The Department for Education launched its consultation ‘Strengthening Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and Improving Career Progression for Teachers’ in December 2017, when Justine Greening was in post. Since then – at time of writing at least – there have been 7 more secretaries of state (Source). Despite the unprecedented turbulence in Sanctuary Buildings, there has been remarkable consistency of focus on this agenda. They set out their Teacher recruitment and retention strategy in February 2019 listing what they saw as the 4 ‘key barriers’ to getting and keeping teachers in the classroom.
- The wider context in which headteachers operate can create pressure that leads to excessive workload that distracts teachers from teaching
- Not enough early career teachers receive the high-quality support they need to build the foundation for a successful career.
- A career in teaching does not always adapt to the expertise and lives of teachers.
- The process to become a teacher is too complicated and burdensome.
To address these barriers, they proposed 4 strategic priorities: getting Ofsted to look at – and penalise – excessive workload in schools; the Early Career Framework; a revised suite of National Professional Qualifications; and a market review of ITE.
‘World-class teacher development requires world-class delivery’
In terms of the ECF, this kicked off with an early roll-out in September 2020. The ITE and NPQ reforms followed in rapid succession. In March 2022, the DfE published Delivering world-class teacher development, a brief overview of the slew of recent radical changes in this area, including the creation of the National Institute of Teaching (‘England’s flagship Lead Provider’); the ‘Golden Thread’ of career-long support led by a ‘professional development infrastructure’ – the network of lead providers and partners delivering the ECF and NPQ curricula; the designation of 87 Teaching School Hubs (the ‘backbone’ of delivery partners); and accreditation of new – and de-accreditation of many well-established – centres of Initial Teacher Education.
Problems solved? Not quite.
The March 2022 report from NFER – Teacher Labour Market in England – Annual Report 2022 – pointed to the ‘substantial risk’ of under-recruitment in a range of secondary subjects. It noted that teachers’ median real-terms pay was around 7 to 9 per cent lower in 2020/21 than in 2010/11. They also quoted concerns from senior leaders about the combined burdens on their schools of mentoring trainee teachers and early career teachers. NFER recommended ‘Government should take action to ensure schools have sufficient long-term mentoring capacity to support the increasing numbers of trainees and new teachers entering the system’ (p5).
The latest data from the school workforce census, November 2021 (Source) shows that teacher retention problems are now returning to pre-pandemic proportions. 4,000 more teachers left in 2020-21 than the previous year. A total 36,262 staff – 8.1 per cent of the state school workforce – left the sector. 12.5% of newly qualified teachers left within the year – still two percentage points better than 2019. Becky Allen says
‘This creates a profession that is less experienced than in other developed countries and it is a perpetual teacher recruitment crisis where we must keep stuffing the pipeline with new trainees. It damages the overall quality of teaching that students experience through unnecessarily high exposure to inexperienced staff. Early career retention is a problem worth fixing.’ Schools Week, November 2022
Allen’s ‘fixes’ – as suggested to respondents to the Teacher Tapp survey (Iain Ford, Becky Allen, Karen Wespieser) – are two-fold: reduce the ‘overlap in content’ between the ITE and ECF frameworks; and adapt the ECF so that it meets teachers’ subject and phase specific needs. ‘What teachers would like is a much greater role in co-designing early-career provision, alongside the right to adapt existing programmes to suit an individual teacher’s needs.’
The UCL approach
Becky Allen concedes that, overall, the profession is supportive of the ECF. Only 10% would see it scrapped. 96% of early career teachers are signed up to a programme with a lead provider, when schools have the option of creating their own induction instead. In fact, what Teacher Tapp suggests teachers would most like to do, they can already do: their schools have the right to co-design their own provision, using the freely available core materials; they can already adapt the programmes to suit their own needs, as the statute guarantees their freedom to develop a school-based offer of their own.
Of course, there are incentives for schools to sign up for the full package of induction from a lead provider. The materials have already been approved by the Education Endowment Foundation and signed off by the DfE. The government funding for mentor training is only there for schools that opt for a provider-led programme. Where a school is served by a local Teaching School Hub whom they trust, they can be assured of the high quality of the online or face-to-face sessions. With these incentives in mind, it’s not surprising that the huge majority of schools have so far made the choice they have. But that does not mean that they no longer care about adapting the programme to meet their local needs.
The question arises: can a school make the ECF programme their own while at the same time being signed up to a provider-led full induction programme?
The answer: if your provider is UCL, then pretty much yes.
Three levels of adaptation
The Delivery level. Our network of delivery partners is highly collaborative. They have helped us to improve how we present our materials on our learning platform; they spot when things go wrong and help us to put them right. They work most closely with schools and that affords us a vital feedback loop. We have made our resources much more accessible.
- Every item of every module is free to view at all times, and on any internet enabled device. This matters because, although the majority of our teachers commence in the Autumn term and follow our sequence as we have designed it, not all can. We have part-time teachers, we have teachers who start induction in January or April, we have teachers who – through enforced absence or because they are struggling to meet the Teachers’ Standards – need to have their mentor meetings or do their self-directed study at times that suit them.
