Professional Learning Networks within School-Centred Initial Teacher Training in England

Within England there are several distinct types of organisations that can provide Initial Teacher Training or Initial Teacher Education programmes that lead to the award of (QTS) Qualified Teacher Status. These organisations are collectively referred to as ‘providers’ within the sector and although they have slightly differing approaches to preparing teachers for gaining QTS, they rely heavily on the placement of beginning teachers within schools to develop their confidence and competence within the classroom.

A School-Centred Initial Teacher Training provider (SCITT) is a group of schools that work co-operatively to train teachers, and these have been in operation since 1993 in England. Bromley Schools’ Collegiate was one of the first providers in this sector and are based within the London Borough of Bromley. It comprises a fixed family of schools that work collegiately to train both primary and secondary teachers and they have worked together for decades.

Within each school there is an eco-system of teachers who work together under a Senior Mentor to form a dedicated Professional Learning Community (PLC). Using the definition of a PLC from Stoll et al. (2006) “a group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning-oriented, growth-promoting way” we can categorise the community of practice centred on the development of trainee teachers as a specific type of PLC.

This would then include not only the trainee teachers, their mentors, and the local Senior Mentor, but also the wider “team around the trainee” of other professionals that support the professional training of the trainee teachers.

Our organisation brings together each of these PLCs and has specific structural ties between the schools at multiple levels within their leadership and management structures. This in effect has evolved into a Professional Learning Network dedicated to the training of teachers for Qualified Teacher Status.
If we use the definition of a Professional Learning Network from Poortman and Brown (2018) as “any group who engage in collaborative learning with others outside of their everyday community of practice, in order to improve teaching and learning in their school(s) and/or the school system more widely” (p. 1) then this cross-school collaboration, focused on Initial Teacher Training, is a Professional Learning Network.

In the diagram above, there are linkages between various strata within each school and these are the operational conduits through which the Professional Learning Network operates. At a Headteacher level this represents our Consortium Management Board constituted of those Schools that form the validating organisation.

The Senior Mentors provide local leadership of the Professional Learning Community within their own schools and oversee quality assurance and local training of both trainee teachers and mentors that work within the school to support the development of the trainees. Their role also includes managing access to the wider range of professionals that the trainees will interact with.

Mentors come together several times of the year for cohort level training to support their continuing professional learning and development.

Where partnerships of schools work collaboratively over long periods of time, these Professional Learning Networks can develop and mature so that expertise can be recognised and developed. This is easier where partnerships are formalised such as within School-Centred Initial Teacher Training providers and schools invest time and effort formally into solidifying these.

Schools which work on an occasional basis with other types of providers do not have the chance to develop both the internal eco-system of expertise focused on the training of teachers within a specific training framework or the chance to form links between schools. Within England, Universities that work with a wide range of placement schools and the membership of this group is in flux each year, so these structures are more difficult to establish and sustain.

References

Poortman, C. L., & Brown, C. (2018). The importance of professional learning networks. In Networks for learning (pp. 10–19). Routledge.

Stoll, Louise & Bolam, Ray & Mcmahon, Agnes & Wallace, Mike & Thomas, Sally. (2006). Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Educational Change. 7. 221-258. 10.1007/s10833-006-0001-8.

Author: Derek Boyle, SCITT Director, Bromley Schools’ Collegiate