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GRE07138 Most Excellent! - Proving or improving ‘best practice’ in the professional learning and development of teachers? Maggie Gregson*, Trish Spedding and Lawrence Nixon University of Sunderland, UK Work in Progress Corresponding Author Maggie Gregson University of Sunderland School of Education and Lifelong Learning Forster Building City Campus, Chester Road Sunderland SR1 3SD UK Email: maggie.gregson@sunderland.ac.uk

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Title: Most Excellent! - Proving or improving ‘best practice’ in the professional learning and development of teachers? Maggie Gregson, Trish Spedding and Lawrence Nixon University of Sunderland, UK Abstract This paper compares models for the identification and dissemination of ‘best practice’ in the professional learning and development of teachers in England with those operating in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The research was commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The methodology included a review of the literature, document analysis and interviews with policy makers and practitioners in each country. The research examined how each country went about identifying and disseminating ‘best practice.’ The research brought to light the highly contextualised and complex nature of professional learning and development. It revealed tensions between top-down approaches to the identification and dissemination of ‘best practice’ with other approaches based upon trust and devolved decision making which enabled successful innovation to take place in a wide variety of contexts at the local level. The paper provides examples of how local approaches can be effectively scaled-up to support wider applications and further developments and improvements in teachers’ professional learning. The research points to the need for agreed pedagogical values in teachers’ professional learning and the development of models of ‘best practice’ which encourage the enactment of such values. Key word – Teacher professional learning Introduction To decide that standards of teaching, learning and achievement need to be improved is not to decide how they ought to be improved. Approaches to improving the quality of teaching and learning are often contentious and are inevitably political. Models of education reform and approaches to quality improvement adopted by different countries are important in bringing to light dominant political, social and educational values and the relays of power operating within each. Our central argument in this paper is that while the terms ‘good’ ‘best’ and ‘excellent’ practice in education are used inter-changeably and roll easily off the page and off the tongue, the identification of ‘good practice’ and the promotion and pursuit of ‘excellence’ in education are complex, highly contextualised and therefore much more difficult to ‘roll out’ in real life! Our contention is that attempts to ‘prove’ ‘best practice’ in the form of

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‘recipes for teachers’ is of less importance than finding ways to actually help teachers to improve what they do in the everyday contexts in which they work. This scoping paper reports upon work in progress funded by the Department of Education and Skills (DfES) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) through a Research Development Fellowship at the University of Sunderland. It focuses upon approaches to improving teaching and learning and notions of ‘best practice’ in Adult and Vocational Education & Training (AVET) in England. Comparisons are drawn with systems for improving teaching and learning and notions of ‘best practice’ operating in Finland, Denmark and Sweden. Consideration is given to the extent to which the English system fosters preoccupations with the bureaucratic resource-intensive production of evidence by practitioners as they struggle to demonstrate compliance with centrally prescribed standards. The paper highlights how notions of ‘best practice’ and ‘excellence’ in the form of ‘recipes for good teaching’ overlook the importance of context and the central role of professional knowledge. In particular, it emphasises the vital part played by the provision of local spaces where teachers can exercise their creative capacities and professional judgement in the contexts in which they work, in order to effectively implement national policies which aim to improve standards of teaching and learning. Each of the countries we have studied has undergone different degrees of reform in relation to approaches to improving teaching and learning. We begin by looking at notions of ‘best practice’ and approaches to improving standards of teaching and learning in the English AVET system. We situate these using two other studies with which we have recently been involved. The first, reports upon the findings of the qualitative strand of a multi-method three year evaluative study which aimed to identify the impact of the Northumberland Raising Standards of Achievement in Schools project (NRAIS). The project was based upon an alternative approach to the continuing professional development of teachers. The model was designed to give teachers opportunities to plan, implement and evaluate improvements in their teaching through periods of joint planning and joint practice in a culture of collaborative critical enquiry with colleagues (Gregson & Spedding, forthcoming). The second study, took the form of a systematic review carried out on behalf of the DfES and The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information Co-ordinating Centre at the Institute of Education University of London (Nixon, Gregson and Spedding forthcoming). This review focused upon practitioner accounts of implementing national policy at the local level. Both of these studies are in press and reported in detail elsewhere. We use the findings from all three evaluative studies to offer some suggestions about the practical conditions which may help to create spaces which provide teachers with opportunities to engage in and share experiences of collaborative curriculum enquiry. Mindful of McKernan we offer these suggestions ‘not as a recipe for success but as an intelligent proposal for critical experimentation in educational settings’ (McKernan 1996: vii).

