With the disaster of the 2020 exam period and the many months of pupils being out of the classroom now behind us, it feels like we could just be over the very worst of the immediate chaos sowed by the pandemic. 

But while there might be some semblance of normality in sight, the real work of dealing with the fallout in education is only just beginning, as attention turns to helping pupils to catch up over the next few years. 

That alone is an enormous challenge. But it is complicated by the low morale of teachers, who have already been under huge pressure for the past year.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson and the education recovery commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, have both emphasised the need to put teachers at the heart of any recovery plan, acknowledging that there is no substitute for high-quality teaching to support pupils. 

However, an NEU teaching union survey suggests that two-thirds of teachers have experienced an increased workload over the past year. And over half believe their work-life balance has worsened.

The problem now facing policymakers is easing the burden on teachers while simultaneously increasing learning. The education secretary says that improving professional development for teachers will be central to that, and he is right to do so. 

Analysis published by the Education Policy Institute highlights just how important a role professional development can play - we find that an entitlement to high-quality CPD for all teachers would not only improve pupils’ progress by GCSE level, but also may improve teachers’ wellbeing and encourage them to remain in the profession. 

Prioritising CPD in the recovery is also likely to be needed, given the skill in which teachers say they most need training - effectively supporting SEND pupils - is one that is likely to be increasingly necessary in the coming months.

Unfortunately, we are not yet a world leader in supporting professional development needs. It’s well-known that England’s teachers are well below international standards on the amount of CPD they take. And, perhaps more worrying, much of it falls short of the Department for Education’s own standards. A pilot study on CPD  found that only 10 per cent of teachers taking part had both met the DfE’s criteria and had at least 18 hours of subject-specific content.

CPD: The potential to improve teachers’ job satisfaction

Improving the quantity and - more importantly - the quality of that training is therefore crucial to achieving the government’s goals for both education recovery and teacher retention. Randomised controlled trials find that high-quality CPD has an average effect on pupils’ attainment equivalent to one month of extra learning. 

With pupils suffering a learning loss of two to three months over the past year, it is clear that CPD could be an effective tool to support education recovery. However, hidden within that average are many CPD programmes that have no measurable effect on pupils’ attainment, so it will be critical to focus on the quality of the programmes that are funded.

While CPD has great potential to improve teachers’ job satisfaction and retention, the research evidence on this is slightly thinner than the impact on attainment. Some programmes have shown marked effects on retention, with teachers who participate more than twice as likely to remain in the profession as their colleagues. 

Teachers participating in Wellcome’s CPD challenge, which aims to drive up the quality of CPD on offer, report benefits such as improvements to knowledge surrounding pedagogy, subject mastery and confidence and leadership skills - all of which hold the potential to help with retention.

Other studies have found that CPD is associated with greater job satisfaction, or a stronger intention to remain in the profession. However, good studies are rare, and we still need to see lots more of them to confidently answer the retention question. 

Having more information on CPD undertaken by teachers in England would be a good place to start in improving the current offer. Lack of government data means we can’t even be sure whether teachers are doing more or less CPD than a few years ago, or how much is of high quality. This needs to change. 

Improved professional development has the potential to both help teachers feel supported at work and aid children’s learning; however, that relies on being able to quickly scale up the delivery of high-quality training. The past year has produced many examples of excellent ideas that failed to live up to expectations because of poor implementation, from inadequate school meals to the extraordinarily slow delivery of laptops. 

Avoiding those pitfalls will be hard, especially given the complexity of designing and delivering good CPD - but they are not insurmountable. If the government were able to get this policy right, it could yield huge rewards for both teachers and pupils.  

James Zuccollo is director for school workforce at the Education Policy Institute, and Jens Van den Brande is senior researcher, school system and performance, at the Education Policy Institute