Putting professional development centre stage

All countries in the developed world aspire to ever higher standards of education and training. Clearly this depends, at least in part, on having a sufficient supply of high-quality schoolteachers. In the UK on the two occasions in the last 75 years when there were reviews of this need (the McNair report of 1944 and the James Committee of Enquiry 1971), more attention was paid to the recruitment and initial education and training of teachers than to the need for their continuous professional development. Moreover, what priority afforded to the issue was largely ignored by governments of the day whose successors have continued to pay most attention to tinkering with the supply routes and the initial training of teachers rather than their in-service professional development once they have been appointed. This paper, having accepted the crucial importance of the sustaining of teaching quality to the call for ever higher standards of pupil outcomes, sketches and evaluates the history and the present needs and proceeds to set out a menu of measures which should be considered by a third commission/committee of enquiry along the lines of its two predecessors.