- All of our live facilitated sessions are also available asynchronously. We prefer mentors and ECTs to attend their sessions with their own facilitators, but this does not work for all. Our delivery partners are excellent at arranging sessions at different times, or they can extend an invitation for someone to temporarily join another group. But, when all else has failed, ECTs and mentors can attend by watching a recorded version of the session online. With the increasing intensification of teachers’ time, it is important that a large-scale programme such as ours can allow for the choices that hard-pressed individuals need to make.
- Our mentors and our ECTs are assembled into local clusters, of about 15 to 20 persons each. These clusters are where the facilitated professional learning takes place. ECTs learn more about the learn that and the learn how to of the Early Career Framework. Mentors learn about our preferred conceptual frameworks for mentoring and about how to support their ECT through sensible re-contextualisation of the programme resources. UCL has produced all of the slides, notes and readings for these facilitated sessions, and insist on fidelity to the learning intentions. But we also invite and expect there to be local variation. For example, where there is a cluster of ECTs working in special schools, their facilitator will adapt the slides and case studies for that setting. For a secondary cluster, we often see great facilitators splitting them into smaller subject-related groups, so teachers can engage in the ideas with others in similar classrooms.
The Subject or Phase level. Becky Allen recommended that the ECF be amended so that it meets teachers’ subject and phase specific needs. We make two responses to that. Firstly, it already does. Secondly, the generic intentions of the ECF are a strength, not a weakness.
Second things first. The ECF is generic because there are many things about teaching which are universal. Teachers create a curriculum and marshal resources; they ensure a respectful and safe environment; they ask questions, and assess learning at different points, in different ways, for different purposes; they do their best to meet the needs of the pupils and the demands of the curriculum; they cooperate with families, carers and colleagues. Not content with doing all those marvellous things, teachers seek to get better at them all. That’s all teachers. Some teachers spend their careers in a single phase or in a single department, but very many do not. Mainstream teachers shift into alternative provision settings, a teacher may teach Year 6 followed by Year 2, English teachers teach Drama. An ECF programme that merely developed teachers for one setting or subject would not be developing teachers for the careers they are likely to have.
But History ECTs do want to become better teachers of their subject; those in special schools are in settings quite distinct from most of mainstream. It is surely reasonable to expect an ECF programme to address those specific needs. This is a work in progress for us, but we feel the UCL programme already does this in very important ways.
- All of our self-directed study and mentor meeting resources are illustrated with school-based case studies. There are about 100 of these, and they touch on every phase, setting and (nearly every) subject. Each case study is further supplemented with exemplifications – how you might introduce this idea into your classroom, turning this bit of theory into practice. Because the SEND setting is so distinct, we have alternative ECT study materials for that.
- This is not the same thing as, say, a ‘Maths ECF programme’ or a ‘Key Stage 2 ECF programme’. (Remember, we like that it is generic.) But, wherever there is a mismatch between the context of the case study and the ECT’s own context, we guide them to see how they can apply the messages to their own setting. We give mentors particular support for this too, as we recognise that is a skill they may need. This is what we mean by ‘re-contextualisation’. This is a practice any teacher will be familiar with. The professional studies they received as a trainee teacher is likely to have been in a mixed phase/ subject group; the school-based inset they have also most commonly occurs with other colleagues outside their immediate areas. Re-contextualisation is also what is happening any time a teacher reads a piece of educational research which was conducted in another country, or with pupils of another setting or discipline. Re-contextualisation is what we are doing when we talk to colleagues from another school and share our insights or collaborate on a project. In short,
Re-contextualisation is a crucial professional practice. And it belongs in our programme
- Throughout the two years of the UCL ECF programme, we urge mentors and ECTs to reflect on what they have read in a case study, or listened to in a research summary, and then to seek to understand the implications of this for their own classroom, children and curriculum. To this extent, the programme is always about the teacher’s subject and phase specific needs. But, as the ECTs move into their second year, there is a step-change. This is where they design and conduct a series of practitioner inquiries, focused sharply on their own requirements and interests. Here, the Early Career Framework is placed explicitly in support of the ECT, rather than positioned as a manual that all ECTs have to somehow learn. The ECT (with their mentor as a collaborator) is in charge of their own learning agenda. The UCL resources ensure the ECT takes a disciplined approach to their inquiries, providing tools and structures but not supplying readymade answers.
The Individual level. We call what we provide the Programme. That is the ECT self-directed study and mentor meeting materials, the mentor’s self-study resources, the facilitated sessions, the virtual learning environment hosting it all and the sequence governing it all. Most of our ECTs do most of the Programme, as intended. It is our intention that ECTs are selective about what they focus their attention on, so they spend longer on those aspects they need to, and less time on areas they feel overlap with what they are already confident in. The materials are presented in such a way as to make that selection straightforward. They use our module audits to self-assess their areas of strength and need, and can then refer to the module guides to work out the best half-term plan for themselves. If it becomes necessary – when, for example, an ECT is placed on a support plan with the advice of their Appropriate Body – they can keep up with their ECF with the help of our Supported Programme. Simply, this showcases worked examples of where other ECTs have fashioned a temporarily less intensive programme for themselves. Conversely, an ECT who is quickly mastering the standards can dip in, as they wish, to our Enhanced Programme. This is where they will find blogs, further reading and events related to the module they are currently on.
The UCL ECF programme is huge, it can be found in all corners of the land, but all who are involved in it keep the individual in mind.
Yes, it is national in scale. But it is teacher-sized.
For what it's worth 