Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research, UCL Institute of Education
Abstract
This guide has been developed from findings from the Early Career Teacher Support pilot evaluation (Hardman et al., 2020), funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). It is one of three guides intended to summarise the key messages from the evaluation and provide strategic and practical suggestions that can inform planning to support the development of Early Career Teachers (ECTs) in schools. The guidance is applicable to all school contexts and is not specific to particular programmes of support. The Early Career Framework (ECF) has been introduced in some parts of England from September 2020 and will be rolled out nationally in September 2021 along with guidance to support participating Early Career Teachers and mentors. Stemming from the Recruitment and Retention Strategy (DfE, 2019) the ECF seeks to ensure that all teachers in England receive high quality support in the first two years of their career. During 2019-20 the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research at UCL Institute of Education undertook an evaluation of three pilot programmes which were designed to test different ways of supporting Early Career Teachers and their mentors. We worked with the Chartered College of Teaching, Ambition Institute and The Education Endowment Foundation as well as 98 schools (both primary and secondary) to evaluate the impact of these pilot programmes. Following the pilot which we evaluated, the DfE selected four suppliers to develop freely available resources for schools to use. This included a separate team from UCL Institute of Education. We shared our initial findings with these suppliers to inform their materials. From 2021 there will be six suppliers, including UCL Institute of Education, offering programmes based on one of these four initial programmes. Schools now have three options around how they implement the ECF. The guidance in this document is relevant to all three options