Professional development rarely attracts the same attention as achievement rates, curriculum sequencing, safeguarding or inclusion when providers prepare for inspection. Reading last week’s Ofsted reports suggest it deserves much greater attention.
Across the latest report cards, inspectors repeatedly examine how leaders develop their staff. More importantly, they are looking beyond whether CPD happens to whether it is relevant, individualised, informed by quality assurance and making a measurable difference to teaching and learner experience.
The message emerging from the reports is relatively simple: A programme of CPD is not necessarily evidence of effective professional development.
The stronger practice appears when leaders can connect: Quality assurance → identified development need → targeted CPD → changed practice → improved learner experience
That has implications for leaders, quality teams and governors.
FE & Skills depends heavily on practitioners entering teaching directly from industry. Their occupational credibility is hugely valuable and Ofsted clearly recognises it.
One provider ensures new trainers complete teaching and assessing qualifications while giving staff access to industry-specific webinars, conferences and annual development weeks informed by current teaching and learning theory. Despite this, inspectors still identified the need to continue developing the teaching skills of trainers recently recruited from industry.
Elsewhere, tutors were given regular industry updates, opportunities to work within their sector and professional development in areas such as facilitating adult learning. Inspectors nevertheless identified that more individualised and targeted development of teaching skills was required.
There is a clear distinction there - a trainer may be an outstanding engineer, healthcare professional, manager or sector specialist while still needing support to become an equally effective teacher.
Providers therefore need to consider, is this person occupationally credible, and do they have the pedagogical expertise to translate that knowledge into high-quality learning?
One of the clearest themes this week is the importance Ofsted is placing on tailored development. At one provider, staff new to teaching complete relevant teaching qualifications and teaching staff continue working within their sector to maintain current expertise.
That sounds positive but inspectors identified a specific limitation, “professional development is not tailored to meet the individual needs of staff.”
The resulting next step was to individualise professional development for tutors to support consistently high-quality teaching.
A similar message appears in another report. Trainers were well supported and had opportunities to maintain industry knowledge, develop coaching skills and improve their understanding of inclusive teaching. Yet inspectors still called for “rich and highly tailored programmes of continued professional development”, particularly around training and inclusive practice.
This raises an important question for providers: Is your CPD driven by the calendar, or by individual need?
If everyone receives the same training because it appears on an annual development plan, that may be useful organisational development but it does not necessarily demonstrate that leaders understand what individual teachers need to improve.
Perhaps the most significant finding this week is the explicit connection Ofsted makes between quality assurance and professional development. At one provider, leaders had mechanisms to gather information about quality but did not use this sufficiently to target staff training and development to enhance tutors’ professional practice.
The resulting next step was very specific: professional development should support and enhance teaching skills and be linked to areas for improvement identified through quality assurance processes.
Another provider reviewed lessons as part of its QA cycle but did not sufficiently evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching strategies tutors were using. Inspectors consequently asked leaders to strengthen this evaluation so improvements could be made through quality assurance.
This moves the conversation beyond observations and learning walks. The purpose of QA isn't simply to establish whether teaching is good enough. It should help leaders answer:
What specifically needs to get better?
Who needs support?
What professional development would make the biggest difference?
Did it work?
That final question is particularly important. If a learning walk identifies weak questioning, for example, and training follows, the cycle should not end when the tutor attends the training. Leaders need to return to practice and establish whether questioning improved and ultimately whether learners now understand, remember and apply more.
Another feature of last week's reports is how frequently professional development connects with inclusion.
At one provider judged Strong for Inclusion, staff receive highly effective training that develops their awareness of emerging needs and their understanding of SEND. Staff use research-based specialist support, assistive technology and other approaches to remove barriers, while all staff have also received mental health first-aid training.
Elsewhere, leaders commissioned a dyslexia charity to train staff and workplace mentors so they could better understand the support apprentices with dyslexia require.
Another provider ensures educators maintain clinical expertise while developing teaching skills through peer observation and training. Staff have undertaken postgraduate teaching qualifications and specific training on strategies for teaching apprentices with autism.
