By Dr Joyce Chen, Learning and Quality Practitioner, and Dr Paul Tully, ETF’s National Head of Educational Governance.
The Further Education (FE) and Training sector is at least 170 years old but only since 1999 has there been a set of professional standards to guide effective practice and teachers’ professional development. During the 19th century, the sector was disjointed and poorly organised, being left to socially-conscious schoolteachers and philanthropic entrepreneurs to provide the ad hoc basic skills and technical training employees were demanding. Lack of funding and an untrained workforce meant that teaching was often of variable quality and not always relevant to workers’ actual needs, and since neither the curriculum nor its teachers were regulated, there was no evidence base or commitment to developing effective teaching. Given these challenges, it is remarkable that the FE and Training sector did not significantly alter its position until 1999.
As the deregulation of FE and Training has intensified in the last decade, the role of the ETF’s Professional Standards has arguably never been more important. The purpose of standards, suggests Lucas (2009), is to eliminate inconsistency in the quality of teaching. The ETF’s Professional Standards, however, are designed to do much more than this. Professional standards provide a framework to support teachers and trainers to critically discuss, reflect on and evaluate their own practice, and are a tool for identifying their professional development needs during their career. It is the quality and currency of an educator’s work which ensures a learner’s trust, and trust is fundamental to a flourishing, high-quality educational experience.
Critics of professional standards have previously pointed to their prescriptiveness and links to reductions in teacher autonomy. Lucas, Rogers and Nasta (2012) suggest that professional standards often represent a trade-off between being clear on the knowledge, skills and behaviours demanded of teachers, and a propensity to narrow and over-simplify the richness and complexity of teachers’ work. For Professor Jonathan Tummons, of Durham University, past uses of professional standards have had laudable intentions but have often ended up increasing the audit and measurement of teachers to ensure their compliance with policy and inspection agendas (Tummons, 2014). This, he says, can occur when professional standards are centrally imposed and fail to consider the contextual and curriculum particularities of teachers’ practices (Tummons, 2016). Rather than support professionalism, the use of professional standards could actually restrict innovation and be deprofessionalising.
The Steering Group set up to manage the ETF’s Professional Standards review was mindful of addressing these criticisms and sought counsel from across the sector on how teaching had changed since the publication of its original Standards in 2014. Reviews are important for establishing the ongoing credibility of professional standards. In the FE and Training sector, this is especially significant given the transformation in teaching and learning observed during the CoVid-19 pandemic. At the same time, the Steering Group was keen not to lose the strengths of the 2014 Standards, which had been commended for greatly simplifying the former FENTO (1999) and Lifelong Learning UK (2006) Standards frameworks. As in 2014, the ETF’s revised Professional Standards are not aimed at specifying minimum thresholds of competence for teachers but exist as focal points for developing excellent practice. The emphasis on excellence and professional development distinguishes the ETF’s approach because it recognises that teaching takes place in diverse and complex environments where excellence takes different forms. Rather than prescribing a ‘one-way’ of doing teaching, the ETF’s 2022 Professional Standards encourage practitioners to develop practices appropriate to their unique curriculum circumstances and learner needs.
The review, commencing in 2021, reflected on recent educational and social trends. Practitioners told us that the sector had a responsibility to lead on sustainability issues and train people to make better decisions about the environment and use of resources. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of learner wellbeing, digital literacy and online security was also raised, including a need to work more effectively with learners with diverse backgrounds. The updated Standards, which were released on 3 May 2022, now underscore the increasingly vital role that teachers and trainers play in advising, developing and coaching learners to progress into employment or further study. The importance of knowledge-sharing and respectful working was also highlighted, reflecting calls for a more empowering and supportive professional culture, so essential for solving the current teacher recruitment crisis.
The Steering Group consulted with as many sector bodies and practitioners as it could within the review timeframe. This included the Association of Colleges (AoC), HOLEX, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), the University College Union and OFQUAL, with the Department of Education acting as ETF’s critical partner.
All parties agreed that the updated Professional Standards should reinforce the role of teacher expertise and peer learning as primary goals (see the ETF’s ‘Guide to Updates 2022’ on our website). We were also told that the existing twenty statement format should be preserved and that its division into three domains of practice – Professional Values and Attributes, Professional Knowledge and Understanding, and Professional Skills – was still a useful way of understanding teachers’ practice. In addition, the Steering Group took note of Jim Crawley’s (2015) work on connective professionalism, which argues that a professional workforce depends not just on its technical proficiency but on the capacity of individuals to work collaboratively and share practice. We are optimistic that the ETF’s updated Professional Standards can drive a transformed professional culture that recognises the value of professional learning and dialogue within and across teams, respects and celebrates difference, and supports ethical and evidence-led decision-making across the sector.
