The House of Commons Education Committee report on teacher recruitment,
training and retention highlights the ongoing crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, with shortfalls in many subject areas and many teachers working outside their specialism, with detrimental effects on teacher workload, teaching quality and pupil progression.
One way to mitigate the challenges of teachers working outside their specialism is the provision of subject specialist professional development. Previously, the English government has funded long-term programmes for teachers working outside their specialism in shortage areas such as physics and chemistry. For example, from around 2008 to 2011, the forty-day Science Additional Specialism Programmes (SASP), and shorter Subject Knowledge Enhancement (SKE+) courses which replaced them, provided extended opportunities for teachers to develop their subject specialist knowledge.
Since the end of those government-funded programmes, there has been little equivalent extended support for those teaching outside their specialism. Further, many teachers of science lack access to subject specific professional development, and, in general, access to professional development is often limited by cost, time, staffing challenges in schools and suitability to teachers’ development needs.
As colleagues who were involved in the provision of those long-term programmes, we are interested to know whether they might provide a solution to the pressing need to support teachers working outside their specialism. Therefore, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation funded a small-scale scoping study to investigate the long-term impact of such programmes on teachers’ professional practices, attitudes and career pathways.
We interviewed a sample of teachers who participated in chemistry and physics SASP programmes from 2008-2011 and asked about their experience of participation in the programme, its impacts on their careers and whether such a programme might be feasible in today’s contexts. We identified the following impacts of participation:
● better subject knowledge and understanding of how to teach the non-specialist subject
● greater confidence and positivity about teaching the non-specialist subject
● a toolkit of new teaching approaches, which, for many participants, were used throughout their careers
● connections with programme facilitators and teachers from other schools, which, for some, lasted beyond the programme
● enhanced and new opportunities for career progression
These benefits derived from design features including:
● evidence-informed content directly relevant to teachers’ practice
● sustained, regular programme sessions throughout a school year, providing opportunities to trial, revisit and review learning
● experienced, expert facilitators
● opportunities to collaborate with teachers from other schools, thereby widening professional support networks within and beyond the programme’s duration
Further, the contextual factors which enabled teachers to participate included:
● financial support for schools, enabling participating teachers to be released without significant additional workload to either themselves or colleagues
● senior leader support in schools, linked in part to the financial support, and also to an understanding of the potential value of participation to both the participant and the school.
All the participants we interviewed felt that such programmes would be beneficial in today’s education system, providing a route to supporting teachers working outside their specialism, thereby tackling teacher shortages and, potentially, promoting greater retention and career progression.
Our findings demonstrate how sustained, subject-focussed professional development initiatives can be part of the solution to the challenges faced by teachers working outside their specialism. The programme’s design features, which align with other evidence about effective teacher professional development, provide indicators of how to design such programmes, while the contextual factors point to what is needed within the system to maximise their impact.
The Education Committee identifies that the Department for Education should work with subject associations to coordinate support and funding for the development of professional development opportunities for teachers working outside their specialism. We agree, joining the voices of many other organisations in asking the government to consider the implementation of sustained, subject specific professional development as a major contributor to tackling the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention.
Professor Emily Perry, Head of Sheffield Institute of Education Centre for Research and Knowledge Exchange
Rachel Hartley, Strategic Lead for Pedagogy and Professional Practice, Institute of Physics
James de Winter, Associate Teaching Professor, University of Cambridge
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