Is OUR Golden Thread now Threadbare?

Tracy Goodyear- Founder of Trust-wide CPD Leaders' Forum and  Director of Teacher Development at The Mercian Trust

Trust-Wide CPD Leaders’ Forum founder, Tracy Goodyear argues that the reduction in funding for NPQs is leading to greater barriers to accessing Professional Development in schools and Trusts. 

 

The reformed suite of National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) for teachers and leaders was introduced in Autumn 2021.  These qualifications were designed to support professional development in school leadership and specialist areas of teaching practice. As part of the government’s long-term education recovery plan, £184 million of new funding for NPQs was announced in June 2021 and was set to be reviewed in Summer 2024. Thousands of teachers and leaders nationwide had funded access to NPQs and many Trusts, Teaching School Hubs and schools had rightly capitalised on this as an equitable, standardised offer for school teachers and leaders.  

In response to the commitments outlined in the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy and the ITT Market Review, “the DfE is creating a world-class teacher development system by transforming the training and support teachers and school leaders receive at every stage of their career.” (Delivering World Class Teacher Development, DfE, 2022). The introduction of the reformed NPQs helped to form a more secure trajectory of learning for colleagues throughout their careers, enabling them to establish strong professional development cultures within individual schools and Trusts.  


There are/ were undoubtedly criticisms of some aspects of the ‘Golden Thread’, notably that such a linear model “fails to recognise the complexity of teacher learning” (UCET, 2022). However, schools and Trusts saw the NPQ curriculum as a welcome invitation to build upon these set foundations by designing and providing opportunities to translate learning from the “cognitive domain” into real, sustainable, context-sensitive change in schools.  

 

This took a range of forms, with many Trusts and schools building successful contextualisation programmes for NPQs, wrap-around coaching programmes and integrating NPQs into a wider suite of teacher and leader development in and beyond their organisations, ensuring the depth of learning aligned with organisational development priorities.  

Whilst the variation of this key contextualisation work is clear depending on Trust size, stage, age and capacity, the NPQs broadly still offered schools and Trusts with a consistent offer of professional development that didn’t squeeze already compromised school budgets. It sent a clear message that a long-term investment would have significant benefit to the profession more widely.  

As mentioned in a joint letter from Teacher Development Trust, ECF and NPQ National Providers in November 2023, “ To resile from the investments made hitherto would be to risk the entire work of the ‘Golden Thread’ and send an awful message to current and prospective teachers - that their development is something the government is willing to sacrifice”. 

Context of Funding Reduction 

In the summer term of 2024, the DfE announced that funding for future NPQs would target teachers and leaders who work in the most challenging schools or educational settings, serving more disadvantaged pupils and said that scholarship funding to cover the full cost of the NPQ course would be available to teachers and leaders from:  

For the early years leadership NPQ, highly disadvantaged early years settings will also be eligible.   

For Cohort 7 (November 2024 start) the DFE announced a limited number of funded places. These places are available for anyone in any maintained school, college or nursery who wanted to study NPQ Headship, NPQ Leading Primary Maths or NPQ for SENCO. Early indications are that these revised funding arrangements will remain the same for Cohort 8 (Spring 2025), but we await an announcement in early December from the DfE.  

Funded places were also available for participants in PP50 schools (schools with the highest deprivation) who want to study other NPQ courses- NPQ Leading Teaching, NPQ Leading Teacher Development, NPQ Leading Behaviour and Culture or NPQ Executive Leadership. 

If you were in a non-PP50 school and you wanted to study NPQLT, NPQLTD, NPQLBC or NPQEL your course would not be funded.  

The original commitment in 2021 was that the allocated funding would provide 150,000 funded NPQ places across 3 years (an average of around 50,000 places per year, distributed amongst national providers). For the Autumn 2024 cohort, the amount of funded places available dropped to just 10,000 NPQs nationally. Therefore, even if schools were eligible for funding, they were not likely to secure a funded place, which means that difficult decisions would have to be made regarding which colleagues may be deserving of scholarship funding and which would have to source alternative payment methods.  

In the Summer Term, the Trust CPD Leaders’ Forum convened an additional ‘sense-making’ meeting to gauge the implications and impact of these changes to funding on Trusts, Teaching School Hubs and schools. The concerns and issues raised during this meeting have been grouped thematically, below:  

So, why is the change to funding a problem?  

1.) It compromises strong, trusting partnerships with national providers 

Many Trusts and Teaching School Hubs act as delivery partners for national NPQ providers. These are partnerships that are based on mutual trust, understanding and effective working relationships. Trusts and Teaching School Hubs make partnership decisions based on their own contexts and to secure alignment between the aims and mission of their organisations and national providers. 

Forging purposeful and meaningful partnerships is key in ensuring the greatest outcomes for professional development, and knowing the finer details of the programmes helps organisations to build on the foundations of learning from the NPQs most effectively. Due to such low/ mixed allocations of funded places per NPQ, Trusts/Teaching School Hubs have found themselves in an uncomfortable position- either reduce the professional development offer for your staff/ local schools you have been serving or encourage applications to alternative providers who have spaces and potentially endanger long-lasting partnerships.  

