Our refreshed vision, missions and strategy for Teacher CPD

30 March 2024

Off the back of the CPD cross-service discovery and a new Deputy Service Owner being appointed in October 2023, we decided to revisit our vision, missions and strategy for the whole digital programme.

The digital programme sits within the Developing Teachers and Leaders Division (DTLD). We are a core pillar of “delivery” in a policy and delivery division responsible for delivering the teacher development reforms. These include the National Professional Qualifications (NPQ) reforms and Early Career Framework (ECF) reforms, which you can read more about here.

The image below illustrates the current services we deliver in the digital programme.

As we approach 4 years since the national rollout of the reforms, the Deputy Director of DTLD set out their new vision for the whole division:

A self-sustaining world class teacher development system that retains more teachers and transforms the quality of teaching throughout their teaching career.

However, the next step was to break down what this overarching vision means for the digital services.

The policies and programmes are never going to be static. Alongside continuous improvement, the policies and programmes need to evolve as our teachers in the system do over time. There will continue to be framework reviews and procurement cycles that impact delivery. Ultimately, the service needs to deliver and inform the policies as they evolve over time, to ensure DfE-funded CPD meets the needs of teachers.

We focused on two things based on our experiences so far developing and running the digital services in a such a large-scale reform programme with continual policy changes and contracts:

1. What kinds of changes can we expect going forward?
2. Given the above, what does a self-sustaining system mean?

The kinds of changes we can expect to see differs between the ECF and NPQ reforms.

A better understanding the types of changes gives us an element of control (even if not full control) as we can more effectively plan for it and bake it into our strategy.

There are no current plans to introduce more NPQs to the current suite, but the department may add more NPQs in the future, albeit at a much slower rate. NPQ funded places could change year-on-year, as well as the eligibility criteria. However, the department will still want to monitor how many NPQs are being taken up so they can evaluate the impact of the programme. Our service will continue to play a key role in facilitating this.

Because of the statutory element, it is unlikely in the short, medium and potentially longer term that the entitlement and funding for early career teachers (ECTs) to serve induction and complete ECF-based training will change. However, the content framework and delivery model is likely to change because of periodic reviews and the procurement cycle (every 4 years). While the current 2025 delivery review is intended to represent the last major changes to the ECF delivery model, political changes and the long-term unsustainability of the dominant provider-led route might lead to change in the future.

What do we mean by a ‘self-sustaining’ system?

There remains heavy reliance on the department, on providers and other influential stakeholders to make the CPD system work in the way we’re envisioning.

The teacher development system needs to be sustainable for schools and DfE. We need to recognise the workload stresses on the sector across the registration process, delivery and content. We also need to try to reduce the scale of policy and funding changes, move to more mature government-to-supplier relationships and ensure that the delivery of the programmes and assurance activity is proportionate to BAU activity.

From a digital perspective, we came up with some examples of “unsustainable” activities, to help us understand how we might move to a more sustainable model. These include:

• The duplication of data entry for users

• The high amount of development resource needed to fix edge cases and perform manual tasks

• The high amount of resource needed to generate finance statements and add new cohorts

• The high amount of resource needed to schedule and send comms to users at key points in the cycle

We then thought about what a sustainable service looks like. Ultimately, it means that we can scale down the amount of resource needed on the digital programme, and enable policy, contract management and assurance colleagues to run the programmes autonomously in the future.

Examples of adopting such an approach would mean contract managers can self-serve and are not reliant on the digital team to do things like adjusting funding caps for NPQ intakes, setting up new training cohorts and varying terms and service fees for each contract.

We landed on the following principle: we should always design and build with self-sufficiency in mind. This means asking the question: can a team without developers use this feature indefinitely?

Our missions

There was some confusion about how we prioritise work given our vision above alongside continuous pressure to deliver the policies and programmes as new scenarios emerge on the ground or policy changes come into force that we must respond to.

Alongside delivering the policies and programmes, we have 3 missions that should guide the strategic transformation of the service. As a programme, we need to focus on tightly managing the former, so we have the space to do the latter. This will be achieved through regular conversations where teams and programme leads come together to discuss the roadmap and agree priorities.

Based on the pain points surfaced in the CPD discovery and the barriers to achieving our vision, we came up with the following three missions for the digital programme:

1. We eliminate the administrative burden involved in teachers taking up DfE-funded training

2. We achieve increasing efficiency and flexibility in managing the delivery of the programmes and adapting to policy changes

3. We provide accurate data and insights to evaluate the impact of the policy reforms and inform improvements to the policies, programmes and services

Our strategy for delivery

In order to achieve these missions and our wider vision, there are some fundamental things we need to get in place first. We therefore broke down our strategy into three phases for delivery:

1. Our services serve their core purposes and are flexible enough to adapt to future changes and opportunities
2. We have maximised value for users and increased efficiency through automation
3. We have stabilised the services and consolidated down

Phase 1 – Our services serve their core purposes and are flexible enough to adapt to future changes and opportunities

Our services still fall short of delivering their core functions and are incredibly rigid, making it difficult to respond to new scenarios and changes. The lack of flexibility means that any future big changes to the delivery model will require a significant amount of work – potentially building again from scratch rather than building from what we already have.

Our key goals in this phase are to:

• decouple the NPQ service from the ECF service so they are separate services and databases to eliminate unnecessary dependencies and simplify them. This should eliminate a lot of the problems we have around data integrity
• increase access to data and leverage analytics to help us assess how we’re doing and make better decisions around what to prioritise
• redesign and rewrite the ECF end-to-end service to eliminate tech debt, improve data accuracy and meet user needs. The current ECF service is complex, inflexible and is not sustainable
• influence the ECF review and 2025 procurement to ensure the delivery model better meets user needs, elevate the digital standards of providers and hold providers to account for digital delivery

Phase 2 - We have maximised value for users and increased efficiency through automation

Once we have got the fundamentals in place and have the foundations for
a more sustainable and flexible service in place, we can prioritise
efficiency gains and optimising the services. This includes:

• reshaping the programme to give the NPQ reg team ownership of the end-to-end journey from registration through to the API and payments. This will lead to a more efficient use of resource and a more empowered team owning NPQ delivery
• increasing automation and self-serve to achieve greater efficiency and lower costs for programme delivery (for DfE and providers)
• increasing the scope of the services to deliver end-to-end, by including NPQ completion data and induction data collection to minimise data entry duplication for our users and confusion
• better meeting user needs around knowing what DfE CPD options there are at different stages in their career

Phase 3 - We have stabilised the services and consolidated down

By the time we get to phase 3, we will be able to reduce the number of people needed to run the services. The services should be set up to easily accommodate funding and minor policy changes with minimal digital resource required.

This frees people up to go and tackle other problems within Teacher Services. Separating the NPQ service from the ECF application and the different levels of complexity associated with both policies and services means that the NPQ and ECF services will progress through the phases at different rates.

This is our vision and our strategy for getting there, but it’s not static. We are continuously updating it based on people’s feedback and other factors that impact delivery and priorities. But we hope it gives the programme more clarity on where we’re going and how we get there over the next 2 to 3 years.

If you have any questions get in touch with Mili Malde, Deputy Service Owner for the CPD Programme