Exploring school-level professional development: a look behind the research
Formerly known as the ‘Golden Thread’, the Department for Education (DfE)’s ‘coherent offer’ of professional development includes Initial Teacher Training (ITT), a two-year Early Career Framework-based training and induction, now referred to as the Early Career Teacher Entitlement, and National Professional Qualifications (NPQs).
The series of programmes, all underpinned by a shared evidence base, form the core of teacher professional development (PD) in England. Since PD is central to improving teaching quality and staff retention, it has a decisive impact on pupil outcomes. Our research seeks to understand the role the coherent offer plays in this.
Our interim report includes emerging findings on how schools engage with the coherent offer, especially in areas with high pupil disadvantage, as well as how schools describe their school culture, understand pupil outcomes, and define high-quality teaching. Along the way, we are developing a Theory of Change – a roadmap to understand how the coherent offer influences key areas from school culture to pupil learning.
Methodology matters: our qualitative approach
When new research is published, it’s tempting to jump straight to findings. But knowing how research is done is often the key to understanding why its findings matter and, therefore, how they can be useful.
Education research has familiar terms like direct instruction, school culture and pupil outcomes; but these terms can have different meanings for different people, for example, a teacher, a parent, or a policymaker. Qualitative research helps to unpack these terms so we can better understand how people describe and make sense of their work.
Even when concepts are messy or contested, they still reflect real classroom life. The language we use tries to capture the complex interactions between teachers, students, and learning activities. What matters isn’t only what we describe, but also why – including the values that shape our understanding.
Qualitative research is crucial here. By listening closely to practitioners, researchers can better understand what is happening in schools and what is driving decisions, which in turn reveals promising practices, shows how teachers and leaders experience professional development, and ensures that innovation in schools is grounded in evidence and not guesswork.
As our project enters its second year, one objective is to identify the mechanisms that are influencing decision-making – to help school leaders gain clearer insights into how professional development can best support teachers and pupils.
What are the DfE’s intentions behind the ‘coherent offer’?
To explore what the DfE’s coherent offer is intended to achieve for schools and pupils, we drew on two main sources:
- Document analysis: We prioritised the DfE perspective, reviewing two policy papers that introduced the coherent offer and its related frameworks, to understand the intended programme outcomes and impact in schools.
- Informant interviews: These were used to add context to the policy picture without introducing too much personal interpretation.
Talking to schools about professional development
To understand how schools drew on the coherent offer, we listened to school leaders, PD leads, and PD participants. Their insights revealed how PD decisions were made and experienced in practice. We also reviewed school websites to enrich our understanding of their PD approaches and school culture.
We saw patterns in the ways our case study schools spoke about pupil outcomes (academic and broader), school culture and high-quality teaching. Schools tended to interpret the coherent offer selectively, adapting it to fit their priorities and context.
For example, in one school, senior leaders reframed pupil outcomes around re-engagement and classroom participation after COVID-19:
“[...] another thing that's come out of COVID is that lack of engagement. We feel it a lot more in a rural deprived area because it's quite isolated. Context is really important to consider…because what works for our students and our teachers doesn't necessarily work in a city centre school”
This shows how schools use PD in context-sensitive ways to meet local needs. It also highlights the challenge of separating school culture from high-quality teaching, as both influence each other and shape pupil outcomes.
Schools also defined and prioritised pupil outcomes differently, emphasising some aspects of learning or development over others – an approach that may be particularly significant in schools facing high pupil disadvantage.
Limitations and next steps
As with all research, there are some limitations to our approach. Our document analysis only covered a relatively small set of documents, and the coherent offer extends beyond the three main programmes to a wider system involving Ofsted and appropriate bodies (DfE, 2022, p.12), whose policies and guidance shape how schools experience and interpret PD (Ovenden-Hope, 2024).
For example, Ofsted’s traditional inspection framework might create an emphasis on academic outcomes, which is not always explicit in the DfE’s documents. Indeed, recent changes place more weight on staff wellbeing and pupil support, which feels more aligned with the coherent offer’s broader aims.
Our current findings are also based on a small number of schools, so they don’t represent the full national picture. The next phase of the project will expand beyond six case study schools to capture national patterns, and we will also co-develop strategies and resources with schools through participatory workshops to ensure our findings are practical and useful.
Fully understanding PD needs more than a policy tick-box approach. As our interim report shows, schools adapt policies in context-sensitive ways to benefit their pupils, staff and communities. Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, we aim to spark reflection on the coherent offer through a set of questions in our report as a starting point for discussion in your setting.