Describing appropriate bodies, lead providers and delivery partners
Why we did this
The delivery model for early career teacher training and induction is complex. There are 3 different types of role involved in its delivery:
- appropriate bodies
- lead providers
- delivery partners
Appropriate bodies have been quality-assuring induction for new teachers for many years. They decide whether an ECT has passed or failed their induction with a school. They can also choose to extend a teacher’s induction.
Lead providers and delivery partners were only introduced in September 2021. Lead providers create the curriculum and learning materials for early career teachers and their mentors. Delivery partners typically deliver events for this training, often in person, and are typically geographically closer to the school. They work together in ‘partnership’ with school to give training for ECTs and mentors.
Understanding these 3 different roles has been difficult for schools. In research, many have reported confusion and a difficult naming the organisations they are working with that fulfill these roles.
To help with this, we tested defining each of these roles on the pages where we ask the school to specify them. However, school users pointed out this wasn’t always helpful - they needed to understand how the roles were differentiated and in context together.
A lot of this confusion is a result of often the same organisation fulfilling more than one of these roles for a school. For example, many appropriate bodies are also delivery partners. So when schools give their answer, it’s unclear that it’s the same to what they’ve specified before.
We decided to try and solve this problem by trying to define these 3 roles in some content where schools would most benefit from it.
What we did
We have added a details component to several parts of the registering an ECT journey, to help better explain these roles to schools.
We didn’t want to use a details component as we know they can frequently get missed. However, we thought it was the best solution we had because we didn’t want to link off to any alternative guidance and take them out of the registering an ECT journey. We also thought adding the full information to every page would be very repetitive and take up a lot of space.
We hope this will help schools understand better the different roles for the education organisations involved in early career teacher training and induction.