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Context is king: how ECTs are affected by the conditions they are working in and by their own personal dispositions
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Elaine Long
Welcome to The ECF Staffroom. I'm Elaine Long.
Mark Quinn
And I am Mark Quinn.
Elaine Long
We are programme leaders for the UCL Early Career Teacher Development Programme. Why are we in the staffroom? We are here because this is where the best professional learning conversations always take place. This is where problems can be aired bluntly and where solutions can be explored.
Mark Quinn
Over the course of this series, we will hear the voices of different colleagues as they come in the ECF Staffroom. We will hear from early career teachers themselves and from the mentors and induction tutors who support them. We will talk about all things ECF, the challenges and the joys. So, why don't you enjoy a coffee with us, perhaps even grab a biscuit and sit down to half an hour of ECF Staffroom, chat.
Welcome to the ECF staffroom Sofia Eleftheriadou and Lisa Baines. You are extremely welcome in our virtual staff room. We're excited to listen to you. We're going to introduce you in a moment to our listeners about what your roles are and everything else. But because you are guests in our space, we offer you a coffee or another hot drink of your choice. So, what can I what can I fix you? Sophia, what can I fix you?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
I like filtered coffee please.
Mark Quinn
With milk or without, or how do you take it?
Eleftheriadou, Sofia
Without, without please.
Quinn, Mark
Filtered. a good strong black coffee and what about you Lisa?
Lisa Baines
Yeah, exactly the same actually.
Mark Quinn
Well, you two are easy dates. That's great. That's what I like to hear. I should say we're recording this in a very cold December. So, we want our drinks nice and hot. Do anything with that piece of cake I got. I can open up the cupboard for you. I'm sure I've got some biscuits here. What would you like?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
Do you have any mince pies?
Mark Quinn
Mince pies! That's right. That's to go with our Christmas decorations. I'll put those in the microwave and we'll have those a little bit later.
Elaine Long
Yeah, because that's when nearing to the holiday season. This is quite a festive episode of ECF Staffroom and as a special Christmas present for us, we are lucky enough to have two post doctorate researchers at UCL in our ECF staffroom today, and I'm just going to ask Lisa first. Just describe your background, your interests in education, and how you've reached this point.
Lisa Baines
So, I was a secondary school teacher, a science teacher. Mostly up in Lancashire, but more recently down here in Surrey and I've always been interested in professional developments, and I enjoyed being an NQT mentor when I was teaching, and so I happened to come across a PhD that was available that really sort of caught my interest and that was around widening participation, widening access for disadvantaged young people to go to universities. So, I applied, and I managed to get on to that PhD and I completed that in May this year. So not that long ago.
I'm working at UCL in the centre since January. I mean my background is psychology. My undergraduate degree in psychology, my PhD is psychology.
So, I'm really interested in some of the sort of personal dispositions, you know the self-efficacy of teachers and how that contributes to their well-being, all those sorts of individual factors that are influenced by you know, the surroundings, the context that the teachers are in and that contribute to. how they teach and what decisions they want to take around their teaching career as well. So that's the sort of path that's led me to our current research.
Elaine Long
That's really interesting because as part of the early career framework, we often focus on the knowledge and expertise teachers need to do their job., but less talked about at the moment probably is self-efficacy. So it’ll be really interesting to talk to you a bit later in the podcast about what that means and why that's so important to you. And also, interesting that you've been a teacher and a mentor yourself, so you'll be well aware of how difficult it is in in schools at the moment and can see both sides of that and bring that to your research approach.
Elaine Long
Sofia, can I ask you the same question?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
Yeah, so my background is in the field of education. I did my undergraduate degree in education in Greece and then I completed my Masters in the UK, in Social Research methods and statistics, and I very much enjoyed my course on research methods, and this is how I decided that I wanted to pursue further studies in research and do a PhD. So, I recently completed my PhD at the University of Manchester and this was a PhD in Education and my research was related to the area of educational assessment.
More specifically, I was looking at the assessment of secondary school students collaborative problem-solving skills, and it was a mixed message project that I analysed some educational data for students in England, that was a large scale educational data sets and I also did some interviews with students and this finished, I completed it in very recently.
