I first realised that we had a problem with teacher development in 2012, when I asked a civil servant at the Department for Education what its CPD policy was.
The response was: “Our CPD policy? I don’t know… I guess it’s Teaching Schools?”
This was a time when the government believed that CPD was something to be left to headteachers: as a result, it was in the process of closing arm’s-length bodies like the General Teaching Council, the Training and Development Agency and the National College for School Leadership.
Ten years on and, thankfully, priorities have shifted. Today teacher development is centre stage in government policy.
We’ve now got an Early Career Framework, more National Professional Qualifications being developed and, of course, the new National Institute of Teaching - all of which have required significant levels of funding.
More on teaching and learning:
In these initiatives, the government has taken a research-first approach; it has ensured that the latest evidence on CPD is built into all of the early career and leadership frameworks, headteacher standards, the CPD standards and the central models of the new Teaching School Hubs.
These school hubs, especially, are a great example of the government ensuring that funded programmes are quality-assured, in line with existing research. The assurance process is built on published frameworks and involves increasingly influential education research body the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) keeping an eye on whether statements being made in materials are genuinely aligned to the research base. The EEF also now checks whether research quoted is representative of the broad sweep of evidence and is of high quality.
Improving teacher development
This focus will continue into the new National Institute of Teaching, which promises to bring more research into the field of teaching and teacher development.
It’s a long way from the very hands-off approach that we saw at the start of the 2010s.
Multi-academy trusts, too, are increasingly taking the lead on CPD and developing their own programmes of development that share expertise, develop staff and create cross-school networks.
There’s huge potential here - so many teachers in smaller schools have very limited career options but they are increasingly able to consider doing, for example, a day per week in a cross-trust role, either supporting a curriculum area or developing colleagues.
There’s real change at institutional level, too: the Chartered College of Teaching, for example, has established chartered career routes and has become fully independent of government, something that the General Teaching Council never was.
So have we solved the problem? It feels like great progress, but there’s plenty of work still to do. The nature of politics means that attention and focus could swing away just as quickly as they arrive.
And just because the policy at the top is shifting, it doesn’t mean the reality is being felt in all schools. Indeed, you may be reading this and thinking, “That doesn’t sound like my school or trust.”
This, then, is a call to action.
We have to build opportunities for development that support every teacher. We have to keep prioritising this work, not just in government policies but in leadership, too.
In turn, the government’s requirements on leaders need to take into account the time and resources needed for it to work.
So, as my charity, the Teacher Development Trust, celebrates its 10th anniversary today, my key message is this: we need to take the learning of staff just as seriously as the learning of pupils.
If we do that, there’s really no limit on what we can do.
David Weston is chief executive of the Teacher Development Trust. He was chair of the Department for Education’s CPD Expert Group. Follow him on Twitter @informed_edu and the Wellcome Trust @WellcomeTrust
