Thousands of teachers could be prevented from leaving the profession every year if schools spent an extra £500 per teacher on high-quality CPD, according to this analysis by the Education Policy Institute (EPI).
The report found that giving teachers a formal entitlement to high-quality training and development would only cost the government an extra £210m in funding a year.
When added to existing school spending on training and development for teachers, the total cost would represent less than 1% of the government’s total budget for schools in England.
A policy of providing teachers with an entitlement to 35 hours of high-quality continuing professional development (CPD) a year has been shown to bring significant returns in the way of pupil attainment and earnings, and may tackle retention problems in the teaching profession.
But despite these benefits, there is currently no formal entitlement to high quality training offered by the government. Teachers in England currently participate in less CPD than their international counterparts, while the quality of CPD programmes on offer often fails to meet the government’s own standards.