Working with the British Council, experts here at the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE) explore the current state of research evidence around the continuing professional development (CPD) of teachers working in low- and middle-income countries. This report aims to answer these questions:

PREP Is Up And Running

We are pleased that our project, working with the Education and Training Foundation and other partners to improve access to practitioner research on the Excellence Gateway, is now complete.

The new facility was originally soft launched at Easter when, of course, we were in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. From April to September we added some new facilities and a large number of additional resources.

Today, Philippa is delivering an online presentation for ResearchED Home on the findings from a map of evidence from systematic reviews, with evidence about pupil impacts. One of the key notes from this presentation is that there is currently no systematic research reviews into curriculum development with evidence of pupil impacts, largely due to there being too few studies with this evidence to support them. Philippa touches on what designing effective CPDL (Continued Professional Development and Learning) means, how it contributes to curriculum development, and what the evidence about curriculum development says about CPDL. 

The goal of ResearchED is to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. Researchers, teachers, and policy makers come together for a day of information-sharing and myth-busting.

You can find Philippa's presentation attached to this news item as a downloadable PDF document. 

Serious pupil and teacher challenges

According to Pisa, pupils in England may be making slightly better progress than they were but they are also some of most unhappy pupils in the world and getting unhappier. Also, at a time when our teachers are tackling major curriculum reforms, we have a significant recruitment and retention crisis. A new map of the pupil focussed research evidence about Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and its leadership, has important messages for school leaders and policy makers about these twin challenges and what to do about them.

The International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) is unusual for bringing together policy makers, educationalists and researchers from around the world. CUREE's Bart Crisp, with colleagues from the Universities of Ontario (Professor Carol Campbell) and Birmingham (Dr Tom Perry) went to the 2020 Conference held in Marrakesh to make presentations at a symposium drawing on the 3-year research project CUREE orchestrated for Education International.

That research explored how teachers' professional identities are formed through the lens of seven contrasting jurisdictions around the world.  

You can find the full report and a summary here

A New Platform for Practioner Evidence and Research 

Thanks to everyone who completed our questionnaire. This is now closed and we are analysing the results.

From this we will produce some prototypes for further consultation. Please contact daniel.case@curee.co.uk or paul.crisp@curee.co uk if you would like to know more about that. Click here if you want to know more about the project overall

13 case studies of executive leaders

This report summarises interesting commonalities across 13 smaller multi-academy trusts in the way the leaders (chief executives and others) understand their role in the leadership of learning.  Key commonalities include;