There is also a useful counter-example. At one provider, tutors, including subcontracted tutors, had received SEND training. However, inspectors found that some did not have sufficiently current specialist knowledge to adapt their teaching confidently.
One of the provider's next steps was therefore to provide staff with up-to-date specialist training so effective strategies could be applied consistently.
This is an important distinction as completing SEND training is not the same as having the expertise to adapt teaching effectively. The inspection question is increasingly about application and impact, rather than attendance.
CPD is not solely about pedagogy. Several reports highlight the importance of trainers maintaining their occupational currency. Training managers in one provider visit workplaces to maintain technical expertise. Teaching staff elsewhere continue working within the film and television sector to keep their expertise current. Ambulance service educators frequently update their clinical knowledge and skills. Another provider gives staff regular industry updates and time working back within their sector.
And this becomes particularly interesting in rapidly changing areas such as digital technology and AI. One Skills Bootcamp provider continually updates teaching content as AI technology develops and ensures trainers have opportunities to maintain their industry knowledge.
For providers, professional development therefore has at least three dimensions:
The craft of teaching: can staff explain, question, assess, adapt and give effective feedback?
Inclusive practice: can staff recognise barriers and adapt learning without lowering expectations?
Occupational currency: is what staff teach still relevant to contemporary industry practice?
Strong professional development needs to consider all three.
Perhaps the most useful comparison comes from a provider judged Strong Standard across leadership and governance, inclusion, curriculum and teaching, achievement, and participation and development. Inspectors described an organisation with rigorous quality procedures that led to improvements in provision, including bespoke support for individual tutors to develop their craft of teaching.
That wording matters as they aren't just saying that staff undertake CPD. What they are saying is:
Quality processes identify what needs improving → individual tutors receive bespoke support → teaching practice develops → learner impact evidenced.
That is a very different model and the further down that sequence an organisation can evidence, the stronger its professional development story becomes.
There was also a small but particularly interesting example this week of technology, professional expertise and inclusion coming together.
At one provider, staff use artificial intelligence to create podcasts covering essential reading materials for apprentices who find it difficult to retain information through reading. I think this illustrates an important point about digital CPD.
The objective shouldn't simply be, “Our staff have completed AI training.”
A much more meaningful question is, “How has staff development enabled our teachers to use technology differently to improve learning or remove barriers?”
That moves digital capability from CPD participation to learner impact.
Last week's reports suggest that a CPD log showing dates, courses and attendance is unlikely to tell the whole story.
A more useful professional development review might ask:
This is where data and professional dialogue need to come together. The challenge for leaders is using intelligence about quality to decide where professional development will have the greatest impact.
Perhaps one of the simplest changes providers could make after reading last week's reports is to stop asking, “How much CPD have our staff completed?”
And start asking, “What has our quality assurance told us our staff need to get better at, what have we done about it, and how do we know learners are experiencing the difference?”
That is a much harder question, but increasingly, it appears to be the one that matters. The message from these reports isn't that Ofsted wants more CPD, it is that professional development should be purposeful, individualised and connected to improvement. Ultimately, the evidence of successful CPD shouldn't be found in the training log, it should be visible in the quality of teaching and the experience of learners.
Effective professional development starts with understanding where improvement is needed and being able to measure whether it has made a difference.
AiVII helps providers bring together the information needed to identify patterns in learner progress, achievement, engagement, support and risk. This gives leaders and quality teams a clearer evidence base for identifying where variation exists and where further investigation or staff development may be required.
Through AiVII Consulting, we can support providers to review how effectively their quality assurance and professional development processes connect, asking whether CPD is sufficiently targeted, whether it is addressing identified weaknesses in practice, and whether leaders and governors can demonstrate the resulting impact on learners.
The objective is not simply to evidence that CPD has taken place. It is to create a clear line from:
Quality insight → identified staff development need → targeted CPD → improved professional practice → better learner experience and outcomes.
That is the evidence trail providers increasingly need to understand and be able to articulate.
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