Category: Teacher Training

  • Regulation builds walls between different levels of education, but universities can build bridges

    Regulation builds walls between different levels of education, but universities can build bridges

    Education in England remains segmented by regulation.

    Schools operate within Ofsted’s education inspection framework and the statutory regimes of the DfE. FE colleges navigate the new suite of Ofsted frameworks alongside funding and skills accountability structures. Universities face OfS oversight, TEF metrics, and the expectations of the professional standards framework (PSF).

    Even within universities, initial teacher training (ITT) can sit slightly apart. It is tightly regulated, operationally complex, and often detached from wider higher education teaching development.

    This fragmentation undermines the very professional identity that all sectors claim to cultivate. Educators, whether in early years, FE, HE or the workplace, share core capabilities: pedagogical reasoning, reflective practice, evidence-informed decision-making and relational skill. Yet current inspection and quality structures often privilege compliance over coherence. The new regulatory climate – with Ofsted’s expanded reach and the Office for Students’ growing emphasis on outcomes – risks hardening rather than healing these divides.

    Connected teacher formation

    The development of educators should be understood as a connected professional landscape spanning all phases of education. Early-years practitioners cultivate curiosity and foundational learning; FE teachers integrate academic knowledge with technical and vocational practice; HE staff foster critical inquiry and disciplinary expertise; workplace trainers translate theory into competence and innovation.

    These contexts differ, yet the core professional capabilities – reflective practice, relational pedagogy, and evidence-informed judgement – are deeply aligned. It is this alignment that offers the potential for genuine coherence across the system.

    Yet policy and regulation often pull in the opposite direction. Current agendas, including the post-16 white paper and recent ITT reforms, prioritise measurable outcomes and workforce supply. While these imperatives matter, they risk reducing professional formation to a compliance exercise they privilege evidence collection over reflection and credentials over capability. Entrenching directive, overly prescribed curricula that constrain professional judgement rather than deepen it.

    The challenge for higher education is not to reject accountability, but to reclaim its meaning: to own, shape, and model what intelligent, developmental regulation could look like in practice for our educational professionals.

    Connecting silos

    Higher education institutions are uniquely positioned to reconcile accountability with professional growth across sectors. They already engage in ITT partnerships with schools, support FE teacher education through validated programmes, and offer HE teaching qualifications, from PGCerts to Advance HE fellowships.

    Yet in practice these streams often operate in splendid isolation, reinforcing sector barriers, constraining professional mobility, and limiting opportunities for genuine cross-sector learning.

    Recognising teacher formation as relational and interconnected allows universities to model genuine professional coherence. QTS, QTLS and HE-specific qualifications should not be seen as separate territories – but as mutually informing frameworks that share a commitment to learning, reflection and the public good. At their best, reflective and research-informed practices become the collaborative engine that drives dialogue and professional mobility to connect schools, FE and HE teaching, fostering shared inquiry, and generating innovation that travels across boundaries rather than staying within them.

    The central challenge is one of narrative and ownership. Policy discourse too often frames teacher education as a workforce pipeline and a mechanism for filling vacancies, meeting recruitment targets whilst delivering standardised outputs. While workforce priorities matter, they must not be allowed to define the profession. The new Ofsted frameworks for ITT and FE, and the emerging regulatory language in HE, offer a moment of reckoning: will these instruments shape teachers, or will teachers and universities shape them?

    Universities have the intellectual capital, research capacity, and civic role to do the latter. They can reposition teacher education as the means by which professional agency is restored. They can demonstrate that robust accountability can coexist with autonomy, and that inspection need not stifle innovation.

    As I’ve set out, ITT, education and training, and HE teaching frameworks share a foundational logic: reflective practice, evidence-informed professionalism, and a commitment to learner outcomes. Treating these frameworks as interdependent rather than siloed gives HEIs the permission to shape, not just satisfy, regulation.