In October and in November this year I joined the UCL Centre for Educational Leadership as a research fellow and I'm just very excited and very happy to be part of the team researching the impact of the early career framework programme and I was very excited for to join and be involved in that project because I could see myself utilising the skills that I got from my PhD to this project and also recognising the significance of the impact of the project that can make in terms of the well-being and the retention of teachers. I’m sure we will discuss later on. So therefore, although very recently joining the team, I'm super excited.
Elaine Long
Thank you. It's obviously you bring such a huge wealth of expertise to this. Can I ask you both and you touched on this but why do you think research has such an important role to play in education particularly when we're thinking about the success of policies implemented in such scale as the ECF framework is?
Lisa Baines
I mean, for me, there are still gaps in outcomes in education. There is always something to improve and I think taking an approach that uses evidence and sort of more systematically tries to deal with those issues I think is really important. So, you know, for me trying to address some of these issues that ultimately lead to better pupil achievement, better pupil outcomes.
I think it's right that we take a more critical approach and an approach that can be sort of scrutinised and that way we can try to refine how we teach, we can try to lead to better education for teachers and also improve practice in a in a more systematic and consistent way.
Sofia Eleftheriadou
My view is not very different from what Lisa has already said. I'm just going to add that I think research has a very important role to play in education because it gives us the evidence that will help us then form any recommendations or guide any decisions for educational policy or practice and that's why I think it's very important.
Mark Quinn
As a guide. Yeah, it's really interesting, Sofia, isn't it? Obviously, coming as we all do from UCL, we’re obviously really interested in the research and the evidence, and there's always more that we can be looking for and obviously we're talking here about the early career framework as a framework to guide teachers in how they might teach and how they learn how to teach. But it is interesting, isn't it, that we think about research not as a rule book, well we found these things from research, therefore you must teach in this way.
It's always mediated, isn't it? Through the individual, through the teacher actually standing in front of the classroom with the students that they've got to work with. The best we can hope for research is to have really, you know, well informed guidance rather than here is a set of instructions that you need to follow. Would you agree with that would, would that be where you?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
I would definitely yes, I was very fast to interrupt you there because I completely yeah, I agree. I didn't mean to say it in a way that there's one rule fits for all and this is the best way of doing things, rather than as you said the well informed decisions that we can make based on evidence and also these can also be a context sensitive so it doesn't have to be the same for everybody or for every school if we talk about teacher practices and evidence relating to the teacher practice and yeah.
Mark Quinn
So context is king here, isn’t it? I think we can get to the actual project that the two of you are working on because you are investigating the context in which teachers are working and the impacts that might have upon what they can learn from the professional development programme which is the early career framework programme they are doing with us.
Maybe I’ll go to you Lisa first. Can you just explain what the project is? What your methodology has been so far? Who we've reached out to so far on the project?
Lisa Baines
So the project in a nutshell is a four-year longitudinal evaluation, research rather into the UCL led ECF programme. So that involves not just the ECTs, but it also involves the mentors as well. We're taking a mixed methods approach to this research. So we have several layers to the project and some of that is more quantitative and survey based and looking at database information which Sofia will perhaps talk about a little bit later. But we also have some more qualitative aspects to the research as well. So we will be interviewing teachers and mentors and we'll also be conducting some case studies of particular schools. So, we are taking that approach because I think in synthesising the quantitative and the qualitative together.
We can look at the at the hard data of who's staying in teaching, who's moving schools, who's leaving. But we can also then really explore why they're making those decisions. So, what we're really interested in and that goes back to your comment, Mark, about context being king, absolutely is and that is actually a research gap that we are addressing with this project because we want to know not just the sort of individual factors, but also the school level factors, the programme level factors and the individual dispositions of teachers, but also the school contexts as well. So not just the phase of the school or the size or the type of school we're interested in.
The organization of the school, the culture, and the leadership. So, all of these different factors come together to then influence the well-being and the efficacy, and then ultimately the retention pathways of teachers. So, our project really is about trying to drill down in more detail about how these factors are all coming together.
Working with the programme, we can think of it a bit like a nest, we have the individual teacher who's you know, who's taking part in the programme, they’re experiencing the programme within the context of their school within the context of their, maybe a wider trust.