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English Perspectives Educational reforms for improving teaching and learning in England appear to be premised upon some questionable assumptions about what shapes teacher thinking and what informs practice. Proposals from both ends of the political spectrum seem to share the notion that the key to educational improvement is to find the ‘ideal curriculum’ and then prescribe the ‘best way’ to teach it. This line of thinking can be traced back to the introduction of the National Curriculum for schools through to more recent policy reforms in AVET based upon a Core Curriculum for the teaching of adult literacy, language and numeracy (DfES 2001, DfES 2002, DfES 2003, DfES 2004, LSC 2007). As part of a study funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) which examined the impact of education policy upon teaching, learning and inclusion in England, Coffield and Edward pointed to the dangers of uncritically accepting naive and unrealistic notions of how ‘good practice’ in education can be identified, shared, developed and sustained,

The imperative now for post-compulsory education and training (from which all our examples are taken) is nothing less than ‘excellent practice for all’. This paper critically examines these highly significant shifts in the rhetoric of policy, finds them wanting and argues that we need to face up to the realities and complexities involved in deciding not only what is ‘excellent practice’ but also in working through all the stages which would be needed to encourage its development throughout the sector.

(Coffield and Edward, forthcoming) In this paper, we want to draw the attention of politicians and policy makers, to the crucial role that initial and continuing teacher education must play in raising standards of teaching and learning which will be necessary for the achievement of daunting targets already set for AVET in improving economic prosperity and social inclusion in England. Our argument is that the prevailing political emphasis upon the identification of ‘best practice’ and the promotion of ‘excellence’ in AVET in England needs to pay urgent and at least equal attention to the necessary forms of professional development which will be required to effectively translate these policies into everyday practice in the sector. Centrally prescribed curricula, narrow measures of achievement, together with notions of ‘best practice’ as recipes for teachers in AVET are in danger of reducing the role of teachers in the sector into what Brown (1998) described as the mere technological ‘delivery’ of tightly prescribed, overcrowded and incoherent curricula. The consequence of this is that educational standards are more likely to be lowered than raised. Over 15 years ago, Louden drew the attention of those who look for improvement and

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change in education to the shortcomings of such positions and reminded politicians and educational policy-makers alike of,

… the power of the past in shaping the future…the graveyard of educational reform is littered with better ways that did not appeal to teachers: open plan buildings that did not lead to open education; heuristic syllabuses that decayed into lists of content to be learned; and principles of effective teaching that made more sense to researchers than practitioners (Louden, 1991, p. x -xii)

Louden claimed that it is not enough to pull down classroom walls, simply provide the syllabus, or advocate particular teaching and assessment practices. What is much more important he maintained ,is to ask how proposed changes relate to teachers’ everyday understandings and experiences of their work. More recently Coffield et al criticised models of education reform in AVET in England for,

… failing to harness the knowledge, goodwill and energy of staff working in the sector and for ignoring what constitutes the main finding of the research: the central importance of the relationship between tutor and students (Coffield et al, 2007, p 723).

