There is a postcode lottery of spending on continuous professional development, with some parts of the country investing three times more per teacher than others, TES can reveal.
The data, collected by the Teacher Development Trust (TDT) and shared exclusively with TES, 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 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.
‘Knock-on problem’ for recruitment
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.
Mr Weston told TES that he was concerned about the high level of variation, and that underinvestment in CPD would “have a knock-on problem for recruitment and retention”.
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 A spokeswoman for the council said: “We do not recognise these out-of-date figures, which would appear to be a basic, over-simplistic calculation that does not reflect the extensive range of free development and training on offer.”
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”.
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.”
A Department for Education spokeswoman said that the education secretary, Justine 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 said the DfE was providing support through its £75 million teaching and leadership innovation fund and by working with the sector to develop new national professional qualifications.
This is an edited article from the 3 March edition of TES. Subscribers can read the full article here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents.
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