The DfE published its Standard for Teachers’ Professional Development in July 2016. Here is a summary of the main points with an explanation (in italics) of how Every Child Counts meets every element of the Standard.
Effective Professional Development
Effective teacher professional development is a partnership between:
- Headteachers and other members of the leadership team;
- Teachers; and
- Providers of professional development expertise, training or consultancy.
In order for this partnership to be successful:
1 Professional development should have a focus on improving and evaluating pupil outcomes.
At ECC our intervention programmes are underpinned by robust data taken from standardised tests taken by the pupils on entry and exit. We encourage every school to test their pupils and also to collect impact data about their pupils’ attitudes, confidence, engagement in class, perseverance etc. We encourage and facilitate schools’ interrogation of data and evaluation of the impact of our programmes during our training and beyond, and we provide an online data analysis system for all of our schools.
2 Professional development should be underpinned by robust evidence and expertise.
Our programmes are trialled before publication and data is collected during these trials. We continue to collect and interrogate data throughout the life of our programmes. We were evaluated by Durham and York Universities in 2011 and our 1stClass@Number programme is currently being evaluated in randomised control trials led by the EEF. Our ECC National Advisers and Trainers are all experts in their field. Many have studied to Masters level. We train, support and monitor our Trainers and require them to meet exacting Standards each year to gain and maintain our accreditation.
3 Professional development should include collaboration and expert challenge.
We aim to foster collaboration within and between schools in our professional development programmes. We challenge participants to reflect on and evaluate their practice and impact and deliberately build structured tasks for this into our sessions. Our programmes can include visits from your Trainer to schools for support and advice.
4 Professional development programmes should be sustained over time.
All our programmes have episodic training events paced over time and running in parallel with the teaching of an intervention programme. We do not run ‘one-off’ courses! Participants teach between training events and have gap tasks and readings to do, too. We provide continuing professional development sessions which are mandatory for Numbers Count and Readers Count teachers to maintain their accreditation and are optional for teaching assistants. These provide opportunities for participants to deepen their subject knowledge and to hone their teaching skills. And all this is underpinned by, and requires that:
5 Professional development must be prioritised by school leadership.
All our programmes require intervention teachers or teaching assistants to have a Link or Lead Teacher. This teacher facilitates the intervention programme’s implementation in school, champions the programme, supports and monitors the programme’s delivery, advocates for the teacher or teaching assistant and provides the link with the school’s leadership. The Link or Lead Teacher accompanies the intervention teacher or teaching assistant to some or all of the professional development.
Read the full document from the DfE here