the second week, you are in bright and early, hoping to show your teacher your plans. You’ve worked hard on these. There’s a message from the deputy head. Your class teacher is ill. But you can cope, can’t you? There is no mention of a supply teacher. On Friday of that week, you learn that the flu has turned to bronchitis. But the school is really impressed with the way you are handling everythingI Of course, there’s much to be said for building up your credit with the school. Nevertheless, you are not an unpaid supply teacher - you are in the school for experiences that are crucial to your learning.

Be generous, yes - and certainly for a day or so. But then you need quietly and firmly to insist on alternative arrangements. You should also request visits by a senior member of staff for feedback on your teaching.

So you’re Miss Know-it-all Sadly, students can create their own disasters unaided. A mature student, fresh from senior management in the NHS, was on her first school placement.

She was an intelligent, interested person. Questions flowed from her in a ceaseless stream. “I just wondered why you were doing that. Apparently, Vygotsky saysI” Within a few days, she had infuriated every member of school staff, the educational psychologist, the nurse, the caretaker and even the lollipop lady. One morning she told the head: “My trouble is that I’m not afraid of headteachers.”

You can probably imagine the reaction. So what had gone wrong? First and foremost, she had not “played the role” of a student. The best schools make students really welcome and treat them as fellow professionals. Even so, perhaps more than in any other profession, expertise is inextricably bound up with experience - and the experience of most students tends to be somewhat limited.

Teachers do expect students to appreciate this. By the end of the placement, the headteacher accepted that the student was likely to make a good teacher, but all this added a few miles to an already long and difficult road.

Somehow, without behaving like Uriah Heap, you must try to convey to the other members of staff your conviction that you still have much to learn and that they have a lot to offer you. This must be genuine, so look hard and listen hard. Don’t miss anything - even if you don’t like some of the things you see.

And in some schools there may be very good reasons for certain approaches which will take you some time to understand.

Andrew Davis is a course leader for the primary PGCE at Durham University