After years of ‘strategic neglect’ of professional development as an instrument of school improvement in favour of structural change, the Department of Education (DfE) has fired off a salvo of new funded CPD initiatives. These represent a fantastic opportunity for teaching schools and others in the school-to-school support system but only if they have the foresight and the energy to grasp the challenge. Our current Secretary of State is minded to work with the system but she will need to see strong and early evidence of it being willing to work with her. In this article, I draw on CUREE’s experience of working with schools’ consortia in the early stages of these initiatives to flag up the practical opportunities and challenges.
It is a sad but unremarkable fact that schools’ first response to budget pressure is to slash professional development (CPD) spending. It is less widely recognised that all school improvement is achieved in whole or part through CPD - with or without academisation - so we probably shouldn’t be surprised that school performance has been on average static (see Rob Coe’s 2013 analysis for example).
Happily, after years of ‘not my job’, we have a Secretary of State who recognises that a) CPD has a key role to play in school improvement and b) it won’t happen without some injection of resources[1]. So in a few months we go from a CPD desert to a comparative deluge of national funds to an extent which challenges the system’s short term capacity to respond to the demand.
First was the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund (TLIF) - £17m or so – then Strategic School Support Fund (SSIF) Round 1 - £20m - and Round 2 (expected to be £60 - 80m). Round 3 of SSIF follows soon, as does the next tranche of TLIF in 2018. Also coming down the ramp is Opportunity Area funding and the new kid on the block - Multi-Academy Trust Development Funds (MTDF). These are not all exclusively CPD but all have CPD as an essential element. Happily, further education is not left out with recent announcements of a Strategic College Improvement Fund (closely mirroring SSIF) and funding for National Leaders of Further Education (sound familiar?)
So this is good – right? Well, who can argue that more money is a bad thing? And it’s also very good that the DfE both sponsored and endorsed the Standard for Teachers Professional Development and is expecting provision within the new funds to meet these standards. Even better is the expectation that proposals under these funding streams should be able to show evidence of efficacy – a reason to believe that they might actually work. So you might expect that we CUREE folk are walking around punching the air; after all, this pretty much encapsulates what we stand for. We are pleased that is true but our delight is somewhat alloyed by our experiences of helping several schools consortia specify and write bids to these various funds. We worked intensively with eight bidding groups in SSIF Round 1 (seven of which were successful) and a further five in Round 2 and we’ve provides support for a variety of proposals for other funding sources.
And what have we learnt from this?
- This is a better arrangement than the one it replaced (lots of bitty, very short term one-on-one funding which was too small and too short to have any real impact). The new funds are much larger scale (commonly around £500k) on a longer time scale (up to 20 months);
- There is a much stronger commitment to rigorous targeting and evaluation (though it remains to be seen how much this focuses on process and outcomes rather than mere auditing) ;
- The bidding process is onerous and getting more so. TLIF was a procurement exercise beyond the capacity of most schools and consortia (and local authorities) but SSIF now runs it a close second. It’s conceptually challenging (e.g. does the Logic Model stand up?), demands a lot of research and other evidence and requires the players to build and nurture networks of providers and ‘customers’ – all within a small time window;
- It requires a willingness to commit to levels of investment (mostly in expensive senior staff time) and risk which a lot in the public sector generally (and teaching schools in particular) feel unable to make on the 30% chance of getting funding;
- The demand for evidence of efficacy is challenging for all concerned - the bidders because they have little experience of this approach and the bid evaluators because they struggle to establish evidence benchmarks, thresholds and exemplars. Even the evidence providers are challenged because there isn’t enough of it in sufficient detail and, important point, addressing the actual wicked issues confronting schools in difficulty;
- Better though it is, the new system still doesn’t make provision for developing the capacity of the system. The bidding window is short (typically six weeks) but, more importantly, the bidder (plus partners) is expected to have one or more interventions ready to go and to have all the staff and other resources on standby and ready to be assigned when (if?) the bid is approved;
- Already, after only one bite of the TLIF and two bites of the SSIF cherries, we are seeing bid fatigue and a growing feeling amongst teaching schools that they can’t commit any more capacity.
Having worked in an official development role with teaching schools in the past, I am very keen for them to seize the opportunities these funds represent to show that the school-to-school support system can work at scale when properly funded and evaluated. If they don’t in sufficient numbers, there’s a real risk that the teaching school network will be seen to have flunked it when the big chance came along. Of course, it would be better if the application and approval system was less burdensome and bureaucratic and better still if the funding was even less ‘quick fix’ oriented and accepted that some money needed to go into supporting building capacity.
It is good to see the new enthusiasm at policy level for professional development as the vehicle for school improvement and, with it, some recognition that struggling schools need sustained help over months and years not weeks. But teaching schools and others in the local school-to-school support system should be in no doubt that they have a short time to show they can take on school support systematically and at scale, moving beyond the established 'artisanal' approach. Our current secretary of state has the air of a woman in a hurry and she won't wait for the school-led system to catch up.
Paul Crisp
Paul Crisp was Teaching and Leadership Adviser in the West Midlands until 2016 and continues to support the development of the regional teaching school system
[1] Though many would argue that this is merely recycling a part of the recently axed school support budget