From There to Here Levels of trust in teachers in England have fluctuated widely over the last 50 years, signalling significant shifts in the value systems underpinning the role of national government in education reform. Prior to the late1960’s teachers in England were generally trusted by government and parents (Tomlinson 2007). James Callaghan’s ‘White Heat of Technology’ (1968) Ruskin Speech represented a watershed, in that, for the first time a British Prime Minister spoke about education reform and made explicit reference to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI). By the early 1970s national government began to take a keen and active interest in education reform. In 1979 the election of a Conservative Government, led by Margaret Thatcher signalled a sea change in the nature and pace of government led reforms in education. The1993 Further and Higher Education Act introduced the incorporation of Colleges effectively turning them into private limited companies where College Principals almost overnight became Chief Executives, of organisations, in many cases worth millions of pounds. Teacher Training became a prime focus for national government control in the form of the establishment of a number of regulatory bodies and inspection regimes. The establishment of Lifelong Learning UK (LLUK) represents the most recent of these in relation to the regulation of AVET in England During the same period, inspection and quality improvement administrations in England proliferated and the powers of national regulatory bodies were strengthened even further . Through the work of the Department for Education

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and Skills (DfES), the Office for Standards in Education, (Ofsted), the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) the Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI), the Further and Higher Education Funding Councils (FEFC, HEFCE), the introduction of Technical and Enterprise Councils (TECs) and the Learning and Skills Council (LSCs), the role and power of Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in planning education and training provision at the local level was increasingly eroded. Other recent developments in the sector witnessed the introduction of the Quality Improvement Agency (QIA), the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and the separation of the Department for Education and Skills into the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). No part of the system remained untouched. Little was left or trusted to the skilled judgement of teachers. Through these top-down legislative processes more and more power is being centralised into the hands of the State and taken out of the hands of teachers. This has served to diminish public levels of trust in teachers, leading to an increase in the surveillance of their practice. A consequence of the speed and intensity of top-down, short-term education reform in England has exacerbated problems in implementing AVET national policy at the local level. As Coffield et al (2007) argued, such top-down approaches to education reform combined with highly bureaucratic, micro- managed measurements of performance,

… exact high costs (such as intense pressure on staff from constant change and increasing workloads) and produce unintended and perverse consequences (e.g. the switching of staff time and attention from teaching to coping with bureaucracy). (p 736)

Furthermore, by increasing powers of UK government departments, top-down policy initiatives have served to curtail spaces where teachers can exercise professional judgements about what constitutes ‘good practice’ in the context of their own teaching. Centralised curricula and increasing imperatives for teachers in AVET to conform and comply with externally set standards of performance, have reduced opportunities for teachers to address pedagogy, individual needs and local priorities. Such prescriptive reform makes innovation by teachers increasingly difficult and strengthens pressures to ‘teach to the test’, producing an unhealthy and intensified emphasis on measurable outcomes and instrumental approaches to teaching and learning. AVET in England has been subjected to an overload of policy, audit, inspection and the spread of other forms of accountability which generate high transaction costs and divert attention and resources away from pressing pedagogical issues. The reform agenda in England from 1978-2007 has brought about a high- control, low- trust culture (at least at the macro level). The tendency among ministers and policy makers in England to believe in the simplistic identification, development and sharing of ‘best practice’ from the perspective of ‘one size fits all’ has served to further reduce the importance of context and diminish the importance of the professional knowledge, identity and confidence of teachers.

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Arrowsmith (2006) showed that while some teachers still feel that they have the space and capacity to exercise professional judgement others feel compelled to leave the profession in the face of what they consider to be, ‘excessive bureaucracy, ridiculous deadlines and unconvincing consultation process’. In this climate, AVET practitioners often have to ‘interpret’ and implement policy imperatives at speed and work hard to implement initiatives which are not always particularly well articulated, research informed or even pedagogically sound. For example, in the case where Ofsted inspectors advocated the use of ‘learning styles’ questionnaires’ as an example of ‘best practice’ in differentiating learners’ needs. In some cases inspectors demanded to see evidence of these in use during inspection visits, although there was, and is still, little empirical research evidence to justify this. (Coffield 2004). Sometimes a quality improvement initiative can be sound in principle but becomes ‘corrupted’ as it passes through layers of interpretation in policy and practice. Past examples of these are many and range from the introduction of the important meta-cognitive idea of ‘ learning to learn’ in the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) in 1983 which very soon afterwards became synonymous with the highly contested notion of learning as ‘skills’ (Hyland 1993,1994, 1998). A more recent case in point is the concept of ‘personalised learning’ which has been diluted from the concept of an inclusive and enhancing pedagogy advanced in the work of Fielding (2003) into an excuse to limit funding for learning to the short-term needs of individual employers. The quality of local ‘interpretations’ of policy are highly dependent upon the pedagogical knowledge and the professional values of practitioners and the quality of the initial and continuing professional development they receive . If narrow and instrumental forms of learning are to be avoided in AVET then the necessary knowledge, values and dispositions for sustained participation, progression and critical thinking for teachers and learners alike have to be encouraged. Thompson and Wiliam (2007) point out that the fundamental lever for improving the quality of student learning is the quality of teachers’ professional development ‘ … teacher quality trumps virtually all other influences on student achievement’ (2007, p. 2). In this section of the paper we have attempted to show how models of education reform in England are becoming more coercive than enabling. The main reason why such approaches are unlikely to bring about a speedy transformation of the sector has been illustrated by Coffield et al, on the grounds that such approaches, treat the ‘workforce’ (teachers in AVET),

