Since the early career framework was launched in 2019, our trust has worked with over a thousand early career teachers - in partnership with Ambition Institute - and in doing so, we noticed something really interesting. When experienced teachers who hadn’t had a journey of rich professional development saw what the early career teachers were learning, they became hungry to have the same.

We already knew the ECF was a comprehensive curriculum for teachers just starting out in the profession, but we’ve come to realise that it’s a lot more than that. In short, it’s not just an early career framework - it’s a powerful teacher development framework.

That’s why we have rolled out a version of the ECF to every teacher in our schools - no matter how experienced they are.

So, what does this look like in practice?

Rolling out the early career framework

It all began when, during learning explorations around our schools, trust leaders noticed some practices that our ECTs were implementing consistently well, but that our more experienced teachers hadn’t considered in the same detail.

Take entry routines. As a trust, we’d never broken down how we transition from lunch to lessons, but our ECTs had a clear entry routine for bringing children from transition into learning. Their lessons started fast, they were maximising learning time, and low-level disruption was minimised.

Another example is “I do, we do, you do”, which our ECTs were using to explicitly model new concepts to children. The teacher would model, the whole class would practise together - often building collaboratively on an example - then children would practise independently. Our more experienced teachers were modelling, but in a less explicit way, and we found this new structure gave children a much clearer model of what to do when they worked independently.

More widely, our schools also didn’t have a shared understanding of routines and practices, meaning that each time the children moved to a different year group, the expectations were different.

We asked ourselves how we might share this learning with all of our teachers, and the ECF was the answer. We have now developed a structured approach to whole-school improvement, based on the framework. We cover much of the same material, with the aim of building expertise across whole teaching teams.

Read more:

• How to ensure effective CPD in schools
• How ‘open classrooms’ can enhance CPD
• Why modelling should be at the heart of teacher CPD

The trailblazers in this change were the ECF induction tutors and mentors; they could see the difference the programme was making and wanted to see it shared more widely. As a trust, we backed them on this, and harnessed our ECF mentors’ enthusiasm to roll out additional training to all staff as part of their directed time for staff meetings.

Initially, there was some trepidation about receiving ECF training - but a big part of this was the “early career” part of the name. As soon as staff realised it was really just about sharing evidence-informed pedagogy and developing expertise, that trepidation disappeared - especially as they began to see the impact on their practice.

Of course, not all of the ECF is relevant to more experienced staff. However, there are still complex concepts to grapple with and principles that apply to learners at every stage. For example, we know learning must be repeated and practised to enter long-term memory and become automatic. Repetition is therefore an important part of the programme.

In terms of content, we identified the key components that we think are really important for engaging learners (for example, entry routines); building learning (for example, “I do, we do, you do”); and consolidating learning (for example, retrieval practice), then we used the action steps in the ECF to detail the behaviours and actions needed to get to that point.

The phrase “engage, build, consolidate” forms the foundation of our approach.

Trust-wide professional development

Our schools are different in context, so implementation varies from school to school, and has been carefully considered with every headteacher.

During our teaching and learning visits, the trust leadership team identifies where strengths and weaknesses lie, then links up schools to collaborate. If we assess that there’s a need for whole-trust training around a topic, we will deliver this training centrally. Otherwise, training takes place on a school-by-school basis; it might be delivered to all staff, or by phase - depending on the topic.

Inset days are supplemented by about an hour a week of professional development time in staff meetings.

Across the trust, we’ve also used the ECF to codify the language we use to talk about teaching and learning. For example, while schools may have developed the behaviour policy into “the St Paul’s way” or “the Greenhill way” - there’s still a level of consistency that means teachers can move between schools in our trust and speak a common language of learning.

In addition, we’ve developed a clear flight path from trainee teacher to executive leader as part of our professional development hub. We feel it’s our duty to ensure that all our staff are on a career pathway where they can flourish.

Developing expert teachers takes time but we keep asking ourselves, can we afford not to make this investment? High-quality professional development should be an entitlement, not a luxury. And at the end of the day, it’s teacher quality that makes a difference to our children.

Elliot Costas-Walker is director of learning and partnerships at the Forward As One Church of England Multi-Academy Trust