Can CPD aid teacher retention?

By Sir Ian Bauckham CBE

A resignation letter from a teacher in the middle of May is a familiar headache for headteachers. Finding a replacement for the new school year in September at that stage has always been a challenge, but this year, as we are all too aware, has been harder than ever.

Why is it suddenly so difficult? Well, public sector pay has certainly been an issue, and we have also seen a labour shortage where, right across the economy, there are basically more jobs than people to fill them. In addition, many schools are also reporting that some aspects of the job of teaching have felt harder since the Covid-19 pandemic. Taken together, these factors will certainly have impacted teacher recruitment and retention.

A further factor is the advent of mass hybrid working in many professional roles. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, many more jobs offer options like hybrid working, which is hard for teaching to match. Teachers need to be physically in classrooms with pupils during the school day. We know, more clearly than ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, that nothing can replace that. Now, pay and job flexibility are important, but as school leaders they often feel largely beyond our control. The good news is that these are only two of a number of motivators for going into teaching and staying there. Job satisfaction and workload also play critical roles.

So, if we can’t do much about pay or hybrid working, what can we do about job satisfaction and workload?

More than just a day out of the classroom and a chance to network

One of the answers to this is professional development. As someone who has spent nearly four decades in schools, I have experienced an awful lot of CPD. Too often, especially when I was in the classroom, CPD felt like little more than a break from routine or a chance to network with colleagues. I now actually feel pretty cross about so many wasted opportunities. But recently something has changed.

Increasingly, teacher CPD is influenced by research, evidence and cognitive science. This is perhaps especially since the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) came onto the scene, with its role of sifting and curating relevant evidence. We are now able to say with increasing confidence that CPD will be much more than a day out of the classroom or a chance to network. Properly designed, CPD actually has the potential to keep teachers in teaching. How can this happen?

The logic chain goes like this: the more we learn from evidence and research, the more precise we can be about the ‘best bets’ for teaching pupils so that they learn and remember. This means that less teacher effort is expended on activities which we now know are less likely to work, and the relationship between teacher effort and pupil progress becomes more direct. In turn, this drives not only lower workload but also higher teacher job satisfaction through a stronger sense of teacher self-efficacy. And better job satisfaction and lower workload absolutely influence teachers’ decisions on whether to complete their training and stay in teaching.

The Early Career Framework

One example of how this is being operationalised is the Early Career Framework (ECF). Now, I know that some people have found the workload involved in this itself burdensome. But I think we have to bear with it and refine it, because the idea is absolutely the right one. It is intended to give every new teacher a rigorously evidence-based induction programme across the first two years of teaching. The ECF is one of the most ambitious and exciting efforts in education happening in the world today. There is great interest in it around the world, and once fine-tuned and embedded, it could become a model for others to follow.

Many school and multi-academy trust leaders have used both the ECF and the NPQ (National Professional Qualification) Frameworks to help them offer evidence based CPD within their schools. This can give teachers’ CPD a plan and shape that matches the aspiration we have for the curriculum we design for our pupils.

The tantalising longer-term prospect goes beyond recruitment and retention problems to the nature of the profession itself. Teaching could become a truly evidence and expertise-based profession. This will raise its status, make it less susceptible to passing unevidenced ‘fads’, and make it more attractive to aspirational graduates.

So, the future of teaching is in fact bright, despite the current travails. Teachers joining now will enter a profession which has the potential to transform itself and where teachers could be more effective and more satisfied in their job than any generation before.

Ian has worked in education since graduating from Cambridge University, initially teaching MFL before moving into school and trust leadership. Ian was President of ASCL from 2013-14 and is currently CEO of Tenax Schools Trust, which is a Teaching School Hub and trains teachers as a SCITT. He has led national reform in many areas including Relationships and Sex Education, MFL Pedagogy and MFL GCSEs, and Initial Teacher Training. He has been Chair of Ofqual since 2021 and Chair of Oak National Academy since 2022. He has been closely involved in the reforms to teacher professional development including the ECF and the new NPQs. He was made a CBE in 2017 for services to education and knighted in the New Year’s Honours in 2023.