…as the main obstacle to progress rather than as indispensable partners. Having explored the complexity of impacts upon practice, we wish to ask: what is the problem in harnessing the knowledge, creativity and energy of staff working in the sector? (Coffield et al 2007, p.739)

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Nordic Perspectives In the broader European context the concept of quality improvement in education might arguably be traced back to when the Office for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission (EC) put the term on the agenda in the early 1980s. Since then, education reforms across Europe have been driven by initiatives to improve the quality of teaching, both in general education and in AVET. (DfES 2005, DfES 2006, Leitch 2006). In contrast to the frenetically paced ,yet short term, focus prevalent in England’s approach to education reform, in Finland, Sweden and Denmark, education reform is regarded as a medium to long-term process. The development of close relationships and ownership of reforms by key stakeholders at the local level is established through local partnerships. Such partnerships are based upon the identification of common goals for improving teaching and learning, aligned to national priorities and local economic and social needs. Social inclusion in these countries is seen as an essential part of a strategy for lifelong learning and an integral aspect of pedagogical practice. Decentralisation of approaches to quality improvement has been sustained and radical in Finland and in Sweden where the Ministry and national agencies provide a broad structure and general objectives for local actors, local authorities, training providers and social partners to implement in the long term. Further examples of decentralised approaches to the identification and development of ‘best practice’ can be found in the Danish Minister of Education’s assertion,

“We have no need for inventing good practice it exists already. We must become better at discovering good practice where it is found, highlight it and praise it so as to allow it to inspire and spread to all schools” (Bertel Haarder, Danish Minister of Education, 6th April 2006)

Interest in international comparisons is stronger in Finland, Sweden and Denmark, particularly in the light of the triennial OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA results are of particular interest for the AVET sector as they are a snap-shot of the literacy, numeracy and science skills of 15 year olds. Knowing the skills status of students just before they leave compulsory education gives a better understanding of their learning needs and achievements to date. The initial study results in 2000 sparked a flurry of interest in how Finland, in particular, did so well. Decentralisation and school independence are key to the successes of Finland and its neighbours,

…teachers have played a front stage role in that country’s success. Teaching is a high-status profession there. Entry to teacher education is highly competitive, they are all graduates with master’s degrees, and

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they are given considerable freedom to innovate in their professional practice. The Finnish system has abolished streaming and grade repetition. Students in difficulty are not passed off to others.

(Barry McGaw. Director, OECD Education Directorate, March 2004) The results from PISA highlight two key points. The almost inevitable first focus is upon which country came top, a secondary but equally important concern, relates to issues of equity and inclusion. Some countries have a high overall ranking in PISA, but have poor equity in the distribution of learning opportunities,

In the UK’s case, for instance, these gaps were much greater than in many other countries. Yet “high quality” and “low equity” do not have to go hand in hand. Other countries like Finland, Canada, Japan, and Korea showed that high quality/ high equity results are possible.