    Bridging the gaps

    The spaces between sectors – the school-to-FE transition, FE-to-HE pathways, and workplace interfaces – are where professional formation is most fragile. Policy and inspection regimes often treat these spaces as administrative handovers, yet they are precisely where higher education can add value.

    Universities can convene cross-sector networks, support shared professional learning, and promote collaborative research that spans education from the early years to lifelong learning. In doing so, teacher education becomes both the hub and the bridge: a central space where insight, evidence and practice converge, and a connective route through which ideas, people and purpose move freely.

    When universities play this role with intent, they enable knowledge, skill and reflective practice to travel with educators, strengthening the coherence of teaching as a truly lifelong, connected profession.

    Looking forward

    Teaching is the connective tissue of education, yet current regulatory and inspection frameworks continue to partition the profession into sector-specific silos, limiting transitions and weakening shared professional identity. The post-16 white paper, ITT reforms, and evolving HE teaching frameworks present more than compliance obligations – they offer a pivotal moment to restructure teacher education towards collaborative, cross-sector and shared professional agency.

    HEIs are uniquely positioned to seize this opportunity. By bringing schools, FE, and HE into constructive dialogue, aligning teaching pathways, and engaging inspection regimes strategically, universities can model a profession that is both coherent and adaptive. In doing so, they can collectively lead the sector in addressing complex challenges, ensuring teacher education supports not just quality, but innovation, inquiry, and resilience across the system.

    The pressing question is this: if teaching is the thread that binds the system, will higher education step forward to unite the sectors, shape regulation, and demonstrate what it truly means to teach without borders?

    Source link

  • Science of Reading Training, Practice Vary, New Research Finds – The 74

    Science of Reading Training, Practice Vary, New Research Finds – The 74


    Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    North Carolina is one of several states that have passed legislation in recent years to align classroom reading instruction with the research on how children learn to read. But ensuring all students have access to research-backed instruction is a marathon, not a sprint, said education leaders and researchers from across the country on a webinar from the Hunt Institute last Wednesday.

    Though implementation of the state’s reading legislation has been ongoing since 2021, more resources and comprehensive support are needed to ensure teaching practice and reading proficiency are improved, webinar panelists said.

    “The goal should be to transition from the science of reading into the science of teaching reading,” said Paola Pilonieta, professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was part of a team that studied North Carolina’s implementation of its 2021 Excellent Public Schools Act.

    That legislation mandates instruction to be aligned with “the science of reading,” the research that says learning to read involves “the acquisition of language (phonology, syntax, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics), and skills of phonemic awareness, accurate and efficient work identification (fluency), spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension.”

    The legislature allocated more than $114 million to train pre-K to fifth grade teachers and other educators in the science of reading through a professional development tool called the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS). More than 44,000 teachers had completed the training as of June 2024.

    Third graders saw a two-point drop, from 49% to 47%, in reading proficiency from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 school year on literacy assessments. It was the first decline in this measure since LETRS training began. First graders’ results on formative assessments held steady at 70% proficiency and second graders saw a small increase, from 65% to 66%.

    “LETRS was the first step in transforming teacher practice and improving student outcomes,” Pilonieta said. “To continue to make growth in reading, teachers need targeted ongoing support in the form of coaching, for example, to ensure effective implementation of evidence-based literacy instruction.”

    Teachers’ feelings on the training

    Pilonieta was part of a team at UNC-Charlotte and the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) at UNC-Chapel Hill that studied teachers’ perception of the LETRS training and districts’ implementation of that training. The team also studied teachers’ knowledge of research-backed literacy practices and how they implemented those practices in small-group settings after the training.

    They asked about these experiences through a survey completed by 4,035 teachers across the state from spring 2023 to winter 2024, and 51 hour-long focus groups with 113 participants.

    Requiring training on top of an already stressful job can be a heavy lift, Pilonieta said. LETRS training looked different across districts, the research team found. Some teachers received stipends to complete the training or were compensated with time off, and some were not. Some had opportunities to collaborate with fellow educators during the training; some did not.

