There are a lot of issues facing education right now: recruitment and retention remain deeply problematic while teacher wellbeing, workload, attendance and pupil behaviour also require major focus.

Tackling these issues requires deep knowledge, expertise and understanding of the various factors that cause them and then putting together proposals to solve them - both at a national level but also locally, as each school, trust or local authority faces factors unique to its area.

Sadly, though, changes in the past few years around teacher training and development have depleted this talented pool and made its expertise harder to access at the very moment when we need it the most.

Reducing training access

The first move was the change from Teaching School Alliances to Teaching School Hubs that occurred over the past 18 months or so. There were over 750 of the former, delivering CPD and school-to-school support within a local context and often with over a decade of experience in this area.

However, in order to streamline this - and I agree having over 750 of these Alliances was too many - we now have 87 of the Teaching School Hubs (of which Chiltern Teaching School is one). Having fewer, higher-quality providers was needed.

This does offer efficiencies and perhaps makes it easier for a school to find a training partner as there are fewer choices in their area so it’s clearer where you need to go to access teacher development. This also allows for greater scrutiny of the providers and the quality of the provision being offered.

However, the difficulty was the metrics used to decide what makes a good teaching school - chiefly having good recent Ofsted reports and above-average Progress 8 scores - are not necessarily a true reflection of how good you may be at training other teachers and don’t demonstrate your contribution to the local teacher development landscape.

After all, being brilliant in one aspect of a discipline doesn’t necessarily translate into success in a different aspect. Just look at successful Premier League footballers who have tried their hand at management and been found wanting.

Yet this approach, which took a purely quantitative assessment of schools, meant much of the deep knowledge, expertise and insights that teacher trainers held in schools that failed to be accredited was essentially lost.

These trainers’ local knowledge, reputation and relationships meant that teachers in their immediate locality used them as the key signpost for all things training and development. That knowledge is lost when you lose that person from the system, and that local educational oracle-type figure is very hard to recreate.

Losing centuries of knowledge

This would be challenging enough on its own, but it is compounded by another recent policy change that required all ITT providers to go through a reaccreditation process - the upshot of which was that many universities and school-centred initial teacher training providers (SCITTs) either failed the process or decided not to go for reaccreditation at all.

At Chiltern Teaching School, we secured re-accreditation but we knew of several SCITTs that chose not to go through the process. So we have since partnered with these organisations as our expert partners for teacher training in their locality.

After all, the expertise and wisdom of someone who’s trained thousands of teachers cannot be replicated and recreated through just having a new handbook of some sort - it’s real, hard-earned experience that we need to ensure does not slip away.

In fact, we worked out that from just four colleagues, we gained over 100 years of combined knowledge of teacher training that would have otherwise disappeared from the sector.

Ensure hard-earned wisdom is not lost

Again, I want to make clear I am not against moves to bring greater alignment of the quality of provision for teacher training providers. I accept that it has merit and will help boost overall outcomes if handled correctly.

But I worry the way it has been done has created a situation where too much institutional knowledge could be lost - and that cannot be replicated.

Given this, it’s vital that those of us who are in the position to deliver training to teachers, new and old, do not become so blinded as to think we have all the answers but instead harness this expertise that exists around us.

The onus is on us to look beyond our own brands, local rivalries, school rivalries, or MAT rivalries and ensure we preserve the richness and heritage that exists within the system to ensure we can overcome the challenges we face together.

Sufian Sadiq is director of teaching school at Chiltern Learning Trust