The NSW Minister for Education Prue Car has just announced important changes to professional development for registered teachers in NSW. Among them, ‘accredited’ PD has been dumped, along with the constraints of ‘mandatory priority areas’ introduced in 2021, and removing some time-consuming documentation and evaluation. The changes were announced directly to teachers last week via email. In an earnest talking head video, Prue Car vigorously defended the need to trust teachers, as “the architects of learning” and “the experts in identifying the tools and the resources …[they] need”.
While this focus on trust is admirable, the changes raise some serious questions.
What counts as teacher professional development?
The Minister emphasised that teachers will be trusted to “choose the professional development that suits their needs”. But when we look at the fine print, there are professional development activities currently highly valued by teachers that are either not included in the Government’s new framework, or explicitly excluded. This includes professional reading, collaborative planning, and the moderation of student assessment – core professional activities at the heart of good teaching practice. Furthermore, while research shows that ‘home grown’, school-based, teacher-led activities are highly effective in supporting teacher development, there is a disturbing pervasive idea that PD is something “delivered” to teachers by a “provider”.
Curiously, “compliance training” is, for the first time, explicitly included as professional development. First aid and child protection updates are undeniably important in maintaining teachers’ fitness to practice. But it is questionable whether they meet the benchmarks of high quality teacher professional development we should be aspiring to.
Who decides what teachers will do?
The second question is, who decides? While the Minister emphasised that the changes will “ensure that every hour of professional development that you do is relevant and valuable to you and your practice”, the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) website also states that employers “may choose areas of priority for their staff”, decisions which can be made at both a school and “system level”. There has been a trend toward NSW Department of Education ‘control and command’ approaches to dictating the focus and form of professional development activities for public school teachers. This suggests that teachers may continue to have little say in the kind of PD that matters to them.
The shift from ‘accredited providers’ to ‘recognised providers’ seems at odds with the Minister’s messaging, by reinforcing the idea that teachers are not best placed to decide which PD to engage with. The list of recognised providers will be “overseen by an expert advisory panel”, whose membership is as yet unclear. The use of the term ‘providers’ again suggests a view of PD as something ‘‘delivered’ to teachers rather than something they actively engage with and have ownership over.
Will teachers’ professional development be monitored?
Finally, while there does seem to be a reduction in administrative compliance work as part of this change, particularly for ‘providers’, teachers will still have to log their hours and be subject to an ‘audit process’ described by the Minister as “an annual review of the PD teachers have recorded so that the 100 hours of appropriate PD can be verified if needed”. This monitoring signals the continuation of “appropriate” teacher professional learning being defined by ‘experts’ (rather than by teachers themselves), which does not include many of the professional learning activities teachers may value the most.
Good teacher professional development is not measured in hours. If, in the words of the Minister, PD has “always been at the heart of [teachers’] practice… it was simply what teachers did”, then why is an auditable log of hours required? It hardly illustrates the ‘trust’ the Minister was at pains to express for teachers.
Increasing trust in teachers is a worthy and much-needed objective. But these changes make little meaningful progress toward it. While teacher PD continues to be framed as a set number of auditable ‘hours’ that are ‘delivered’ by ‘providers’, we will miss an opportunity to genuinely support teachers to do what they value and sustain them in the profession.
From left to right: Nicole Mockler is professor of education within the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has a background in secondary school teaching and teacher professional learning. Meghan Stacey is a senior lecturer in the UNSW School of Education, with a particular interest in teachers’ work. She has a background in teaching English and drama in public secondary schools. Claire Golledge is a lecturer in education and the co-ordinator of HSIE Curriculum (Secondary) in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She worked as a secondary teacher of humanities. Helen Watt is professor of educational psychology at the University of Sydney, initiator of the Network Gender & STEM (www.genderandSTEM.com) and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Header image of Prue Car from the Minister’s Facebook page.
THankyou some great points. Viv Ellis, Warwick Mansell & Sarah Steadman’s paper on the trend in the UK, “A new political economy of teacher development: England’s Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund.” is also a useful analysis in our current political climate,
“Through a political economy analysis of public records, course information, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and interviews, the paper offers an emerging typology of enterprises to describe the organisations that won TLIF funding to provide Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for teachers in designated ‘Opportunity Areas’. Further, the paper extends available theorisations of the shadow state by identifying three kinds of shadow state structure – autonomous, intermediate and co- created – in relation to CPD provision under TLIF. This provisional identification is offered for critical examination beyond the immediate context of English CPD policy. The paper argues that these different relations of power and interdependence represent a new political economy of teacher development in England.”