    “These differences in support influenced whether teachers felt supported during the training, overwhelmed, or ignored,” Pilonieta said.

    Teachers did perceive the content of the LETRS training to be helpful in some ways and had concerns in others, according to survey respondents.

    Teachers holding various roles found the content valuable in learning about how the brain works, phonics, and comprehension.

    They cited issues, however, with the training’s applicability to varied roles, limited differentiation based on teachers’ background knowledge and experience, redundancy, and a general limited amount of time to engage with the training’s content.

    Varied support from administrators, coaches

    When asking teachers about how implementation worked at their schools, the researchers found that support from administrators and instructional coaches varied widely.

    Teachers reported that classroom visits from administrators with a focus on science of reading occurred infrequently. The main support administrators provided, according to the research, was planning time.

    “Many teachers felt that higher levels of support from coaches would be valuable to help them implement these reading practices,” Pilonieta said.

    Teachers did report shifts in their teaching practice after the training and felt those tweaks had positive outcomes on students.

    The team found other conditions impacted teachers’ implementation: schools’ use of curriculum that aligned to the concepts covered in the training, access to materials and resources, and having sufficient planning time.

    Some improvement in knowledge and practice

    Teachers performed well on assessments after completing the training, but had lower scores on a survey given later by the research team. Pilonieta said this suggests an issue with knowledge retention.

    Teachers scored between 95% to 98% across in the LETRS post-training assessment. But in the research team’s survey, scores ranged from 48% to 78%.

    Teachers with a reading license scored higher on all knowledge areas addressed in LETRS than teachers who did not.

    When the team analyzed teachers’ recorded small-group reading lessons, 73% were considered high-quality. They found consistent use of explicit instruction, which is a key component of the science of reading, as well as evidence-backed strategies related to phonemic awareness and phonics. They found limited implementation of practices on vocabulary and comprehension.

    Among the low-quality lessons, more than half were for students reading below grade level. Some “problematic practices” persisted in 17% of analyzed lessons.

    What’s next?

    The research team formed several recommendations on how to improve reading instruction and reading proficiency.

    They said ongoing professional development through education preparation programs and teacher leaders can help teachers translate knowledge to instructional change. Funding is also needed for instructional coaches to help teachers make that jump.

    Guides differentiated by grade levels would help different teachers with different needs when it comes to implementing evidence-backed strategies. And the state should incentivize teachers to pursue specialized credentials in reading instruction, the researchers said.

    Moving forward, the legislation might need more clarity on mechanisms for sustaining the implementation of the science of reading. The research team suggests a structured evaluation framework that tracks implementation, student impact, and resource distribution to inform the state’s future literacy initiatives.

    This article first appeared on EdNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


    Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    Source link

  • Call for unis to ditch teacher education – Campus Review

    Call for unis to ditch teacher education – Campus Review

    A conservative research centre has recommended initial teacher education (ITE) courses be removed from universities and be once again set up through independent colleges.

    Please login below to view content or subscribe now.

    Membership Login

    Source link

  • The trouble with the latest accreditation round for initial teacher education

    The trouble with the latest accreditation round for initial teacher education

    English teacher education has been the subject of ongoing and turbulent policy change for many years. But the radical shift in agenda instigated by the Department for Education (DfE) market review between 2022 and 2024 brought this change to another level. The policy instigated a reaccreditation process for all initial teacher education (ITE) providers awarding qualified teacher status.

    The Conservative government’s attempt at “delivering world-class teacher development” ended up decimating the landscape of ITE, leaving those of us left to pick up the pieces. Now DfE has opened a second round of the accreditation process – has it learned any lessons?

    What went wrong

    Stage 1 of the process the first time around included a written proposal of over 7,000 words outlining compliance with the new standards, including curriculum alignment to the ITE core curriculum framework. Additional details and evidence of partnership and mentoring systems and processes also had to be included. Successful applicants progressed to stage 2. Here, rigorous scrutiny of further preparation and plans began, with each institution being allocated a DfE associate to work with for a further twelve months.

