Serious pupil and teacher challenges
According to Pisa, pupils in England may be making slightly better progress than they were but they are also some of most unhappy pupils in the world and getting unhappier. Also, at a time when our teachers are tackling major curriculum reforms, we have a significant recruitment and retention crisis. A new map of the pupil focussed research evidence about Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and its leadership, has important messages for school leaders and policy makers about these twin challenges and what to do about them.
A team of experienced researchers and research reviewers (Professors Steve Higgins, Toby Greany, Rob Coe led by Professor Philippa Cordingley) set out to update their 2015 review (Developing Great Teaching) and connect the evidence about CPD and its leadership. The new map of the evidence shows this field is moving forwards - away from an exclusive focus what CPD facilitators do, and towards a focus on what’s involved in teachers’ active professional learning as they integrate new knowledge, skills and ideas with existing practices.
Echoing concerns arising from Pisa, the research specifically emphasises the 
importance of school leaders modelling and leading Continuing Professional Development and Learning (CPDL) first as an exercise in building shared responsibility and second with a focus not only on pupil achievement but also on their well-being. It also reveals that this involves leaders in supporting teachers’ progress through appropriate career pathways alongside their development of their knowledge and skills. What is key here is the provision of tools and systems to help teachers manage the complexity of using and developing new approaches with very large numbers of diverse pupils; tools which take account of the cognitive, practical and emotional demands being made of the teachers. In other words, this research highlights the importance of school leaders mirroring for their staff the focus on wellbeing for pupils, as an integral part of accelerating progress for pupils.
Alongside these headline messages the research map also starts to flesh out what these important principles look like in practice.
The team were unable to uncover systematic research reviews of the impact on pupils of curriculum design and development (though there were some which reported impact on teachers). They did surface evidence from systematic reviews about CPDL and its leadership showing the important links that leaders can and should be making between curriculum development and CPDL including:
- Selecting curriculum approaches and supporting resources carefully:
- for the evidence and expertise on which they are basedtheir relevance to the needs of the communities served by the school
- for their capacity to help teachers navigate complexity
- Avoiding focusing on CPD which imparts bodies of knowledge that are divorced from the practical ways in which such knowledge is brought to life in schools
- Ensuring that CPDL leaders and facilitators have the opportunity to work with subject, phase and departmental leads to align CPDL and curriculum development into a coherent whole
The map was created by identifying and analysing the quality of systematic reviews of research about CPDL, its leadership, and connections between CPDL and curriculum development. The same tests of quality and relevance used for the Developing Great Teaching review of reviews were applied to this map to ensure that we were focussing on evidence about what really feeds through into benefits for pupils. We identified 132 reviews in total and identified 7 reviews as providing evidence of sufficient relevance and quality to feed into the map. The team then summarised the key contours of the reviews, the patterns in and quality of the data available across the reviews. Data from the best available research reviews were then summarised and analysed to identify the ways in which this important research field is moving forward, to update messages from the first review of reviews and to set the data about CPDL in the context of evidence about how it intersects with evidence about school leadership.
Download the full or summary reports from here
Contact Professor Philippa Cordingley philippa.cordingley@curee.co.uk for more information