Teacher Development Trust welcomes the publication of the Government’s White Paper – Every Child Achieving and Thriving. These are complex documents to pull together, and the ambition and commitment of this government to support children across the country comes through clearly.
As an organisation, our focus is naturally on the sections dealing directly with teacher and school leader professional development. As the White Paper itself says on page 76, “Great teaching is the most important lever schools have for improving children’s attainment…”. We welcome announcements to support flexible working and to improve maternity pay (something our friends at MTPT have long been pushing for), as well as the commitment to be positive on pay for teachers, school leaders, and support staff (in line with the evidence so expertly gathered by NFER).
We are, however, unconvinced by the wider approach to supporting teacher and school leader professional development which does not respond to the evidence we set out last autumn in our report Teacher Development: the CPD Landscape in 2025. That evidence showed that, despite an annual investment in England of around £1bn, 39 per cent of teachers and school leaders say that the CPD they undertake has little or no impact on their practice.
Many will welcome the additional investment to support training in building inclusive environments – an area that undoubtedly requires attention and that teachers and school leaders are keen to understand more – but our concern is that without a more fundamental consideration of the way the system operates, money will not achieve the outcomes intended.
Our research shows that the key challenges to engaging with meaningful professional development include sufficient time to make effective choices and undertake the right development, and doing so in cultures of support and trust. Teacher agency around professional development matters for job satisfaction and efficacy.
The approach articulated in the White Paper appears to be centrally driven without taken sufficient account of local context or teacher agency. As our didagogy report showed, the effective teaching of teachers has to respond to both the local conditions in every school as well as the intrinsic motivation of teachers.
We welcome the commitment to reform the ECF and NPQs to ensure they reflect the latest evidence and practice, but overall the Teacher Training Entitlement does not take account of the recommendations we developed ahead of the last General Election. In particular, that report emphasised the importance of giving agency to schools and teachers when it comes to selecting professional development.
In the announcements around the Excellence in Leadership support package for head teachers, we are pleased to see continued investment in wellbeing and supervision support for head teachers: the currently funded programme is having a very positive impact on retention. But there is little to show how school leaders will be supported as they take on the variety of new tests, accountability measures, and the complexity of transitioning to a new system.
In addition, we have concerns about the place-based Headteacher Retention Incentive: previous schemes to incentivise teachers and leaders to move to schools in the most challenging parts of the country have invariably fallen short (most recently the National Teaching Service) so we hope that the Department looks at previous efforts and responds accordingly.
There is much in the White Paper that will require further consultation and policy development, and we hope that this will take account of the evidence for how to support teachers and school leaders to be the best they can be for the children in their care.