(ibid) Whilst the UK is an average scorer overall, it is clear that much has yet to be done on improving equity for all learners. A main aspect of Finnish models of ‘best practice’ is that of equity, raising overall standards through efforts to minimise low achievement (Välijärvi et al 2002). Indeed, ‘small between-school variation is characteristic of all the Nordic countries’ (Ibid). It is the non-selective nature of Nordic countries which shows through in comparisons. Where all students are provided with the same comprehensive schooling, the range of results overall is narrowed. Students are not enrolled into different kinds of schools at an early age. Inevitably, therefore, there is a broad range of abilities within schools. In Finland, Special Needs teachers have a unique status and receive highly specialised training, ‘Special education has become de-stigmatised’ (McKinsey 2007). The high volume of students taking part in special education alongside the standard practice of even the most successful students on occasion, receiving additional instruction, “interventions” can maintain strong and consistently equitable outcomes in schools. As many as one in seven teachers in Finnish schools are special-education teachers, more than any other country (Economist, October, 2007). A difficulty associated with such “interventions” is being aware of the problem in the first place. With a decentralised and non-inspectorial system, the Finns still manage to intervene effectively with failing students. In the English system, intense regimes of inspection and quality assurance would suggest that there is surely a better awareness of failing students and thus a better opportunity to intervene successfully, however this is not reflected in the PISA data. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, recently commented on the need for tough intervention in failing schools, something not required within the Finnish system (Stewart, 2007). Teachers are so well respected;

...they are trusted to get on with the job without central government interference, inspection, national tests or league tables. The vast majority of parents, officials say, are happy for their pupils to attend their neighbourhood school because they trust that it will be a good one. (ibid)

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In a recent report in October 2007, McKinsey and Co. offered some interesting conclusions about how to achieve a top performing educational system.

Getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career of choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.

(Economist, October, 2007) Quality of teaching is universally accepted as an essential for a ‘best practice’ model. In Finland, all new teachers must have a master’s degree. Teaching courses recruit from the top graduates, making entry into the profession harder rather than easier. Teachers get half a day per week for joint planning activities with their colleagues, teachers visit each others’ classrooms and teachers who teach the same subject also have free classes together for joint planning (McKinsey 2007). Finnish teacher training takes at least five years, allowing for a greater depth of study. The more research oriented student teachers are, the ‘greater exposure they get to the latest research about how something can be taught and learnt’. (Henderson and Munro, 2007) As with other professions, practitioners should be involved with research continually. Hannele Niemi, vice-chancellor of Helsinki University, recently emphasised that;

“If teaching is based on high-level knowledge and research, as it is with other disciplines, it will improve teachers' status," The aim should be to integrate research-based knowledge with their own professional behaviour."

(ibid)

Sahlberg (2007) pointed out that while teacher training in Finland attracts top graduates, these young graduates with master’s degrees are much sought after by business and industry. Teacher education programmes emphasise a strong theoretical knowledge as well as practical. Teachers are very willing to engage in research and develop their own professional knowledge and skills, ‘continuous upgrading of teachers’ pedagogical professionalism has become a right rather than an obligation. ‘(ibid) Sahlberg argued that as a result, teachers and schools are trusted enough to be responsible for their own work and solve most problems rather than shifting them elsewhere. In contrast, England suffers from many teachers leaving the profession, and also experiences difficulties in maintaining the quality of entrants to the profession. Preliminary analysis of the literature together with data from the two studies previously cited suggest that the English system increases transaction costs for practitioners through ever more tightly controlled curricula and a plethora of top-down bureaucratic quality assurance and inspection regimes. The identification, development and dissemination of ‘best practice’ in AVET in England would be better served by re-directing funding to ‘ground- up’ initiatives where ‘what works’ can be identified in the context of

