A quiet revolution has been underway in our schools for some time. It may not grab the headlines, but it is transforming the sector. I am talking about professional development.
For a significant part of my own long teaching career, professional development (or “Inset” as it was generally known) was associated with a long-looked-forward-to day out of the classroom, surviving a twilight briefing or “good practice sharing” on a randomly chosen topic after a long teaching day, with marking still to be done that evening.
It often seemed detached and ended up having little impact on my classroom teaching, or, by extension, on my pupils’ learning. Much of it, frankly, was snake oil.
The teacher CPD revolution
Then, a little over a decade ago, as an established headteacher, I started to become aware of the large and growing body of research and evidence on what makes teaching effective, and, indeed, less effective. It immediately struck a chord.
I saw an opportunity at last to give teachers access to professional development that truly merited the name and, better still, could actually speak to some of the problems around pupils’ learning that teachers face every day.
Very quickly it became clear that this breaking out of good evidence about curriculum and pedagogy from the confines of the research community had the potential to be revolutionary for us in schools.
As a large secondary school, and later as a trust, we started to apply all the evidence we could lay our hands on and induct our teachers into professional learning impacting on practice that very few of them had even glimpsed in earlier in their careers.
The applications of cognitive load theory, desirable difficulty and interleaving, along with curricular atomisation, selection and sequencing, became a common language as a result of our (initially home-grown) professional development work.
This experience has convinced me that pupils learn better, remember more, improve their self-efficacy and are, therefore, better motivated when teachers and schools root their practice in properly evidenced professional expertise.
It also helps those pupils who start disadvantaged to find it easier to catch up, and keep up.
This does not happen by chance.
Time to learn and grow
It requires deep interest, understanding and commitment on the part of leaders, the careful planning of professional development, and investment, of both time and money, systematically to mobilise that professional development so teachers actually benefit from it.
This is why I believe that one of the most significant achievements of recent years has been to take that insight and scale it up across the country.
For example, the double teaching school hub (TSH) that I lead covers a large area of East and West Kent and I have seen first-hand the positive impact on early career teachers (ECTs) and those taking part in the new generation of National Professional Qualifications programmes.
By dint of much work, take-up in our TSH areas right across all the NPQs and for the ECT programme has been very strong, as has been the feedback from participants.
Large numbers of teachers and leaders from my own trust are also on the programmes, so I see the impact very close to home. Repeatedly, feedback tells us that this professional development is revolutionary for individual teachers, their teams and often also their schools.
Threats to professional development
Like all revolutions, however, this one also faces many risks, and could still be fragile.
There are those who see properly designed and evidence-based professional development as somehow a threat to teacher autonomy. This is quite wrong.
We need to be clear as teachers that to be truly professional and responsibly autonomous we must be constantly open to honing our expertise in the light of research and evidence.
What’s more, the link between researchers and practitioners is not a one-way street. Researchers must understand the nature of the actual problems that teachers need to solve and shape their research in the light of those problems.
We also need policymakers to be clear that you continue to improve education only by making teachers, and schools, more expert.
And expertise is not based on whim or fashion but, rather, secure evidence, including in the burgeoning field of cognitive science - how human beings learn.
To mobilise that expertise, we need professional development that is planned, sequenced, longitudinal and responsive to the challenges we face in securing better learning for pupils.
A price worth paying
There is an economic element to this, too.
Because while it was great news that education achieved a strong funding settlement in the recent Autumn Statement, it is imperative that, despite the obvious cost pressures that all schools and trusts face, enough of that funding is set aside for initial, early and ongoing teacher development.
While it is not a panacea for driving take-up, free-at-the-point-of-access ECT and NPQ training removes a critical obstacle to access, and so all schools and trusts should recognise their responsibility to invest in teachers’ expertise.
It is the surest way to continue to improve the education that all pupils receive and so, whatever the future funding arrangements or wider landscape, this, for me, is a professional non-negotiable.
Ian Bauckham is the CEO of Tenax Schools Trust and the Kent Teaching School Hub
