Last week, Tes revealed that the Department for Education had awarded delivery of the Early Career Framework (ECF) to just four established providers, a reduction from the five providers currently in place. We should question whether this cut is good for teachers or the sector.
It is clear that reforms to the ECF are needed. Feedback from teachers and mentors following the first rollout raised concerns about increased workload, repetitive content and lack of relevance to context.
Meanwhile, the Gatsby review recommended greater flexibility in delivery, “to reduce administrative burdens on schools and allow variation in content sequence”.
More on the Early Career Framework:
Reducing choice and competition between providers seems unlikely to address the concerns raised above. Professional development at such scale inevitably prioritises fidelity and efficiency of delivery over flexibility and contextual relevance.
As uncomfortable as it may be to recognise, professional development is most effective when it’s rooted in context, enabling teachers to apply new knowledge to the complex problems they face, through the lens of their own daily practice. This is as true for teachers who are new to the profession as it is for their more experienced colleagues.
Finding the balance between greater contextualisation and fidelity to frameworks is tricky but not impossible.
Some National Professional Qualification (NPQ) providers have shown there is a way to work collaboratively with schools and trusts to contextualise content, even within rigid criteria. “Flex” models enable the variation in content sequence that the Gatsby report recommended and could easily be applied to the ECF.
Early Career Framework: connection and collaboration
It is currently prohibitively difficult for schools to deliver the ECF in-house, where they cannot absorb the associated costs. The DfE can - and should - support schools to do so, to reduce reliance on external support and mobilise expertise from within the sector.
Such models enable teachers to work collaboratively, building the connection and belonging that is difficult to achieve in large national cohorts, but is crucial to wellbeing and retention.
School leaders must be given greater agency to make the right decisions about teacher development in their contexts. Constant changes to policy, and waiting on funding decisions, impede their ability to assess quality and impact.
What we have been left with will increase, not reduce, complexity. Some schools and trusts will now find themselves working with multiple providers for ECF and NPQ delivery, inevitably making it difficult to provide a coherent offer to staff and increasing the administrative burden - the very thing the Gatsby review warned against.
All this is not to talk down the concept of the ECF. Indeed, few educators would claim that it has not been a positive move. It’s essential we have a high-quality, evidence-based framework for teacher training and development.
But it should not be a straitjacket, and we need to give far greater ownership of its delivery to schools and trust them to take accountability for its impact. Multi-academy trusts and families of schools have shown they have the capacity and the moral imperative to work collaboratively to develop and deliver quality provision.
Recruiting thousands of new teachers is key to Labour’s opportunity mission and the government’s promised investment is hugely welcome. But if we want to retain those new teachers, we need a bold vision for their ongoing training and development. If we want the ECF to yield the results that merit the investment, we need to look at it afresh.
We can unleash the potential of teacher education reforms if we engage with diverse voices and perspectives, and empower educators with the agency to make decisions in their own contexts. Our teachers deserve nothing less.
Sam Gibbs is director of education at Greater Manchester Education Trust
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