In the worst cases, those relationships have been lost altogether as several national providers pulled out from their contracts for delivering NPQs due, in some part, to the fragmentation of the funding across the system.  

One Trust leader said:  

“How will we maintain positive relationships with partners now we can no longer offer funded places to most of the schools we work with? We have heard that places will be offered on a first come first served basis and we may already have many applications beyond our allocation. How do I communicate this to staff who are no longer able to complete the programme?”  

 

As a result of this, Trusts/ TSHs must make difficult decisions about who is deserving of training and development.  

How these decisions are made is fraught with complexity, as noted by one Trust leader:  

“How do we decide on who should have the funded places?! Budget-wise can we offer some funded places from the Trust but, again, how do we decide/judge the applications or decide which school’s needs should be prioritised over other’s?” 

“ All teachers and leaders should have access to high quality professional development, not just those who work in schools with high levels of disadvantage- who are we to ration opportunities for colleagues who wish to grow and develop in their roles? What message does this send to the profession?” 

2) It reinforces the dangers of accumulated advantage of CPD/ The Matthew Effect 

A common concern of CPD leaders is the worry of ‘accumulated advantage’. Sometimes called the Matthew effect/ the Matthew Principle, this term was coined by sociologists Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman in 1968 and takes its inspiration from the Gospel of Matthew, “ For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Wikipedia, 2024).   

American educator Todd Whitaker wrote in his 2020 book ‘What Great Teachers Do Differently’, “the best measure of a great school is the difference between the best teacher and the worst teacher”. In this case, those who readily have access to high-quality CPD have license to continue an upward trajectory. In contrast, those who don’t are unfairly disadvantaged by the system, which only serves to exacerbate the gaps within our profession more widely. 

Without the equitable distribution of resources and opportunities to develop professionally without barriers, colleagues will inevitably fall victim to a system that prioritises only a few.  

In this case, there are a group of colleagues who will not have equitable access to NPQ study, thus widening the gap between “the best” and “the worst” and having a damaging impact on our schools: 

Staff at greater risk of being disadvantaged 

 

 

For one Trust, who is not a delivery partner but actively signposted colleagues to a provider offering NPQs, that the offer will be very limited or non-existent:  

“This will also mean staff will not have access to accredited training that has validity behind it. This will create a wider gap in the system between those who can get the training - those who can afford to pay for the training and those who miss out entirely. It was a real power for PD development as equitable for the education system and now it seems as though it is not valued in the same way and I worry about the long-lasting impact of buy-in for future programmes”. 

Another Trust leader commented:  

“ We lose the ability to have NPQs as a part of our CPD structure open to all - because not all can afford them, and there are limited places. Staff can’t rely on this being part of their development journey as we’ve encouraged them to think over the last few years.”  

One Trust leader explained that the organisation they work for would struggle to be able to compensate for the gap left by NPQ delivery as part of their wider PD programme:  

“Equity of access and opportunity is a huge issue, only 50% of schools in our trust are eligible. Insufficient places available even for those with funding and we don’t have capacity to deliver PD internally to compensate across a suite of NPQs.” 

 

3) It places significant strain on CPD budgets and it is difficult to find viable and workable alternatives to fund training needs 

Due to the limited scholarship places available (even for eligible schools), schools and Trusts need to make difficult decisions about how/ if they are able to fund willing colleagues to complete qualifications.  

In the most desperate cases, one Trust commented that: “some colleagues are self-funding training as their schools are not able to support them financially...despite there being a training need”. At its least expensive, it would cost participants £850+VAT and at its most expensive, just under £2,000.  For those wishing to complete NPQEL, this rises to almost £4000). This is a significant personal cost, particularly if NPQs lose their status as a nationally recognised qualification, and particularly, like in the case of NPQ SEND, as of 1st September 2024, these qualifications are a mandatory requirement for somebody in role.  

In some cases, national providers have attempted to work around the funding issue by coupling NPQs with apprenticeship levy-funded programmes at either Level 5 or Level 7 (e.g. Coupling NPQSL with Level 5 Operations Management or coupling NPQH with Level 7 Senior Leaders Standard), however this is also problematic: the demands of an apprenticeship including the declared ‘off-the-job training requirements’, on top of the challenges implementing learning from NPQ study is a tall order for busy school leaders. Whilst the cost to CPD budgets may be relieved using this method in the short-term, the cost to organisational levy budgets can be more than £14,000 per participant.  

Likewise, the announcement made by the government in September 2024 stated that funding for post-graduate level apprenticeships (Level 7) should now be funded by organisations outside of the levy (DfE, 2024).  

4) NPQ SEND 

There is widespread concern regarding the national SEND crisis- “ there are an estimated 1.7 million children and young people in England who have some form of SEND- and the numbers are growing year-on-year" (DfE, 2024a). Whilst the issues relating to SEND in our schools are complex and multi-faceted, we also know that high quality professional development is the greatest lever for improvement. A roundtable event reported by SEND Network in October 2024 brought together educational professionals to discuss the challenges of SEND provision, and emphasised the importance of upskilling staff in response to the current situation (https://send-network.co.uk/documents/meeting-the-increasing-challenges-of-send-provision-in-schools).  