But also, then you could drill down into the really more individual dispositions that might influence how they how they sort of interact with the programme and how they then use that in their teaching. So, we're building quite complex models on working towards doing that to really try to understand in detail about how this ECF programme will influence the teaching practice and their retention decisions and doing that over a period of time.
Quinn, Mark
I was just going to ask one more thing about the methods there, Lisa and Sofia. We've got a large number of participants on our programme, and I can just say something just because obviously, numbers matter here, don't they? So how many people have you spoken to? How many people have responding because people listening to this podcast will be amongst the people who have responded to you?
Lisa Baines
They will, and we're so grateful for the number of people that have responded. So, our survey element, which is what I'm more focused on at the moment and I'll hand over to Sofia in a second to talk about the database element of the research. In terms of the survey, we've had over 1700 mentors and ECTs filling our survey, so we're really grateful that we've had that level of engagement.
Obviously, we hope to keep in touch with all of those teachers and mentors, because that's the crucial, we don't just want to snapshot, we want to understand what's happening over time. So, we really hope that those people who completed the survey will carry on with us and sort of share their experiences with us over the long term.
We'll also be picking up then our second year or to phrase it correctly our second group of first year ECTs, so they will be completing their first year of the programme in the summer and we hope to be able to contact as many of those as possible as well. So, we're trying to build a big picture, but we also have the larger cohort, the whole group of the 12,000 ECTs and mentors. I'll hand over to Sophia to talk about the database element of the research, which is really sort of underpins everything.
Sofia Eleftheriadou
Thank you, Lisa. We are looking at building our database that can help us track the early career teachers and mentors, so therefore be able to explore the teacher retention trajectories over time and we are able to do that because we have such a large number of participants in the UCL led Early Career Framework programme and this is possible to do by using the unique school ID's of the early career teachers involved in the programme this year and it gives us this opportunity to track their mobility and their career pathways and for example, we can see and we're very interested in looking at if teachers are leaving from their schools or if they're moving schools and we are very much interested in looking more closely at the type of schools and areas that they are more likely to keep teachers or more likely to lose teachers.
To achieve that, we are matching our database to the national school databases and have information about the contextual characteristics of the schools. For instance, we are looking at the location of the school we're looking at whether the area that the school is based at has been identified by the DfE as an education investment area or the performance profile of the schools. For instance, using the Ofsted ratings that are publicly available to us and information such as the socioeconomic characteristics, using percentages of pupil premium, students eligible for pupil premium and free school meals.
Elaine Long
Thanks. That sounds really interesting and obviously it's a longitudinal study for very good reasons. I know that your early findings very, very tentative. But would you just be able to summarise for us what some of your early findings have been?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
I can start very briefly with the bigger picture, which is the 12,000 the database and perhaps Lisa, you can say a bit more about the survey. We have just conducted some initial analysis and looked at the numbers of teachers who have withdrawn or deferred from the LP framework programme in June as compared to November this year and we saw low numbers of teachers leaving, which seemed to match with the intentions indicated by the teachers on the survey.
The most common reason for early career teachers to withdraw from the programme in November was moving to a different school, and this is very interesting finding because we can follow that up and investigate further. If there are any patterns in the movement of the teachers and whether they can tell us something about the types. As I said, the types of areas or the type of schools that teachers are leaving from, or they're going to. So, these are the next steps that we will be pursuing as we follow them over the years and we get more information about them, as we go on with the project.
Lisa Baines
The survey data was reflective of the actual data on withdrawal and deferral. So, we had 96% of ECTS indicating that they were going to continue in teaching and that was largely reflective of the numbers we actually saw. So that's a really great to sort of see that data from the survey is that intention there is actually a good indicator of reality and it will be really interesting to see in time, I mean the national figures for teacher attention, I believe we're about 87% after a year for the previous years, trainees under the old, the old framework. So, it will be really interesting to see the national figures for our year one ECF participants and see how that matches up, but that's a really sort of strong indicator that we've got good retention in our in our programme.
The survey data is where we are building our models, which will take some time, but what we've done initially is looked at the descriptive data, so we we've looked at sort of percentages and responses and sort of got just a broad stroke view of what the ECTs and mentors are saying. It's really encouraging that the ECTs taking part in the programme are feeling across if we take the teachers standards as a sort of a metric that they are feeling very confident in their in their capabilities, pretty consistently across the teachers’ standards with between 70 and 80% feeling confident or completely confident in what they're doing there.
