Continuous professional development should “run like a golden thread throughout teachers’ careers”, according to education secretary Justine Greening.

But new data shared exclusively with TES indicates that access to that golden thread varies dramatically depending on where you live in England.

It reveals a postcode lottery of spending on CPD, with some parts of the country investing three times more per teacher than others.

The data, collected by the Teacher Development Trust (TDT), shows that schools in Newham in London spent £926.70 on CPD per teacher - more than triple the £278.80 figure in Derbyshire, the area with the lowest spending in the country.

David Weston, the TDT’s chief executive, said the variation was “too high” and failing to invest in CPD could do “terrible damage” to schools in the long run.

The area with the highest spending on CPD in England was the Isles of Scilly, with a rate of £1,407.60 per teacher. But since this covers just one school, it appears to be an outlier. The national average per teacher was £613.60.

After Newham, the area with the next highest spending was Camden, also in London, at £916.10 per teacher.

At the other end of the scale, the areas with the lowest spending behind Derbyshire were Solihull on £306.60 and Bury on £320.40.

‘Schools need the appropriate resources to invest in good-quality expertise’ 

The TDT arrived at its figures by taking the CPD spend from the latest academy and maintained school budget figures for the academic year 2014-15, and dividing this by the number of teachers in the school workforce return for the same year.

While the data covers local authority maintained and academy schools, the figures seem to be driven to a large extent by CPD spending in the maintained sector.

For example, in Derbyshire, the average CPD spend per teacher in the county’s maintained schools was £276.10. In Solihull it was £308.30 and in Bury it was £326.50. In Newham, the area with the highest spending, it was £966.60.

Mr Weston told TES that he was concerned about the high level of variation. “Schools need the appropriate resources to invest in good-quality expertise,” he said. “If [teachers] feel they’re not having that investment, that’s going to have a knock-on problem for recruitment and retention.”

Commenting on the lower-spending areas, he said: “I have significant concerns for the recruitment and retention in those schools, as well as for the quality of professional development and whether it can realistically be effectively improving student outcomes.”

It did not make sense for schools experiencing financial strain to cut CPD “more harshly than everything else”, he said, because in the long term this could result in “terrible damage”.

‘Over-simplistic calculation’

However, Derbyshire County Council disputed the TDT’s analysis. A spokeswoman for the council said: “We do not recognise these out-of-date figures, which would appear to be a basic, over-simplistic calculation that does not reflect the extensive range of free development and training on offer.”

Mr Weston said it was possible that schools in different parts of the country were recording their CPD spend in slightly different ways.

He called on the government to collect more school-level data on how much time was being devoted to CPD and what sort of activities schools were offering.

A Solihull Council spokeswoman said that each school in the borough was “allocated a delegated school improvement budget and is responsible for how they choose to spend it”.

‘Available resources have a significant impact on what schools can afford to spend on CPD’

She also said that the council offered “specific training and briefing to Solihull schools, which is free to access”.

A spokesman for Bury Council said that schools in the area were “among the lowest funded” in England. “Consequently, the amount of available resources has a significant impact on what schools can afford to spend on employing staff and any CPD training.”

However, he added that the council had used its primary and secondary learning collaborative to pool resources and provide training events and peer-to-peer CPD in “the most cost-effective way”.

A Department for Education spokeswoman said that Ms Greening had “set out her ambition to continue driving up standards [in schools] through investment in professional development so the best teachers stay in the profession”.

She added: “We trust schools to decide how best to use their resources to ensure this happens but we are providing further support with our £75 million teaching and leadership innovation fund and working with the sector to develop new, gold-standard national professional qualifications.”

@whazell 

• This story has been amended from an earlier version, which used incorrect figures provided by the Teacher Development Trust