    The additional workload this required stretched the capacity and resources of all education departments within higher education institutions. Academics were simultaneously delivering ongoing provision, continuing recruitment, and writing additional postgraduate (and for many undergraduate) revised provision – and many were under the threat of redundancy. All of the above, under constant threat of looming Ofsted visits.

    A previous Wonkhe article likened to the process to the Netflix series Squid Game, using the metaphor to describe the experience for existing ITT providers – meet the confusing demands and conflicting eligibility requirements, or you’re out.

    A significant number of providers failed to secure accreditation, either losing or giving up their status, with provider numbers reducing from 240 to 179.

    At the time the sector offered collegiate support, forming working groups to foster joint responses when collating the sheer volume of output required. Pressures surfaced including stress and anxiety caused by the increase in workload. Insecurity of jobs and the conflicting and at times confusing advice brought many individuals to the point of exhaustion and burnout.

    Squid: off the menu?

    You would therefore expect an announcement of the opportunity for providers to re-enter the market to be met with a sense of joy. Wouldn’t you?

    However, the new round is only for any lead provider currently working in partnership with an accredited provider. These partnerships are only in their first year and were encouraged by the DfE because of the “cold spots” created when thirteen higher education institutions failed to pass the previous process – despite having proven a history of quality provision.

    The creation of such partnerships added yet more stress and workload to all concerned. No legal advice on governance was provided. They proved incredibly complex to navigate, requiring long standing buy-in to make them workable and financially viable. As of yet no advice has been published of how to exit these partnership arrangements.

    Providers wishing to begin delivering ITT from September 2026 must meet the eligibility criteria. The window for the applications will be open for a much shorter period than the previous round, with the process and outcome to be completed 30 June 2025. This contrasts to the 18 months previously required for providers to demonstrate their “market readiness” in the previous round.

    Stage 1 of the new process will include a written submission of no more than 1500 words – remember, it was 7,000 last time – with applicants submitting a brief summary of their ITT and mentor curricula. In this short piece they will need to “demonstrate how their curriculum meets the quality requirements in the ITT criteria.” A window across March and April 2025 was open to complete and upload this portfolio.

    Stage 2, this time round, is an interview, where applicants “deliver a presentation to a panel, and answer questions further demonstrating how they meet the quality requirement.” Following both the written and verbal submissions, an assessment will be made and moderated by panels of ITT experts.

    For those still haunted by the lived experience of the first round of ITT accreditation, the greatly reduced stringency of the process would appear to make a mockery of the previous, highly controversial, demands and expectations.

    Like last time, success in the accreditation will require a demonstration of compliance with the expectations of the core curriculum framework (or from September, the ITTECF) along with further DfE quality requirements through submission.

    However, unlike last time, prospective providers will not be required to create extensive written responses, detailed curriculum resources or an extensive mentor curriculum (for which many of the requirements were axed overnight in the government’s announcement in November).

    Unbalanced

    How can the two contrasting timelines and expectations possibly be seen as equitable or comparable?

    In addition, how can we guarantee a smooth transition between lead partners and current accredited providers? Some of these partnerships involve undergraduate provision, established as a result of “rationalising” ITT provision. For those students only in year one of a three-year degree, how will this transition work?

    As a sector we recognise that the policy is aimed at meeting the government target of recruiting an extra 6,500 teachers this sitting parliament. And we welcome our peers back into the fold. Many of us are still reeling from the injustice of those colleagues being locked out in the last round (at the time all rated good or better by Ofsted).

    However, as NFER’s recent teacher labour market report pointed out, teachers’ pay and workload remain the highest cited reasons for ongoing difficulties in recruitment and retention. Neither of these things have been addressed by the new accreditation process.

    For those of us still clinging on for dear life, our confidence in the system is fading. One day, just like our stamina and resilience, it will evaporate all together.

    Source link