This optimism is shared by our stakeholders. Eddie Playfair, Senior Policy Advisor at the Association of Colleges, declared that “the new standards provide an up-to-date description of what good professional practice looks like, built on high aspirations and strong values”. Deborah Scarborough, Board Member with HOLEX, agreed that the updates would “inspire learners to move beyond their original goals and develop the wider skills that will improve their own careers”. Practitioner, Adam Sturt, from Bridgwater and Taunton College, told us that the revisions would ‘unlock teacher potential’ and enable learners to make ‘exceptional progress’. We would go even further than this. These updates establish the importance of educating the whole learner – a collective focus on the learner’s technical, personal and social wellbeing to support their achievement and success.
A standards-based approach to teaching and learning is expected to be beneficial to organisational development, staff professionalism and, ultimately, to the learner experience because it consistently supports a continuous process of reflection and improvement needed in the sector. As the updated Standards become embedded in organisations, we believe they will be catalysts for practitioners to explore their subject and the craft of teaching more deeply, stimulating opportunities for developing innovative curriculum content and inspiring career development discussions with coaches and managers.
The revisions have not been developed in isolation. Specific attention has been given to their relationship with the Institute for Apprenticeship and Technical Education’s (IfATE) recently revised Occupational Standard for the ‘Learning & Skills’ Teacher Apprenticeship, which sets out new competency benchmarks for future teaching qualifications (DfE expect to launch this in September 2023). The updated Professional Standards enable the qualified teacher to plan their professional development beyond initial training, building on the knowledge and skills acquired as trainees. Together, Occupational and Professional Standards will offer a complete and continuous journey of professional development.
In addition, we have cross-referenced the revisions with Ofsted’s Education Inspection Framework and the Gatsby careers benchmarks. In the past, this was not routinely established which gave rise to competing models of ‘good practice’. It is our expectation, through our research and rigorous content-mapping against these external frameworks, and our efforts to distil the best from companion Standards Frameworks in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that the ETF’s 2022 Professional Standards will become the ‘gold standard’ for developing high-quality teaching practices in post-14 education.
What is the evidence that professional standards make a difference to those working on the frontline? In 2019, the ETF commissioned research agency IFF to explore this further. Out of 602 respondents surveyed, 3 in 4 practitioners (73%) had used the ETF’s Professional Standards to plan or develop their professional practice in some way. Of these, 9 in 10 felt they had made a difference to their practice. In addition, 8 in 10 stated they provided clarity over definitions of good teaching and learning. Those in teacher training and the ETF’s Qualified Teacher in Learning and Skills (QTLS) programme showed an even greater commitment to using them for reflection and improvement. However, senior managers were most likely to use them for performance management purposes, which practitioners told us was incompatible with the goal of developing innovative teaching. It is therefore our suggestion that the Professional Standards yield the greatest returns when they harness teachers’ creative energies and encourage experimentation and critical reflection. These benefits are already being enjoyed by our ETF Corporate Partners, where embedding the Professional Standards has been established as a high priority for teachers and managers.
Integral to our approach is thinking big about career development. In 2014, the ETF developed a scaffolded approach for its Professional Standards at three career points: the Developing Teacher, the Professional Teacher and the Advanced Teacher, which set out the values, knowledge and skills expected from practitioners as they progressed in their career. While the model was in the public domain, it was not a prominent feature of workforce planning. Unfortunately, it is a harsh reality that career development has been poorly developed in the FE and Training sector for some time, a fact acknowledged in the 2021 White Paper Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth, which stated that “Teaching in further education is often overlooked as a career, with information for potential recruits being inadequate and disparate” (p62). A DfE (2020) survey found that 52% of those who had left the sector believed that better training and career opportunities would have stopped them leaving.
The ETF Steering Group reviewed its existing model and determined there was an unmistakable opportunity to re-establish a powerful career development approach using the Professional Standards. Practitioners agreed that our three newly revised career stages of ‘Early Career’, ‘Experienced’ and ‘Advanced’ were meaningful distinctions between educators at different stages of their career. We were told that the ‘Early Career’ teacher is mainly focused on achieving individual competence by acquiring knowledge and mastering technique. In contrast, the ‘Experienced’ teacher is someone with several years of teaching who plays a more central and collaborative role in their teams. Finally, the ‘Advanced’ teacher is likely to have at least five years teaching and is well-known amongst colleagues for championing and role-modelling initiatives to improve the learner experience. We found this differentiated model to be a useful way of thinking about the values, knowledge and skills held by teachers and trainers as they developed from trainee to mastery in their careers.
All this is consistent with the government’s priorities for the FE and Training sector to “recruit and retain excellent teaching staff”, commission “high-quality professional development to improve the quality of teaching” and strengthen teachers’ career progression (HMSO, 2021, pp60-66). The ETF has responded to this call by updating its Professional Standards to support the work of teachers and trainers at all stages of their career, providing clarity around effective practice and their ongoing career journey. It is also actively working with providers to support their implementation, through a revised self-assessment tool and a range of resources to increase the impact of teachers (see the ETF’s website for details). Used intelligently, the 2022 Professional Standards have the capacity to transform the working culture by putting teacher expertise, peer collaboration and career aspiration at the heart of professional practice. As the sector’s ‘career companion’, the ETF will be working tirelessly to make this vision a reality.
