Culture of Improvement: Reviewing the research on teacher working conditions

“The Culture of Improvement report demonstrates why a ‘cut-and-paste’ approach to professional development is so limited. The circumstances in a school can make the difference between professional development impacting positively on students, and it being a missed opportunity.  Leaders have a crucial role to play in setting the right conditions for the success of professional development in their schools.” Bethan Hindley, Director of Design and Delivery at TDT, and report co-author.

Most existing reviews of professional development literature focus on the content and process of teacher development. They also tend to draw upon experimental studies based on large interventions. This potentially neglects important findings about how/whether teachers’ working conditions affect teachers’ improvement, measured in terms of impact upon students’ academic attainment, over time.

With the support of a number of colleagues including Rob Coe (Evidence Based Education), Matthew Kraft (Brown University), Emily Perry (Sheffield Hallam University), Cat Scutt (Chartered College of Teaching) and Sam Sims (UCL Institute of Education). TDT reviewed 30 papers on teacher working conditions and school leadership in order to explore the impact of teacher working conditions on student attainment.

What does the review tell us?

We find evidence that:

1. The quality of teachers’ working conditions is strongly associated with student attainment and there are tentative signs of a causal link.
2. The extent to which leaders actively foster these working conditions is associated with school improvement.
3. There are some core aspects of teachers’ working conditions that seem to be most clearly associated with improving student attainment, including:
   • Creating opportunities for effective teacher collaboration to explore student data, plan and review lessons and curricula, and plan and moderate assessments,
   • Involving teachers in whole school planning, decision-making and improvement,
   • Creating a culture of mutual trust, respect, enthusiasm in which communication is open and honest,
   • Build a sense of shared mission, with shared goals, clear priorities and high expectations of professional behaviours and of students’ learning, and
   • Facilitating classroom safety and behaviour, where disruption and bullying are very rare and teachers feel strongly supported by senior leaders in their efforts to maintain this classroom environment;
4. The allocation of teachers to teams, classes and subjects and the provision of experienced and effective colleagues appears to be crucial
5. Teachers’ working conditions appear to be associated with turnaround of less successful schools.
6. Teacher working conditions appear to play a major role in retaining teachers.
7. The quality of teacher working conditions of schools is associated with how successfully schools have been responding to COVID-19 closures, remote-schooling and moving to online teaching

What do school leaders need to know?

1. School leadership matters:

Fostering school leaders’ knowledge and skill in developing others will be vital to future efforts for school and system improvement. 

As Liebowitz & Porter (2019) note, this is not about narrowing down school leaders’ roles to one of only ‘instructional leadership’ but about ensuring that all efforts are aligned to produce the most effective collaboration, teamwork and learning for adults alongside well-communicated, shared and aligned goals. 

This also requires the creation of between- and cross-school networks through which schools share and discuss the art, craft and science of people development.

2. Time to talk, plan, and reflect matters:

Leaders should think much more creatively about staff timetables and work demands so that there is significantly more safeguarded time available for quality team dialogue, planning and reflection. 

This involves reflecting on how we can improve the quality of every in-service training day, every staff and team meeting, every one-to-one meeting, and every coaching session, while removing competing pressures and managing workload. 

The Wellcome Trust’s CPD Challenge project has demonstrated that every school in England is capable of ensuring at least 35 hours of the highest quality professional development time per teacher per year, and in many cases, this can be significantly higher.

3. Mentoring and coaching matter:

Ensuring that every teacher has the opportunity to work with a skilled coach and a more effective practitioner and that they can later progress to take on these roles themselves. 

This involves a significant investment in the skills and knowledge of pedagogical (or instructional) coaching as well as ensuring that staff timetables and structures allow for paired discussion and peer observation.

4. Culture and communication matter:

Every school leader should be supported to gain the skills, knowledge and disposition to foster a culture where the highest quality conversation happens, where colleagues trust and respect each other, where difficult issues are aired and resolved, where every voice is valued and heard and where staff feel safe, supported and engaged.

Turning research into practice

We use the findings of this report in the development of our own programmes, including our flagship CPD Leadership qualification and our Building Expert Schools Programme.  A good place to start is our Online Learning Modules, including on Learning How to Foster Trust for Professional Development. Find out more via our CPD Leadership Hub.