Quality assurance of teachers’ continuing professional development: design, development and pilot of a CPD quality assurance system - evaluation report

In 2018, the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation commissioned a project to explore the potential development of a quality assurance system for teachers’ Continuing Professional Development (CPD). This scoping work explored existing quality assurance systems and sought to test the potential for widespread, sustainable engagement in such a system. The study included stakeholder consultation, through workshops and surveys, and a review of evidence from literature and policy. We now build upon this earlier scoping study with the design, development and piloting of a quality assurance system for teacher professional development. This pilot project was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust and delivered by a consortium of the Chartered College of Teaching (CCT), the Teacher Development Trust (TDT) and Sheffield Institute of Education (SIOE) – part of Sheffield Hallam University. Full details of the design, testing and outcomes of the quality assurance system are provided in a separate report, which contains a summary of the outcomes of the scoping work, and findings and conclusions from the two cycles of design, testing and evaluation undertaken in the pilot. It also identifies key recommendations for how the quality assurance system may be utilised moving forward to increase the quality of CPD experienced by teachers, including offering guidance to support school leaders in making informed decisions about commissioning CPD which is more likely to lead to positive pupil outcomes. In this report we describe the evaluation, which was delivered in conjunction with the design, development and piloting of a quality assurance system for teacher CPD. This internal, formative evaluation ran alongside the two cycles of testing of the system of quality assurance, to inform both the development of the system during piloting and also future developments of the project beyond this pilot. In this report, we describe the evaluation aims and methodology, detail findings from each participant group, assess the effectiveness of the system, and offer recommendations for the future development of the quality assurance process.