So, it's great to see that a lot of them are reflecting on their practice in that positive way and obviously that's not necessarily all attributable to the programme, but that is something that highlights how important the qualitative aspect of the research will be going forward, is exploring that further. Another standout which we think is really, really important is highlighting the role of the mentor and we asked the ECTs about each of the learning strategies in the programme and the most valuable component of this is the mentoring to the ECTs.
They really value that mentoring relationship and that's also reflected in data that we collected from the mentors as well, that they recognize the importance of that role in the ECTs journeys, and we actually had some open text questions at the end of each section of our survey and we had many comments saying how instrumental was one that stands out in my memory. How instrumental the role of the mentor was to their progress as an ECT.
Elaine Long
Thanks, Lisa, you mentioned earlier and that it was like a nest and that was really compelling metaphor for me actually the ECT at the centre of that nest then you also talked about your background in psychology and the importance of self-efficacy and those dispositions in teachers. Do you see any links between that and mentoring being that the highest input in the programme?
Lisa Baines
Well, that is something that we don't have an answer to yet because that's something when we build our theoretical model, we have bringing in all of these factors. So, we will be looking at how the ECT have rated the mentoring in terms of the importance to their learning and then we will also be bringing in measures of their self-efficacy of their job satisfaction of their resilience in teaching. All of these things sort of feed into the teacher’s well-being and their feelings of how effective they are as a teacher and then what that means for their retention.
So, yeah, that's something we would anticipate from the literature that you know, if we have teachers who have strong feelings of self-efficacy and they have good job satisfaction, we would anticipate that that would then predict positively good well-being in teachers and feeling more effective, so there is a theoretical basis for the model that we've created, but from our data, that is something that we will be exploring going forward in the in the coming months.
Mark Quinn
Just picking up the issue here of mentoring itself and how delighted are ECTs are to have a mentor, a mentor working with them on the basis of the ECF on a very regular basis. Mentors who are themselves skilled and becoming more skilled, hopefully as they go through the programme. But we also do here, don't we? We hear nationally in the press, we hear it in some of the feedback that we get, that mentors are under a lot of strain. They're very time pressured. Our mentors, I think in fact, some of the, Sofia, you might come into this and answer this. Can you tell us something about who our mentors are? Or what we know about who our mentors are? How typical are they of the workforce? How typical are our mentors compared to other mentors, maybe in the system? Do we know? What do we know about our mentors?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
We have looked at the participant demographics of the mentors and we have presented them in our most recent report with the initial descriptive analysis that Lisa has mentioned before. So, in there we tried to present a picture of the early career teachers as well as the mentors compared to the national statistics that we have on the demographics of those two groups and the majority of the mentors, from what I can see from our report is that there are more female, white and they're also quite young group of mentors. These are pretty much what we have in terms of their background.
I'm not sure, Lisa, if you want to add any other information.
Lisa Baines
We've looked at the demographics of Sofia said. I mean really broadly for both the ECTs and the mentors, our sample appears to be fairly well representative of national ECT and national mentor data. So those demographic graphics that Sofia mentioned just there, that is largely reflective of the teaching population as a whole and the mentor data as a whole.
We will be following the mentors over time as well, which I think will give us a really interesting insight into particularly the movement of mentors because a lot of these mentors are in a position where they may be looking to move up into leadership positions, you know they're likely to be teachers that have some years of experience, of course, as we know. So, what will be really interesting is to see if any of our ECTs even in time or our mentors start to come through into our NPQ programmes, into our leadership training.
Our focus is perhaps maybe a little different with the mentors compared to the ECTs and that may well come out in the qualitative aspect of the research because the reasons for staying in teaching or moving schools or leaving teaching are likely I would think to be slightly different for a mentor who is a more experienced teacher than an ECT who is a newer teacher, so that will be really interesting to see those reasons for movement, if there is any movement in the mentors and to explore that with them through qualitative interview over a period of time.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, Elaine, you know something about this as well, don't you? You've been looking a lot at our end of module completion reports and the feedback that we get from our ECTs and our mentors and also we're able to profile somewhat who those people are, who are mentors are for example.
