The Educator Magazine U.K. Jan-April 2023. - Magazine - Page 26
Ofsted:
Schools and further
education & skills (FES)
Inspecting the initial stages of the early career
framework and national professional qualifications
Posted by:Helen Matthews, Senior HMI for Teacher Development
Recruiting, training and
retaining high-quality teachers
and leaders is fundamentally
important. It forms the
foundation for giving pupils
the very best experience in
education.
In March, we published our new
framework for inspecting lead
providers of the early career framework
(ECF) and national professional
qualifications (NPQs). These prgrammes
complete the ‘golden thread’ of
professional development for
teachers. This golden thread is made up
of: high-quality initial teacher education
(ITE), support for early career
teachers through the ECF, and
professional development qualifications
(NPQs) for experienced teachers and
leaders.
The ECF is designed to help early career
teachers develop their practice,
knowledge and working habits. NPQs
enable teachers to develop their
expertise in specialist areas of teaching or
leadership.
Under this framework, we inspect the
lead providers who are delivering the
ECF and NPQ programmes. We evaluate
the lead providers’ curriculum design,
and how well they ensure the effective
delivery of the programmes.
Lead provider monitoring visits
(LPMVs)
In the first year of delivery of these programmes, lead providers receive a monitoring visit known as an LPMV. During
the summer term, all 10 lead providers
had a LPMV. The visits check how well
the lead providers are implementing the
programmes. The 10 LPMV letters are on
our reports website.
We were encouraged to find that almost all the lead providers were taking
effective action to establish and deliver
high-quality training programmes.
We saw some common features of good
practice:
• Strong communication and
collaboration between the lead
providers, delivery partners and the
ECTs or NPQ participants
• Curriculum that ensures the course
content is consistent with the materials
specified by the Department for
Education (DfE)
• Well-chosen and high-quality examples
of how the ECF statements relate to
different subjects, phases and/or settings
Most ECTs and NPQ participants we
spoke to were positive about the training.
They believe that it is delivered
effectively and builds on what they
already know. NPQ participants found
that what they were learning was highly
applicable to their role and was helping
them improve their practice. Some ECTs
said they would like further examples of
how what they were learning related to
their own subject or phase. We were
encouraged to see that most lead
providers had noted this and were
responding.