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where and how it works. This knowledge could then be used to support teachers in translating these understandings into the contexts of their own practice. In Nordic countries, decentralised education systems require trust in order to operate effectively. Indeed, it is trust that often epitomises the education systems of these countries. Teachers are trusted to get results, principals are trusted to manage and ultimately, parents and employers trust the system to do the best for students. Nordic education systems work effectively because high levels of trust flow in both directions from policy makers to practitioners and back. Such levels of trust operate alongside the recognition that longer-term incremental approaches to the planning, implementation and evaluation of education policy are central to the identification and transfer of ‘best practice’ (Milana & Desjardins 2007) Conclusion There is little logic, or point, in advocating a return to the situation which prevailed in England before 1978. There was much room for improvement in the pre-1978 highly localised system of education which allowed little regulation of teaching and offered few if any mechanisms through which poor, sloppy or even ‘bad’ practice could be addressed (Tomlinson 2007). We do not wish to return to a position where there was ‘blind faith’ in teachers without evidence to support this belief. Nor do we support the current situation in England where evidence of good practice consists of ‘fabrications’ of ‘compliance’ without trust (Ball 2003, 2004). There is no room for complacency in AVET in England. In a report commissioned by the Rowntree Trust, Machin and McNally found that many young people are still not getting a good deal from the compulsory education system (Machin and McNally 2006). Urgent recognition is needed of the personal and social needs of significant numbers of learners, systemically ‘failed’ by 11 years of compulsory schooling. A ‘one size fits all’ quick-fix approach to the meeting their needs is neither appropriate nor realistic. Furthermore the identification and dissemination of ‘best practice’ in the form of ‘recipes for teachers’ is unlikely to be able to effectively meet the complex and diverse needs of either learners or teachers in the wide variety of contexts in which learning takes place across the sector. In the light of systemic shortcomings in the English system improving the quality of teaching and learning in AVET becomes even more important, together with the approaches to policy which will be necessary to successfully underpin such improvements. The effectiveness of education policies in raising standards in AVET will rest, at least in part, upon their ability to promote and develop inclusive pedagogical approaches which recognise and value the wider benefits of learning through a broad and inclusive curriculum. A better balance will also need to be struck between national, regional and local decision-making mechanisms. New forms of social partnership will need to be established which admit the legitimate use of local knowledge and pay serious attention to context in the pursuit of national priorities. There is now a

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pressing need to slow the pace and intensity of policy initiatives, inspection quality assurance measures and make a concerted effort to eliminate costly overheads which are taking already over-stretched teachers in England dangerously close to breaking point. A period of consolidation is needed where lessons learnt from the flood of inspection and quality improvement initiatives in the past can be used to forge a more coherent and incremental strategy for the future, focused less upon bureaucratic demonstrations of compliance and more upon actual teacher- centred (and more importantly teacher-supported) evolutionary forms of quality improvement. Transaction costs might also be significantly reduced by establishing a system that balances increased levels of trust in teachers’ professional judgment with greater joint responsibility accountability for improvement, shared by inspectors, teachers and education managers. The need for further change also needs to be tempered with the need for stability in order to encourage professional innovation and empowerment.

This suggests that policy-making itself will have to slow down with more long-term plans and fewer, headline-grabbing initiatives’. (Coffield et. al.forthcoming).

In the field of policy analysis the role of ‘local knowledge’ and the importance of context in pedagogic and social situations is gaining recognition (Morais & Neves 2001, Hajer & Wagenaar 2003).However in terms of education policy, the logistics and practicalities of creating spaces where teachers can plan and enact the curriculum through critical enquiry into their own practice in collaboration with colleagues remains insufficiently understood. A central aspect of teachers’ professional learning resides in the nature and quality of their reflections upon their experiences of their own teaching and the nature and quality of the feedback and support they receive from others about their practice. Seymour Sarason, an American psychologist seeking to explain what he called the ‘predictable failure of educational reform’ in the United States, argued that teachers cannot create and sustain the conditions for students to become creative lifelong learners, if those conditions do not exist for teachers (1990). Later, in the context of the UK, Wells made a similar point when he argued that if educational institutions are to become places in which students are apprenticed into fair and democratic ways of living, feeling and acting and encouraged to become critical and creative thinkers , then teachers must themselves be educated according to the same principles and ethos,

‘We can hardly expect teachers to create the conditions in their classrooms for students to develop these dispositions, if the teachers themselves do not have the same formative experiences. Nor can students be expected to develop confidence in their own knowledge and judgement, while recognizing the benefits to be gained from collaborating with others, if those who teach them are trained unquestioningly to implement the decisions of distant and authoritative