On the 1st September 2024, NPQ SEND was added to the suite of reformed NPQs and has since replaced the National Award for SEND Co-ordination (NASENCO) as the mandatory qualification for SENDCOs. Due to its new status as a mandatory programme, the demand has outstripped the number of scholarship places available, meaning that even if a school is eligible for places, they are still unlikely to gain a funded place. Leading SEND experts have reiterated the importance of high-quality professional development in schools, particularly upskilling colleagues to be able to bring about a “whole-school shift through strategic thinking” and that it “should be a must that a SENCO is on the senior leadership team” in order to bring about powerful, lasting change. The additional strain on colleagues in role is exacerbated further by the fact that there is a significant lack of knowledge around SEND, “ findings showed that some staff lack knowledge around SEND, even SENDCOs, with 12 per cent of all senior leaders reporting they were either ‘not very knowledgeable’ or ‘not knowledgeable at all’ when supporting children with SEND” (Chilvers, 2024). Given the extremity of the SEND crisis and the need to build powerful knowledge and understanding regarding SEND in schools, allocated scholarships for this qualification should not be capped.  

5.) Devaluing of nationally recognised qualifications is forcing more siloed working across organisations 

Whilst there are clear criticisms of the NPQ programme, such as their perceived narrow evidence-base and their relevance to current challenges, what the qualifications have offered is an accessible, structured, standardised approach to professional development that organisations could freely build upon and contextualise to their needs.  

In the absence of accessible programmes like these, schools and Trusts are now looking to compensate for their loss by designing their own programmes and training to address shortcomings in their immediate offer. With huge variation nationally with dedicated time, resource and capacity to this project, we are at risk of further exacerbating the inequalities that are felt nationally in professional development.  

For example, Teacher A may work within a Trust with staff who work centrally to design programmes for their Trust on developing middle leadership. They have free access to this programme, which has been well-considered and is research-informed. Teacher B may work in a school that previously had a good relationship with a local delivery partner, but can not secure funded places, as they cannot afford an external programme from their budget, they attempt to build one themselves, with little resource or time to do so. They work in isolation to attempt to address their training needs to compensate for this loss.  

In both examples, there will be significant variability in the quality and effectiveness but also in the foundational standard of learning required. The NPQs provided a benchmark and a foundation, but perhaps more importantly a standardised starting point for organisations to build upon as they see fit. The national recognised standard was a positive aspect of these qualifications.  

In-house equivalents could be perceived to have less currency for colleagues.  

One Trust commented on this particular challenge, stating:  

“If we don’t put in our own offer for MLT/SLT, then our leadership offer won’t be equitable at all given our reliance currently on the NPQ model as our overall Trust model” 

Other Trusts explained: 

“The NPQs form the foundations of the Trust offer, from which contexualisation is set. If we can’t offer equality of opportunity across the Trust, without it having serious financial implications, what do we do?” 

“We are currently developing our own leadership training for next academic year. This had already been planned to address ‘the gap’ to bridge the NPQ theory with leadership of people.  

Many Trusts appear to be doing this - is this good use of time to do this individually? How does it help the profession more widely?” 

 

So where do we go from here? 

These reflections from our members feel timely, as the Labour Party begins to make key decisions in addressing the recruitment and retention crisis.  

By proposing a Teacher Training Entitlement, there must be a clear investment for teachers, leaders and support staff at all stages of their careers, and that entitlement should not be hindered by compromised school CPD budgets or should not disadvantage groups of schools, Trusts or colleagues.  

Here are some further thoughts and considerations:  

 

 

References:  

Department for Education, 2022. Reforms to teacher development. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reforms-to-teacher-development [Accessed 8 November 2024] 

Gateway Alliance, 2024. The Reformed National Professional Qualifications Explained. [online] Available at: https://gatewayalliance.co.uk/new-npqs/ [Accessed 8 November 2024] 

Department for Education, 2022. Reforms to teacher development. [pdf] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reforms-to-teacher-development [Accessed 8 November 2024]. 

Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), 2022. Golden Thread or Gilded Cage? CPD position paper. [pdf] Available at: https://www.ucet.ac.uk/downloads/14605-Gilded-Cage-UCET-CPD-position-paper-(full-version).pdf [Accessed 8 November 2024].  

Department for Education, 2022. Reforms to teacher development. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reforms-to-teacher-development [Accessed 8 November 2024]. 

Long, R. and Roberts, N., 2024. Special Educational Needs: support in England. [online] House of Commons Library. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07020/ [Accessed 8 November 2024]. 

Wikipedia, 2024. Matthew effect. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect [Accessed 8 November 2024]. 

Department for Education, 2024. Prime Minister overhauls apprenticeships to support opportunity. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-overhauls-apprenticeships-to-support-opportunity [Accessed 8 November 2024]. 

Chilvers, R., 2024. How are SENDCOs managing amid rising pressures? [online] Schools Week. Available at: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/how-are-sendcos-managing-amid-rising-pressures/ [Accessed 8 November 2024].