Teacher CPD – Let’s beat the staffing crisis with better professional development
At a time of severe teacher retention issues and spiralling recruitment costs, the need for more and better CPD has never been greater, argues Chris Pope
- by Chris Pope
For 15 years, the PTI has been providing professional development designed to feed teachers’ love of, and expertise in, their subjects. In that time, countless teachers have told me that they only remained in teaching thanks to the lifeline we provided them with.
Right now, for example, I know of two new teachers currently taking our New Teacher Subject Days courses who were previously so disenchanted with the prescriptive teaching regimes at their schools that they were on the verge of quitting the profession. They’ve told us that we’re a ray of sunshine in their lives – the one thing that’s kept them sticking at it.
Depressing statistics
There are many more like them. Each year, around 42% of our 375 or so new teachers tell us that they’ve seriously considered leaving the profession, despite being only one or two years in. That figure rises to 63% and upwards when it comes to the 120 subject leaders who attend our annual subject enrichment residentials.
Those statistics make for depressing reading when you consider that these teachers aren’t the whingeing or unmotivated type. They’re deeply committed to giving their students the best possible start in life, to the point of choosing to give up their weekends in order to attend our courses.
The good news, however, is that we often succeed in convincing such teachers to remain within the profession. Upon completing their training, more than three quarters of teachers tell us that they feel reinvigorated and more excited about teaching their respective subjects, rising to 98% for subject leaders. And more than 60% say that they’re less likely to leave the profession as the result of having attended a PTI course.
Over and above
We’ve been collecting similar retention statistics since 2017, but sceptics still tell me that they find our data circumstantial. I was therefore delighted when the Education Policy Institute confirmed our experiences by concluding in its April 2021 report, ‘The Effects of High Quality Professional Development on Teachers and Students’ that around 12,000 teachers could be retained in the profession per annum if all teachers were entitled to 35 hours a year of high quality professional development.
Bear in mind that secondary schools are going to require an additional 11,000 secondary teachers by 2024 – over and above the 15,000 to 20,000 teachers who need replacing each year already.
There are many benefits to high quality professional development. With its Wellcome CPD Challenge, the Wellcome Trust identified that teachers upping their professional development to 35 hours a year feel able to teach their subjects more effectively, grow in confidence and experience fewer issues with pupil behaviour and attendance. Those findings are consistent with what teachers have told us themselves.
The economic case
Economically, the Education Policy Institute has calculated that over 10 years, a £4bn investment in more CPD would yield £61bn in returns – principally from the increased earning power of children with higher grades. But we wondered whether there might be a more immediate kickback. If 12,000 more teachers remained in the profession, that’s 12,000 fewer trainees needing to go through ITT. Would the costs of more professional development outstrip those ITT costs or not?
We commissioned the economists at Pro Bono Economics to look into this for us, and in their recently published ‘Learning to Save’ report, they conclude that investing in an entitlement of 35 hours CPD a year for all teachers would indeed be cheaper than training up new teachers to fill the gap.
As things stand, a teacher crunch is looming. Our teachers spend around 20 hours a year less on CPD compared to the OECD average. We could almost halve the impending additional teacher supply gap by giving all teachers access more high quality professional development, and doing so would be cheaper for the country. So what are we waiting for?
Chris Pope is co-Director of the PTI – an education charity providing a wide range of teacher CPD courses focused on the development specialist subject knowledge; for more information, visit ptieducation.org or follow @ptieducation