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‘experts’ and are given no encouragement to assume an agentive role in taking situationally appropriate initiatives in collaboration with their colleagues …’ (Wells, 2002, p.204)

Calling for a change in the conditions under which the initial and continuing professional development of teachers takes place, Wells argued that teachers need to be given the opportunity to develop their own expertise in planning and enacting the curriculum through critical inquiry into their own practice, conducted in collaboration with their colleagues. Fielding et al (2005) studied factors which facilitated or constrained the identification and transfer of good practice in the schools sector. They concluded, firstly that the identification and transfer of ‘good practice’ was a kind of teacher learning and essentially a social process, sustained by relationships and trust. Secondly, that the transfer of ‘good practice’ is both a personal and an interpersonal process which must engage teacher and institutional identity. Thirdly, that the effective transfer of ‘good practice’ depends upon the creation of conditions which encourage teachers to have the confidence, space and security to try out something new, and finally, and perhaps most significantly,

…that it requires a more sophisticated and patient understanding of time than is customarily acknowledged or allowed (Fielding et al 2005, p.204)

An international study of selected issues in Further Education (FE) in England compared similar systems of education In Finland, Ireland Sweden and New South Wales (Leney et al 2007). Emphasising the complex nature of provision in each country’s contexts together with the acute necessity for ‘creeping rather than jumping reform’, the authors’ contended that,

Pilot projects and the up-scaling of local reform, involving local stakeholders are arguably far more effective than top-down rapid systemic change. Enabling successful innovation to take place at the local level, with mechanisms for up-scaling reflects a system that is able to balance the tension between external regulation and quality assurance and sufficient trust to empower the players at the local level to take the initiative. (Leney et al 2007, P2)

We began this paper by pointing to the importance of the nature and quality of the initial and continuing professional development of teachers in the AVET sector, to the success of education reforms in supporting economic prosperity and promoting social inclusion. We questioned the wisdom of the notion that the key to educational improvement is to find the ideal curriculum and then prescribe the best way to teach it, on the grounds that such approaches perversely encourage a passive acceptance by teachers of ‘recipes for good teaching’. Through the work of Sarason (1990) and Wells (2002) we have argued that programmes of teacher education should encourage teachers to

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think in critical, creative and collaborative ways. The same professional experiences must also develop teachers’ confidence and ability to exercise and defend situationally appropriate pedagogically informed judgements in their classrooms. We contended that it is only when these same ways of thinking and acting are embodied in the relationships between teachers and learners can we reasonably expect learners’ to be able to see the value of these ‘ways of being’ in their own lives We have tried to illustrate the value and potential of alternative approaches to teachers’ professional development which encourage the ‘opening up’ rather than the ‘closing down’ of opportunities for open-ended collaborative enquiry and conversations which enable teachers to think deeply and critically about their existing approaches to teaching and learning and to explore, develop and continually refine their practice. Such approaches do not require the ‘policing’ of centrally prescribed policy initiatives. On the contrary, they can create spaces where teachers can plan and enact the curriculum through critical enquiry into their own practice in collaboration with those responsible for ensuring the achievement and advancement of high standards of teaching and learning. Over ten years ago McKernan argued that,

The idea of teacher as researcher is of crucial importance for the future development of the profession and the curriculum in general… If this idea were taken more seriously then the curriculum would improve dramatically (1996:38).

On one hand, it is unfortunate to note how (often well intended) education reforms have taken AVET systems of education in England closer towards over-regulation, micro-management, demanding ever more restrictive forms of compliance and conformity in the practices of teachers. On the other hand, and on a more optimistic note, through the recent DfES/QIA national Centres For Excellence in Teacher Training (CETT’s) initiative we are encouraged to have been offered an opportunity to pilot, develop, implement and have evaluated, an alternative approach to the professional development of teachers in the sector, along the lines advocated in this paper, informed not only by our experiences of the three research studies described above but also by those of other researchers involved in this important field of study.

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