Exploring school-level professional development in schools with high pupil disadvantage in England

Project Overview

Teacher professional development (PD) is crucial for retaining teachers, improving teaching quality, and, ultimately, driving pupil attainment (Fletcher-Wood & Zuccollo, 2020). The Department for Education’s (DfE) PD reforms (2022) introduced a coherent offer of PD across the teaching career that spans Initial Teacher Training (ITT), the Early Career Framework (ECF), and National Professional Qualifications (NPQs). The DfE (2022) policy paper outlines intended links between PD, strengthened teacher quality, improved school-level PD cultures and pupil attainment, with earlier evaluations of ITT, ECF, and NPQs indicating promising results. However, we still do not fully understand how this coherent approach to PD (i.e., ITT, ECF, and NPQs) is intended to influence the school as a whole, what school-level outcomes drive pupil attainment, and whether this coherent offer creates an impact greater than the sum of its individual programmes.

This two-year project aims to develop a Theory of Change that integrates the mechanisms through which a coherent offer of PD is intended to take effect and how such mechanisms manifest in practice, with a focus on schools with high pupil disadvantage. In other words, rather than conducting an overall evaluation of the coherent offer of PD, this project focuses on one important aspect: the link between PD and the experiences and outcomes of schools with high pupil disadvantage. It will also explore how these outcomes can be measured quantitatively and examine the relationships between PD, school-level outcomes, and improved pupil attainment.

Research aims

• Explore the school-level mechanisms through which a coherent offer of PD (i.e., ITT, ECF, and NPQs) across the teaching career may lead to increased pupil attainment, with a focus on schools with high pupil disadvantage;
• Understand to what extent a coherent offer of PD is associated with increased pupil attainment, and other key school-level outcomes that are important to achieve this, in schools with high pupil disadvantage;
• Identify practices for how schools are getting the most from participation in PD in an intended coherent system;
• Develop strategies for how schools can get the most of participation in PD in an intended coherent system for increasing pupil attainment in schools with high pupil disadvantage, and for providers designing and delivering PD.

Project Team

• Dr Yuchen Zong, Research Fellow, NIoT
• Dr Roisin Ellison, Research Fellow, NIoT
• Patrick Covernton, Research Assistant, NIoT
• Grace Stevens, Research Assistant, NIoT
• Katy Micklewright, Head of ECF Faculty, NIoT
• Dr Grace Healy, Education Director (Secondary), David Ross Education Trust
• Jen Knowles, Director of Teaching School Hubs, South West Institute for Teaching
• Helen Argall, Teaching School Hub Lead, OneCornwall
• Dr Calum Davey, Executive Director of Research and Best Practice, NIoT
• Dr Ellen Turner, Head of Evaluation and Observation Research, NIoT

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