Action will be taken over failings by multi-academy trusts (MATs) involved in the National Institute of Teaching, its leader has pledged in an interview with Tes.
The new National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) was formally signed into existence last week following a legal dispute between the losing bidder, Ambition Institute, and the Department for Education.
Today, Melanie Renowden, founding CEO of the NIoT - who is also the executive director of Star Institute - spoke with Tes about the new organisation and its “expectations” of the academy trusts it works with.
The NIoT will be run by four MATs - collectively known as the Schools Led Development Trust (SLDT) - that were handed the contract after a long-running tender process by the DfE.
Those MATs are Harris Federation, Outwood Grange Academies Trust, Oasis Community Learning and Star Academies.
Tes asked what would happen if one of these organisations was found to be failing on MAT standards, and how this would affect their standing in the government’s flagship training scheme.
Ms Renowden said the institute was designing a “governance and quality assurance approach and framework”, to allow the NIoT to ensure it has a “really thorough oversight of what’s happening across the country in the institute”.
The new governance framework will cover the MATs that combined to form the SLDT, as well as the academy trust partners of the NIoT that are working on the design and delivery of the programmes.
This will mean it can be “really confident” about the decisions being made “upfront”, she said.
Ms Renowden added that the institute was also putting “checks and balances in place” to see where there might be “any kind of variance from our expectations”.
She said: “Of course what we would want to do is make sure that we’ve got up front governance structures and then ongoing quality assurance to keep an eye on and to take action if we needed to take action.”
She added that her organisation, and the partners it is working with, are holding themselves to “high standards”.
The NIoT was first announced by the DfE in January last year as part of an effort by the government to boost teacher recruitment and training.
Ms Renowden said she believes that the NIoT will have an important role to play in teacher recruitment and should act as “a positive lever in terms of future recruitment in the profession”.
Today, Tes revealed that the two Russell Group universities partnered with NIoT had failed to pass round one of initial teacher training (ITT) accreditation.
Responding to this, Ms Renowden said the development of the institute had been underway for “quite a while” and so the institute had “got to know our partners through that process”.
She insisted that the accreditation process was “ongoing” and had not yet concluded. She also added that she was “confident” about the providers being successful in round two and that she had “confidence in the quality of what they’re doing”.
The contract for the NIoT previously said that the institute would open in “early 2022” and “operate most of its core functions” by September.
The contract was expected to be signed in March of this year, but this was delayed due to the legal action brought by Ambition Institute.
Although the government will be sticking to the September opening date, the programmes offered will be staggered, with only the National Professional Qualification for Executive Leadership (NPQEL) and National Leader of Education (NLE) offered from this September.
Ms Renowden also said she “wouldn’t anticipate any more delays” to the launch dates for the institute.
Asked about the place that remote learning will have in the institute, Ms Renowden said there was a place for it and it was about “selecting the right mode for the right moment...whether that’s joining a session remotely or doing gap tasks, or research in between those in person sessions,” she said.
She added: “But even when there are those moments, perhaps, where virtual learning is appropriate or asynchronous learning is appropriate, what’s really important to us is that school-led element still comes through.”
