At the Teacher Development Trust’s (TDT) inaugural lecture last month, CEO Gareth Conyard pointed to what he called an “inflexion point” in the sector. We should be asking, he argued, whether what we do now to train and develop our teachers will continue to be sufficient to meet future challenges.
After years of reforms and rhetoric, he asked, “Are we any closer to honestly trusting the profession?”
Conyard’s speech came a year after the launch of TDT’s report on the future of CPD and in the same week that the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Ambition Institute published on the same topic.
Both reports landed in an education system where the Early Career Framework (ECF) is still bedding in; National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) are scaling up but are currently under review for further improvement; and the new government is promising more teachers, greater trust and less bureaucracy.
While the reports take different views of how we should deliver on the government’s ambitions, they align around a core message: that CPD is central, as the engine of teaching quality, retention and equity.
Under our current model, national providers and Teaching School Hubs have been heavily funded by the government to deliver the national suite of “golden-thread” CPD programmes (ECF and NPQs). There are significant benefits to this, including making CPD more accessible to more teachers and ensuring that the training they are receiving is evidence based.
Teacher CPD delivered by teachers
But if we are to “honestly trust the profession” going forwards, external organisations can only be one part of the future solution.
At the TDT lecture, Conyard questioned whether reforms have truly been designed to deliver improved outcomes for young people or to “create a permanent dependency on government to fund new initiatives and dictate practice”.
We might well question significant sums of public money being poured into training programmes, when the attainment gap between disadvantaged young people and their more advantaged peers has grown significantly over the same period, and the teacher retention crisis has worsened.
To meet the challenges of an increasingly stretched system, where funding and capacity are scarce, we must break this dependency.
Schools and trusts must be empowered to lead for themselves on this. Some of the best CPD I’ve seen has happened in staffrooms, twilight sessions and departmental meetings. We need to stop assuming, therefore, that the most worthwhile professional learning always comes from outside the school and from external expertise.
Multi-academy trusts and families of schools are already showing that they can invest in their own talent, surface internal expertise and build pathways for teachers to become the researchers, facilitators and coaches their colleagues rely on.
But teachers need time and trust to learn from one another. We must invest in CPD not just financially, but culturally. This means recognising that informal CPD - coaching, collaborative inquiry and subject networks - can be as powerful as formal courses. It means asking not just “how many hours?” but “to what effect?”
We also have to prioritise collaboration and professional generosity. These values underpin the work of the Trust-Wide CPD Leaders’ Forum, a network of professionals leading CPD at scale. We work to mobilise the knowledge and expertise already within the sector to improve professional development for every teacher.
We cannot keep waiting for the government to give us the solutions. We have to trust that the answer is in the system.
And that means we need to stop seeing CPD as a bolt-on and start seeing it as the beating heart of the profession.
Sam Gibbs is director of education at Greater Manchester Education Trust
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