The new academic year signified the first-ever cohort of Early Career Teachers (ECTs) to enter their second year of the Early Careers Framework (ECF). While this new requirement provides trainees at the start of their career with further opportunities to develop their skillset, it has drawn questions from school leaders on how to implement the second stage of the framework successfully.
With the support of Ambition Institute, whose programme we deliver through our delivery partner the London District East Teaching School Hub, our ECTs thrived throughout their first year.
They’ve hit the ground running in their second, and to build on their success we knew it would be imperative that we continued enhancing and expanding the support we provide them.
A culture of success
To do that, we have trained two more senior leaders as visiting fellows to maximise our capacity in delivering training internally. Training them is a leadership priority, and should be supported accordingly.
Next, encouraging collaboration has been central to their success so far, so we are increasing our efforts to enables our ECTs to build a network of support to share best practice and advice with their peers. While it’s common practice within schools to encourage collaboration at senior levels, we believe all staff can benefit from learning from their peers.
To facilitate this collaboration, we are planning to utilise the three mandatory training clinics planned for this academic year to bring our second-year cohort together. Instead of hosting these training sessions remotely, we will hold a full training day, providing our ECTs with the opportunity to meet and form connections with others across the cohort.
Collaboration has been central to our ECTs’ success
This enables us to provide our ECTs with bespoke training sessions that are specific to our Trusts’ procedures, assessments, and leadership development.
To continue encouraging this collaboration, we have also organised a research visit to the Eden Project for this cohort. During the trip, we will encourage our ECTs to discuss why they wanted to be a teacher to support them to cultivate an understanding of their goals and the impact they are already having.
Distributed leadership
One of the biggest lessons we learned is the impact of the mentor programme and the importance of ensuring we are fully supporting our mentors to succeed. As a part of this, we have embraced the benefits our mentors gain from being engaged with the programme by creating opportunities for them to develop their leadership skills.
Deliberately up-skilling our mentors has provided us with a valuable resource that can be deployed within schools and across the trust. Our mentors have conducted wider staff training using the instructional coaching skills they developed as an ECT mentor, helping them to move on to more senior roles.
We have had to adapt our implementation of the mentor programme to the changing circumstances within our schools. While the programme has been set up to ensure the same mentor is assigned to each ECT over the two years, this is not always possible. Staff move to new schools or are promoted to senior leadership positions. What is important is that our ECTs feel supported, and therefore we have placed greater emphasis on building a full support network to ensure a change in mentor does not impact their progression.
Our success in implementing the ECF has given us significant confidence as we support a larger ECT cohort this year. In part, this is due to the strong investment we have made in ensuring our full network of staff, from ECTs to senior leaders, feel well-supported in their career progression.
As we continue to adapt to the new ECF, we will continue to put wellbeing and success at the heart of our approach to its implementation. Our teaching workforce is our greatest resource, and our ECF strategy is just one way of fulfilling our desire to make every employee happy and fulfilled.
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