Rapid Evidence Review of Subject Specific Continuing Professional Development in the UK
This major new evidence review, funded by the Wellcome Foundation, was published on Friday 16th February 2018. It's key findings include:
- Teachers in England are more interested in subject specific CPD than are their leaders but both valued it much less than do their peers in high performing education systems elsewhere in the world
- High levels of curriculum reform trigger investment in subject-specific CPD by governments and by schools. In practice, especially in England, too much of this has taken the form of briefings by awarding bodies about new assessments
- The marked shift in England to in-school provided CPD has been associated with an emphasis on generic pedagogies
- Schools and networks of schools with strong CPD environments and an understanding of the positive contribution that deep subject knowledge brings to learning and achievement, are succeeding in overcoming a range of barriers to create coherent and high-quality subject-specific CPD for all their staff
- Schools struggling in terms of pupil outcomes and/or inspection results were inevitably focussed on raising floor quality in teaching and learning and less likely to prioritise subject-specific CPD over more generic school improvement approaches, for example in relation to classroom management or whole school assessment and marking policies
The full Developing Great Subject Teaching report and it's executive summary can be downloaded from the Wellcome website. This offers a more extensive and nuanced treatment of the findings. Philippa Cordingley and Toby Greany have also written a blog - We Need to Talk about Subjects - exploring some of the policy implications of the findings.
The study was conducted by a team from the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE) and the University of London Institute of Education (UCL/IoE). The authors - Philippa Cordingley, Toby Greany, Bart Crisp, Sarah Seleznyov, Megan Bradbury and Tom Perry - build on earlier work by the same team funded and published by the Teachers Development Trust. That report and some associated resources can be accessed here