New teacher training plans ‘need proper funding’

Teacher trainers warn that schools need to know exactly how much funding they will get for new Early Career Framework
17th October 2018, 6:00pm

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New teacher training plans ‘need proper funding’

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/new-teacher-training-plans-need-proper-funding
The Government Has Launched A New Teacher Recruitment Strategy

The Department for Education needs to make an “early commitment” to funding schools to lengthen new teachers’ induction period, teacher trainers have warned.

National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT) executive director Emma Hollis told her organisation’s annual conference today that the new Early Career Framework (ECF) would be a “game-changer” if properly funded. 

But she later told Tes that schools now needed to know exactly how much funding they were going to receive to fund ECF, which involves extra CPD.

“CPD is really expensive and schools do not have enough money as it is, so if you are going to give the entitlement of two years CPD that has got to be funded,” she said.

“If it’s not given the funding, it won’t get done properly, and if it’s not done properly then it’s a crying shame.”

‘No unusual financial burden on schools’

The ECF is set to be piloted in the North East next year with a view to being rolled out across the country in 2020. It will increase the teacher training period from two to three years in a bid to provide more support and guidance to trainee teachers, and will possibly include more reduced timetabling.

Gareth Conyard, the Department for Education’s deputy director of teacher workforce development, said today at the same conference in London that the framework would be mandatary and would establish consistency in teacher training across schools. But he said he couldn’t say how much funding schools would receive to pay for the extra training.  

“We want to work out exactly how much this costs and make sure this is not an unusual financial burden on schools,” he said.

“What I can’t do is say, ‘That means we’re putting x million pounds extra into the system,’ because some of the questions we are trying to work through in terms of delivery will have an impact on that final cost.”

 

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