New teacher training providers may have “future opportunities” to gain accreditation and enter the market, a Department for Education official has said.
The government’s 2021 ITT market review forced providers to go through a bruising re-accreditation process. Sixty-eight teacher trainers, responsible for training 16 per cent of all trainees in 2022-23, lost out.
This sparked fears teacher supply could be hit and that ITT cold spots might emerge. A re-accreditation round will launch next year, but won’t be open to new providers.
But Claire Plasser, team leader of teacher training and recruitment at the Department for Education today told the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers annual conference that would-be ITT providers might still have a chance to become accredited in the future.
“Looking to the future we want to work with you to support schools to meet the workforce challenges they’re facing, which may mean expanding your current provision to train more teachers where there’s demand from schools and from candidates,” she said.
“It may also mean future accreditation opportunities to accredit new providers where they’re needed, but this will be done in dialogue with the sector, through data sharing and discussions around areas where we think there’s untapped demand.”
DfE ‘may open future accreditation rounds’
Earlier this month, Schools Week revealed the DfE would launch a new re-accreditation round for ITT providers in spring next year to “ensure ongoing coverage and efficient delivery”.
But only providers that were previously accredited, are a lead partner currently and have not received two consecutive ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ ratings will be eligible to apply.
Asked if there will be an opportunity for providers which have not delivered before to become accredited in future, Plasser said the DfE “may open future rounds of accreditation to providers, and we will be led by the data and insights on that”.
Emma Hollis, NASBTT’s chief executive, said a key lesson from the last accreditation round was the “importance of understanding local context”.
NASBTT also wants to avoid the market place “becoming increasingly crowded” because that just creates “lots of non-viable providers”, she said.
“There is a balance to be had between an open market and making sure we’ve got fresh people coming in and also respecting local context and availability of placement already, which perhaps wasn’t done as effectively as it could have been with market review process.”
‘Concerning’ numbers exited market
Gatsby Foundation-funded research by the Education Policy Institute previously found that, “concerningly”, the 68 providers that exited the market had trained 16 per cent (4,491) of all trainee teachers in 2022-23.
Only 179 providers were accredited.
De-accredited providers were able to continue to operate by entering partnerships with accredited providers.
In a blog post in November, the National Foundation for Educational Research’s school workforce lead Jack Worth said “a catastrophic loss of training capacity from the ITT market review seems to be one risk that is off the table”.
But he warned that “increased expectations on schools from concurrent teacher training and development reforms being too much for some schools to bear remains a potential cause for concern”.
Nearly half of providers ‘optimistic’ about future of ITT
It comes as a NASBTT members survey found 48 per cent of respondents were “quite optimistic” about the prospects for ITT under the new government
But 38 per cent of providers said it was “too early to say”. The poll received responses from 48 of NASBTT’s 177 members.
Hollis told the virtual conference that “I think we’re in a cautious yet hopeful space as Labour begins to deliver on its education promises.
“As the voice of school-based initial teacher training providers, we welcome this change in tone from government – it seems to be a tone that acknowledges the vital role of our sector and it seeks to raise the status of the teaching profession, which I know we’ve all been calling for for a long time,” she later added.
But Hollis said common themes in the survey responses included “some scepticism about whether those ambitious recruitment targets can really be met”.
