Make it stop: When you get an email asking you to do four more ECF tasks
As an ECT coming to the end of my first year of the new early career framework (ECF), I thought I'd take a moment to reflect about how year one has been for me. The ECF is delivered by a range of different providers and therefore I'm sure other ECTs will have had different experiences so keep that in mind. This is just my thoughts based on my own experience.
Starting with the good: onside mentoring
I've been lucky enough to have been allocated an absolutely brilliant mentor for my ECT years. It isn't an exaggeration to say that their work in supporting me has probably kept me in the job this year. I also think their ability to do this would've been significantly hindered if they were also the person who had to judge whether I was meeting the teacher standards. The fact that you have a named person whose role in the process is dedicated to supporting and advocating for you is a massive strength of the ECF.
The ECF increases an ECT workload
As I understand it, you're supposed to be able to complete your ECT self study and related tasks in your ECT time. However the designers of the ECF seemingly failed to take into account the fact that the amount of PPA time teachers currently get is wholly inadequate to get the job done, even in a school like the one I work at which is conscious about reducing teacher workload where possible.
This leads to you, as an ECT, choosing between three options:
- Rushing the ECF tasks so that you can use some ECT time to complete school work.
- Doing ECF tasks in school time and then taking more school work home.
- Doing ECF tasks at home and taking ECT time to do school work.
Personally I've ended up doing a mix of 1 and 3 but I don't think any of these scenarios are the ECF working as intended. It shouldn't result in an ECT working more hours than an another MPS teacher.
A related brief note on time
Go and observe a colleague, the ECF materials say, all casually like it's no big deal. When exactly am I supposed to do that?? It's going to be in my ECT time which is going to lead to me bringing more school work home. Then when I'm doing the observation I'm not going to be able to focus on the teaching I'm watching because anxiety about the amount of work this is going to mean I'm going to have to do outside of school time is building. It feels like much of the materials have been written with little consideration given to the practical realities of the job.
The self study materials themselves
I'm sure there's someone who'll argue with me about this, but I just can't see that I can learn much from a case study about a Year 1 phonics lesson that I can apply to my Year 13 functional programming lessons. Why are secondary teachers given primary school case studies to learn from and vice versa? I do get that it is useful to know a stuff about how other phases work, however when they're the core case studies being used to illustrate the key ideas behind effective teaching, I think the need to have more relevance to the context the teacher is working in.
It certainly feels like the developers of the programme either ran out of time, resources or both when putting the materials together and as a consequence ECTs are left with only a portion of it that they can usefully apply to their practice.
Death by long, packed, Zoom lecture
Thankfully these were reduced from two hours to ninety minutes long after the first marathon two hour session I sat through after a full day of teaching. The issue then was the poor teacher whose role it was to deliver the session still had to try to pack two hours worth of content into the reduced session time.
ITT rightly teaches us to be careful of not overloading the working memory of our learners. Are ECTs just expected to cope? For me, these sessions were almost entirely covering content I felt secure in thanks to the good quality of teacher training I received through Oxfordshire Teacher Training. I imagine that an ECT that experienced a lower quality of training might benefit from some of the learning, but the training is so packed it would be hard to commit any of it to long term memory.
The recent move to some in person sessions have served to make the discussion elements a bit more natural and therefore useful but it problem of content overload remains.
Improving retention?
As far as I can tell this was supposed to be the raison d'etre of the ECF. ECF comes in and it, at least in part, contributes to improving the retention of new teachers and reduces the number leaving before they've served five years. The problem is, other than the onside mentoring, I haven't found anything that contributes towards that goal.
I think there's the potential to refine the ECF into something the does better achieve this aim. I suggest it probably looks like stripping back the prescriptive training elements and allowing the flexibility to tailor it the the context the ECT is working in much more whilst retaining the onside mentoring element. It's clear to me that this should be done sooner rather than later otherwise, instead of improving retention, the ECF risks worsening further the shortage of good teachers.
