The Department for Education has launched a consultation on the Early Career Framework (ECF) and initial teacher training (ITT) curriculums.
The review comes amid ongoing criticism of the ECF since it launched in 2021, with a report published last year revealing that most teacher mentors thought the support package for new teachers had no impact on retention.
There have also been concerns raised by the sector about the workload of both early career teachers (ECTs) and mentors.
The ITT Core Content Framework (CCF) was revised in 2019, while the ECF is currently in its second year of national rollout.
The ECF, launched in 2021, aims for ECTs to be mentored on a one-to-one basis in order to “improve support for early career teachers”, while the CCF sets out the content that ITT providers and their partnerships must draw upon when designing and delivering their programmes.
The DfE said today that the research could “inform amendments to the frameworks” but it was “not anticipated that this will involve a fundamental rewrite of the frameworks”.
The department had previously said in 2019 that the two frameworks would be reviewed together in the future, to “build on previous iterations and draw on the best available evidence”.
After the consultation, the DfE said that any decisions about amendments to the frameworks will be taken by the department, working with panels of experts.
Last March, then schools minister Robin Walker wrote to schools to set out ECF changes, admitting the scheme needed “more flexibility” and promising that the DfE was “making improvements”.
He said that to “help” with the implementation, the DfE would be “reviewing materials to make them as user-friendly as possible” as well as a number of other moves to ease the transfer to the ECF.
Not enough mentors?
Data published by the DfE last week shows that there were 25 per cent fewer mentors trained on provider-led courses in the 2022-23 academic year compared to the number of ECTs starting provider-led ECF-based induction.
There were 23,313 ECTs in the provider-led training this year, while the total number of mentors trained for provider-led ECF-based induction this year was 17,610. However, there will be ECT mentors already in the system from training completed last year.
Last year, DfE data revealed that 25,119 ECTs had started the programme since the national rollout of the ECF in September 2021 and the number of mentors recruited was almost 10 per cent lower, with a total of 22,956 trained to work with ECTs.
The consultation launches today and closes on 21 April 2023.
