The national institute welcomes schools white paper recognition of evidence-led teacher development
The government has published its much anticipated plans for reforming the school system in England, including a shake-up of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision, and a workforce strategy to deliver on its manifesto pledge to recruit an additional 6,500 teachers.
As our Chief Executive Melanie Renowden said in her response to the announcement, successful implementation of the reforms that the Secretary of State for Education has described as a ‘decade-long transformation’ will depend on similarly ambitious, sustained and evidence-informed professional development for all teachers – which the government has recognised by including our teacher education dataset (TED) and recently-launched NIoT Evidence Portal in its plans.
Read on for more information on how you can engage with these resources to help us to deliver the change our education system needs.
The NIoT Evidence Portal
Every child deserves an excellent education taught by teachers who have been nurtured throughout their careers. The NIoT Evidence Portal brings together rigorous, high-quality research and expert perspectives from schools and trusts to empower teacher educators to make evidence-informed decisions when designing and delivering professional learning and support.
The evidence portal:
• Summarises global research on effective professional learning approaches.
• Combines rigorous evidence with real-world insights from teachers and leaders.
• Uses relevant research to answer real queries from educators.
So whether you're designing professional development, mentoring or coaching a colleague, you benefit from building professional learning informed by the best available evidence. Explore the NIoT Evidence Portal.
Teacher education dataset (TED)
We know that teachers are the biggest factor in schools influencing children's educational success, and they have an even greater impact on the outcomes of children experiencing the highest levels of disadvantage.
This means that we need to identify what makes effective teaching if we want to increase teacher impact on pupil outcomes.
Currently, there is no reliable method to measure teacher impact across the workforce or to determine the effects of professional development or training on teaching improvement.
That is why we have created the teacher education dataset (TED). This ambitious project will link anonymised teacher and pupil data whilst preserving important data relationships so that we can start to answer interesting questions such as ‘can we measure teacher impact?’, and ‘which school practices and characteristics are associated with teacher impact?’. Once we know the answers to these and other questions, we can share them with those best placed to make informed decisions that support pupil success, including policymakers, teacher educators, headteachers, and trust and local authority leaders.
Our work has already begun generating novel insights. For example, we have looked at the relative effectiveness of teachers for children with and without a marker for SEND, to see if there are teachers who are particularly good at adding value for children with SEND or vice versa.
For further information on the findings or TED, please visit the TED news and blogs page.
If you are a school or MAT interested in getting involved in TED, please get in touch.