Introduction

The Department for Education (DfE) is a ministerial department of the UK Government responsible for children’s services, education, apprenticeships and wider skills in England. It is responsible for the teaching and learning for children across early years, primary schools, secondary schools and higher and further education.

As part of this, they are also responsible for supporting professionals who work with children including teacher training.

The DfE wanted help in transforming the way they supported teachers in their first 2 years of work.

Challenges

DfE wanted to improve the support offering generally and brought Register Dynamics in to help with this, however, on the first day of working together, it was also the first day of a COVID-19 Lockdown in 2020. This meant that ministerial priorities changed over night and we had to adapt to this situation quickly. A National Lockdown meant that schools and colleges were only open for vulnerable children and children of critical workers and all other children learnt remotely.

The first few years of teaching are often tough, however, in this case, many teachers would now miss the bulk of their first or second year onsite at a school. This meant that the usual initial teaching training experience would be disrupted and we needed to accelerate the transformation of their induction programme to be online-first. This involved bringing future timelines forwards by several years which was a significant task.

Solutions

Register Dynamics supplied a Director-level Technical expert to manage, lead and implement the desired digital transformation.

We created a brand new website and platform to deliver their Early Career Framework Core Induction Programme, in time for the new academic year (September 2020). We worked with a range of vendors and content publishing partners to deliver original training material in a fully accessible way.

We helped safely streamline the various project deliverables including: negotiating requirements and deliverables with vendors and publishing partners, ensuring that the new content accessibility guidelines were met, and that departmental architectural standards and support models were followed. We ensured that the platform would be maintainable by the department and that all user needs would be satisfied until post-pandemic.

We prioritised technical requirements including deferring e-learning platforms which required in-depth research and multi-year commitments. We focused on making sure the platform was optimised and available by September 2020.

Results

The Early Career Framework Core Induction Programme was launched and rolled out nationally by the government in 2020. It is said to be ‘one of the most significant reforms to the teaching profession in a generation’.

The programmes include high-quality, evidence-led development materials from 4 expert teaching training providers: UCL Early Career Teacher Consortium, Teach First, Ambition Institute and Education Development Trust. We made all of these materials available for free via the platform.

DfE continues to build on its support for teachers and performs an evaluation of the framework each year. Reports show improvements in the confidence of early career teachers. In 2023, over 85% said they felt confident in promoting progression of pupils, planning and teaching well-structured lessons and in setting and demonstrating high expectations which inspire and motivate pupils. Four in five early career teachers also said they were likely to be teaching in 5 years time.