For schools
We train your staff so the club outlasts our coach.
Forty hours, free to every enrolled school, for two members of staff. No prior chess knowledge assumed — most of the teachers we train have never played a serious game.
What the training covers
8 hours
Playing the game
The rules from scratch, for teachers who have never played. By the end you will be comfortably beating a beginner — which is all you need.
10 hours
Teaching the rules
How to introduce each piece, the mistakes children reliably make, and how to run a class of forty when only twenty can play at once.
8 hours
Tactics and pattern teaching
The four core tactical patterns and how to build the recognition drills that make children spot them at the board.
6 hours
Chess across the curriculum
Using the demonstration board in maths lessons. Making the coordinate-grid and if–then links explicit rather than hoping for transfer.
4 hours
Running a club and a tournament
Pairings, clocks, scoring, and how to handle the disputes that arise when eight-year-olds discover the touch-move rule.
4 hours
Inclusion and safeguarding
Keeping girls in the club past Class 6, adapting sessions for neurodiverse pupils, and our child-protection expectations.
How it runs
Training is delivered in four Saturday sessions across the first term, either at a regional centre or — where a cluster of schools enrol together — at one of the participating schools. Teachers who cannot attend in person can complete the first two modules online.
There is no cost to the school or the teacher. Certification is issued on completion and is recognised for CPD purposes by our state partners.
We ask that the two trained teachers stay involved with the club for at least the following academic year. The whole point is that when our coach's thirty weeks end, chess does not end with them.
Enrol and we will book your staff in
Training places are allocated by district and fill up before each term begins.