A GROUP of pupils from a Croydon school have been helping future teachers prepare themselves to get the best out of their career.

They faced a grilling from student teachers about how they could do their job better once they started work.

Archbishop Lanfranc School, in Mitcham Road, is closely involved with the Government's Teach First programme.

The project involves the recruitment of top graduates from universities and parachuting them into a teaching job.

Instead of years of teacher training away from the classroom, the graduates are given around six months of intensive training in subjects like discipline and behavioural management.

The rest of the training is a combination of study and putting what they learnt almost immediately into practise before a class of students.

The key aim of the scheme is to get more top graduates into challenging schools, helping improve pupil performance while equipping the teachers for promotion into senior posts.

Shiraz Lafhaj, who is in her second year teaching art at Lanfranc and is part of the Teach First set up, believes the combination of studying and classroom work was very successful.

It was Ms Lafhaj who led the Lanfranc pupils in their head-to-head with around 60 teachers on the programme.

The youngsters put themselves in the firing line answering a range of questions on what they expected from education and their teachers.