Professor David Reynolds, a senior advisor to the Welsh government, has welcomed the planned “new deal” for teachers – involving the use of electronic passports to chart development – but warned that changes to ITT seemed “urgently necessary”.
Writing in the Wales Journal of Education, Prof Reynolds said building of teacher “capacity” to teach and professionally improve had become a cornerstone of education policy around the world.
He stated: “The biggest ‘bangs’ for policy ‘bucks’ undoubtedly lie in the area of CPD for our existing educational personnel. But important increments in teacher quality can also be attained from an attention to ITT, too. Action concerning ITT seems urgently necessary.”
Furthermore, Prof Reynolds wrote that “one should be sanguine about the possibility of rapid educational changes in Wales” given the large numbers of policies introduced since 2011 (when the Welsh government launched a 20-point plan to overhaul school standards).
He continued: “Wales is attempting to do in a small number of years what other countries have done over a much more extended time period. There is scarcely an area of curriculum, assessment or school/educational organisation that has not been involved in the, quite simply, massive educational changes that have been introduced.
“But doing such a lot of policy change in such a short time period was not necessarily in itself a totally useful way to proceed, given the overwhelming evidence that successful change needs careful embedding, if it is to become ‘institutionalised’ and if it is to affect learner outcomes comprehensively.”
He pointed out that it had only been a little over four years since the announcement of these policy changes, so there had only been a couple of years for the policies to affect teacher behaviour in classrooms and the consequent results of pupils.
He added that there were “hints of improvement in certain areas” and a rise in attendance rates boded well given “attendance in schools in disadvantaged communities is often the forerunner of improvement in academic results”.
He added: “There are hints that on public examinations – GCSE and A level achievement – Wales may be improving slightly faster than the whole of the UK, but the promise of the improved summer 2014 examination grades do not appear to have been fully realised in the 2015 figures,” he stated.
“Nevertheless, the ‘gap’ between Wales and England in the percentage of 15/16-year-olds achieving the Level 2 threshold does appear to be diminishing slightly.
“The annual reports of the chief inspector for education and skills in Wales also show a slight improvement in standards, although it is often described as ‘slow’ or ‘gradual’.”
He concluded that this “slow improvement” may not be enough to make noticeable improvements in this year’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results.