Recruitment and Retention
Years of building a strong offer for professional development have been undermined and recruitment and retention will suffer.
Years of building a strong offer for professional development have been undermined and recruitment and retention will suffer.
Gareth Conyard
Co-CEO, Teacher Development Trust
March 21, 2024, 11:24
The recent government announcement to drastically cut funding available for teacher professional development is short-sighted.
One of the biggest successes of government policy over the past few years has been the introduction of the so-called ‘golden thread’ of CPD, from ITT and ECF for new teachers to NPQ for established and experienced teachers and leaders.
The reasons for funding this CPD have always been twofold. That means helping teachers and leaders do their jobs better (after all, we know that the single biggest factor within a school that improves student outcomes is the quality of teaching) and helping improve recruitment. We retain prospective and current teachers by showing them that we are invested in them.
That's why delivering ECFs and NPQs has been a key part of the Government's own recruitment and retention strategy, and the DfE should be applauded for investing in this work.
Today should be a moment of celebration with confirmation that 40,000 teachers and school leaders have started the NPQ in 2023/24, taking the total to over 100,000 since the new NPQ began. This is a truly amazing achievement and shows just how valuable these qualifications are. But at the same time, announcing significant funding cuts risks undoing the progress made so far. In 2024/25, only 10,000 teachers are likely to be able to access NPQ funding as only half of schools are eligible and there is only one cohort. This is bound to have a dramatic impact with a 75% annual cut.
The timing couldn't be better. Just this week, NFER published its latest findings on teacher recruitment and retention. This shows that a miserable picture is emerging. Recruitment targets will be missed (again) for a variety of subjects, and workloads are increasing as fewer teachers are required to fill more and more gaps.
But perhaps the most worrying figure in this new workforce report is that the number of people looking to leave the profession has increased by 44% since last year. As NFER says, reviewing pay and reducing workloads are both important but not sufficient on their own.
That’s why it’s so important to continue to invest in teachers’ professional development. This week Ofsted published its first inspection reports for three NPQ providers, including TDT. This all demonstrates the positive impact NPQ has on participants’ professional experiences. For example, in our own report we found: “Participants experience highly effective professional training… The positive impact this has on their wider professional development is exceptional and far-reaching for the training environment in which they work.”
The DfE gets this. Ministers and civil servants know that investing in teachers and leaders in a variety of ways is the only option to stem the decline in recruitment and retention. That's why this decision is particularly disappointing, and feels like a short-term action rather than a considered long-term plan.
It is time to change the way we think about the whole issue of teacher recruitment and retention and move away from schemes that are funded over a period of just a few years. Instead, we must recognize investments in long-term infrastructure building programs.
Investments in teachers and school leaders should be viewed in the same way as decisions to build new capital projects over decades. After all, children will spend decades in the education system, and we want teachers' careers to last for decades as well.
This is part of the motivation for recent work to explore what qualifications for CPD might look like. We wanted to think about how long-term, consistent investment in the profession could work, including continuing to fully fund the ECF and NPQ and providing schools with more money to spend on frontline development needs .
Instead, today's announcement to cut funding for professional development (to reduce investment in existing teachers and leaders) is likely to further exacerbate the recruitment and retention crisis, which will soon get worse unless something radical happens. It will.