So, we know, don't we, that some of them are really experienced in mentoring, have been mentoring maybe for more than five years. We might speculate that they might be slightly older members of the staff room. They would also have multiple roles within the school, we can presume. Do you have anything, Elaine, yourself that you might recall from some recent end of module reports that we've had about our mentors and our ECTs and who they are?
Elaine Long
Yeah, I think interestingly, we tend to find that they're generally got at a higher level of years in teaching and particularly with the with the UCL programme and that's interesting and I don't know. why that is, we have tended to notice that in the profile of our mentoring and you know, like you, Lisa and Sofia, consistently mentoring is always the highest input in terms of impact of the professional learning of ECTs.
It's so highly valued by ECTs yet at the same time we consistently see this tension between something that's so high valued and the lack of capacity for mentors to provide it and I think that's something we've really got to wrestle with in terms of professional learning and I think there's a question there at this is so important and there's evidence that this is having such a big impact, how are we going to create more capacity for mentors? Because in terms of that nest that you talk about, if we take that layer away, I don't think the next is going to be as effective, but you talked about school level and organisational support for mentors and that's really you know where that's got to come at the moment, which is incredibly difficult because schools are also so pressurised at the moment.
So I think that's also an important question to answer if we're going to think about retention of ECTs in the long term and also the link between mentoring and leadership is an interesting one as well because I've very much assert that it that mentoring is a leadership skill, actually that if more leaders had that skill of mentoring and developing others as a first run on the ladder to leadership that then that leadership organisation would be more impactful in schools as well. So, there's, there's so many interesting things wrapped up in that, I think.
Mark Quinn
I was going to provoke you slightly, Sofia and Lisa, I'm sure you're aware of that. The ECF and the programme that are built upon the ECF are not without their detractors, and there's quite a controversial policy led by the Department for Education. Some schools feel that it's sort of been imposed upon them. A lot of the reaction to this new form of induction has stressed that teachers, particularly new teachers, are themselves susceptible to feelings of stress or to feelings of inadequacy and inefficacy, if that's a word and here we have we're kind of we're forcing them through a highly regulated, evidence informed programme and there's been lots of reports about those telling us that we might even be doing damage to new teachers in the profession. Of course, we wouldn't want to do that
Either from your previous backgrounds, your own research backgrounds from what you’re finding out already from the research you've already done or what you might hope to find out. What light can you shed on any of that discussion for us?
Lisa Baines
I mean, as a former secondary school teacher, I went through the NQT programme. As a one-year programme, it is high stress. So, you're under a lot of time pressure, you're still learning, you’re still working out who you want to be as a teacher and to developing your presence in a school. So, I do understand those pressures and we do have some comments from our survey that reflects that while our ECTs recognised that training is valuable and mentoring is valuable and you know continuing to learn as a teacher is really important, that it is difficult and there are a lot of pressures on their time and their energy as well. But I think, this is again, I'm coming back to the same point about the qualitative aspect of the research.
This is why we've chosen to do mixed methods approaches because we really need to explore those thoughts in more depth and think about how and why those sorts of issues might contribute to retention decisions? But I would say it is really encouraging from the survey data that we've collected, just looking at it descriptively, we had about 87% of our ECTs as agreeing that the ECF programme was based on sound research and they also agree that the practice suggested on the programme is going to make a difference to the learning of their pupils. So, the vast majority of the responses in our surveys indicate that the ECTs really do see the value in an evidence led programme and approach to their development.
So, we've got those two things, sort of, not competing, but those two things sort of coexisting at the same time. We have to recognise the reality of the teacher’s experiences on the programme, and we can delve into that through our qualitative work, but we can also see and build into our model that there is a real solid foundation in evidence for the practice that they are learning in the programme and that is recognized by our ECTs.
Mark Quinn
We do know, don't we? Or at least I think I know that teachers, however hard they are forced to work by the system and by their timetable, or by the extra demands that they might have, is that they will work very hard on things which they know make a difference, that they believe are making a difference, which is why that that finding you said, that 87% believe that the programme is based on sound evidence. I wonder about the other 13% because of course, you know. Actually, that is really encouraging, isn't it? Because we want people to believe that what they're working really hard on, is itself well grounded, and as you say the second finding that the Allied finding there will make a difference to their pupils learning and all my knowledge of teachers and I think we'd all agree on this is that teachers who will work exceptionally hard where they know it'll make that kind of difference.
