How is the Welsh Government supporting ongoing professional development for teachers, and what evidence is there that current initiatives are improving teaching quality in Wales?
Ensuring all practitioners can access career-long professional learning is integral to our vision for education in Wales. The National Professional Learning Entitlement, launched in 2022, is playing a key role in providing access to high quality professional learning from early career to system leadership. Building on existing evaluation approaches, a rigorous professional learning endorsement process launched earlier this year, provides additional assurance regarding the quality of current provision. The national Induction Programme for Newly Qualified Teachers was recently awarded endorsed status. The endorsement process includes a core focus on evaluation, impact and sustainability, providing a continuous and robust evidence base.
To further inform our ambitions for the future teaching in Wales, we are currently engaging with OECD on a global new professionalism research study, together with a number of other international partners including Flanders, Austria and Portugal. In conjunction with wider research, OECD findings will not only provide opportunities to raise the profile of teaching as a career, but will also influence professional learning aspects to further support teacher retention and positively impact on the experiences of all learners in Wales. This approach builds on a targeted diagnostic study of teachers’ Continuing Professional Learning (CPL) in Wales undertaken by OECD in 2021.