Thanks George. Yes, the Ellis et al. (2021) paper contains some excellent analysis of the terrain of TPLD in England.
Thank you for shining a light on this important topic. The question of what is appropriate is huge. Who decides? Is it the teacher? the principal? the system? What is gold for one teacher may be ‘ho hum’ for another. Teachers across a school staff are diverse in their knowledge, experience and needs. One teacher may benefit from a one hour refresher, while an inexperienced teacher may need 10 hours over time to fully benefit from the same PD. Almost 10 years ago my colleague (Lorraine Ling) and I considered PD within an Australian context and had many of the same concerns. PD or PL is often offered to a school staff as if all their needs were the same. We argued for PD that allowed for interactivity and dynamic relationships between all of the stakeholders involved – ‘collaborative and collegially supportive PD sessions coupled with follow-up in schools and in subsequent sessions, where teachers discuss, debate and question themselves, the curriculum, policy, assessment, teaching and learning methods, and the very essence of what it means to be a teacher in a fragile and uncertain world where the future is not knowable’. I hope this is happening in some schools. However, I do not think it is common.
Hi Nicole, Meghan, Claire and Helen, a curious article from the 4 of you. I write this as one of those dreaded ‘providers’ 😉 There seems to be a misunderstanding – teachers (those empowered by strong leadership) do have agency. Today, I ran a PD workshop for 30 science teachers from Government schools in the Illawarra. Today occurred because proactive teachers contacted me as a provider to deliver the workshop (ironically NESA accredited). Among other things the teachers collaboratively planned among themselves. Such occurrences are common across the state: New England, Inner Sydney, Riverina etc.
I’m sure you will have read the list of providers. It includes organisations like universities, museums, the Department of Education, teaching unions, indigenous, government, and third party organisations and more. What we all have in common is we’ve recently jumped through the very high hoops to achieve NESA accreditation, including providing the evidence base for our training and collaborative activities.
Where we do agree is that the changes mean a reduction in administration for providers, but an increase for teachers having to log their hours. (Currently NESA accredited hours are logged by those pesky providers). Also, “to genuinely support teachers to do what they value and sustain them in the profession”, be that PD by providers, or in-house activities. SC
Thanks, Simon. could you provide more details on how the teachers organized PD that way? I’ve never seen rank-and-file teachers being allowed to organize PD as you describe.
Typically, PD is prescribed by the Principal and other leaders. They are responsible for addressing DoE initiatives and are accountable via regional Managers. Additionally, there are numerous bureaucratic and financial procedures just for an individual to get approval for PD, let alone a group of 30.
Your point about all the hoops you jumped through for NESA accreditation confirms their argument about “who decides.”
What do you think of their points: “There are professional development activities currently highly valued by teachers that are either not included in the Government’s new framework, or explicitly excluded. This includes professional reading, collaborative planning, and the moderation of student assessment.”
Also, their last point about monitoring PD and who decides whether it’s accredited PD – the experts?
Hi George, it’s quite straight forward. I put out my PD via a newsletter and social media. Teachers responded. A bit of toing and froing to settle on a date. In the meantime I’m sure they sought permission from their leadership, not least to be a host school, then to pay/release teachers/pay for casuals. Like I said, this occurs in schools with strong leadership. A key factor here is often where there is a healthy pre existing professional learning network (Curriculum Network in DoE) that is actively seeking and arranging PD, be it internal or external. But there are also some speculative empowered individuals. This is very much a high school phenomenon, particularly in high level content/chronic teacher shortage subjects like the sciences.
Primary is a very different beast. As you say, this is typically prescribed and ‘delivered’ to them. But how else are primary teachers, many of whom dropped science in Y11, who have very low self-efficacy and high anxiety around the subject, going to learn such technical knowledge and skills and how to teach it without ‘expert’ delivery/provision/facilitation (beyond the brief learning they did at uni)? (I’m in primary schools 2 days a week, so not just a gatecrashing high school educator).
I don’t get the issue with who decides? NESA decide – they are the NSW Education Standards Authority. Again, it is by definition the job of the Standards Authority to monitor and decide on accredited PD. Is this a meta issue, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I find the point re highly valued PD activities not being included curious because many of these are recommended by NESA for providers to include. This seems a legitimate complaint.
ok fair enough. I guess we are coming from very different experiences and points of view.