Lisa Baines
Absolutely. For the pupils, if you're under pressure, under time pressure, there's nothing worse than feeling like you're doing something that's futile. So it's it is really encouraging to see that and that is a particular feature of the UCL led programme. That research is integrated into our programme and that they see the value in that is really good to see.
Elaine Long
That's interesting that you said that Lisa, because that's something that that programme leaders are quite passionate about that that our ECTs, this as something that's done with them not to them and this isn't necessarily a top down top down programme where they just have to implement the research we give them but rather they're part of the conversation and part of contributing to that research based cause as you acknowledge at the start of this podcast, there are so many gaps in the research and so many students out there who are going to benefit from research yet to be done, which could be done by our ECTs and we're really passionate about that on the programme as well.
So, it's really interesting that you share that view and talking about time pressure, I think we're coming to the end of the podcast now. I'm going to hand you though a post-it-note, as is traditional for all our guests. This is a festive post-it-note so it's a red Christmas themed post-it-note.
Lisa, I'm going to hand you the post-it-note first and then I'm also going to hand the post-it-note to Sofia, but I'd like to know what you would write on this post-it-note and where you would stick the post-it-note, and that could be anywhere. It could be in the draw of a mentor. It could be on the wall of the DfE. It could be on Mark's desk but what would you write on it and where would you stick it?
Lisa Baines
Gosh, I think I would write it to all teachers who think they might be interested in research, but aren't confident, or aren't so sure. I had. I had quite a gap between doing my undergraduate and doing my teacher training, and then my master's degree and then my PhD. There are gaps there in time, and I think as a teacher, if you haven't maybe looked at research papers for a while, maybe the last time you did that was in in your teacher training, but maybe before that it was not since your undergraduate degree.
So I would say just anyone who thinks they are interested in research but is maybe not feeling so confident, I would say, just get involved and don't be afraid of trying to engage in literature and maybe trying to think about what ideas you might like to explore in research further, because I think it's really important, as you were saying before, that teachers are active participants in building our education research sprawls across a whole massive of themes and ideas.
So, there's bound to be a niche in there somewhere that you can that you can get involved in. So yeah, I would say don't be afraid to get engaged and involved in research if you're interested.
Elaine Long
That's a great one. So, we're going to stick that in staffrooms all across the country. Don't be afraid to get involved and be part of the conversation because we need you. We need you to be part of this conversation.
Sofia here is your festive post-it-note. What are you going to write on it? And where will you stick it?
Sofia Eleftheriadou
Thanks. I think I will continue the theme of research led thinking and I was going to give my post it to colleagues who are involved in research, either PhD students starting their PhD journeys or researchers in general. I would say and encourage them to surround themselves with supportive colleagues and friends, and ask for their help when they need it, because this is something that has helped me when I was doing my PhD and it still helping me during my postdoc experience. So, and I still try to remind her to myself, so I will stick it on my wall and then I will give it to every other researcher.
Elaine Long,
Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I think that's a great message to end on. It's been an absolute delight talking to you today.
Mark Quinn
I think I can hear. I can hear the ping of that microwave in our staff room, our minced pies are ready. Hopefully the filter coffee hasn't gone cold in the meantime. I know I have sitting here.
Sofia and Lisa, thank you so much for giving up your time when you could be out buying our Christmas presents. Thank you for coming into our staff room and for sharing your research with us. I know that our ECTs and our mentors will really enjoy listening to what you've said and not that advice towards the end about how they themselves might get involved in research on a serious level.
So thank you again and see you around.
Lisa Baines
Thank you for having us.
Sofia Eleftheriadou
Thank you for having us.
Mark Quinn
Our thanks go to Sofia Eleftheriadou and Lisa Baines, who are post doc researchers at UCL for sharing coffee and mince pies with us this week in the ECF Staffroom.
Elaine Long
Please do get in touch with us, if you would like to talk to us about your ECF experience, we especially want to hear from a range of voices and lastly, we hope you'll join us next time for a biscuit and a chat with another colleague in the ECF staffroom
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