ET ET E E CE C

UC U U TU TU T E
ET ET E E CE C C C U
UC U U TU TU T ET
ET ETCE CE CE C UC
U
CE CUC UCUCTU TU T T E
TU TUET ET ET E CE
C C U U U T
ET E E CE CE CUC
Universities Council for the Education of Teachers

UCUCTU TU TU T ET
U
TEACHER EDUCATION:

Oc C
Gordon Kirk and Pat Broadhead
C
A UCET POSITION PAPER

ca E E C C
T sio E
EVERY CHILD MATTERS and

U n al
T T T E T E
P U
CE Caper C C UCU TU U
o1 E C
U C E T

E
A Registered Charity (No 275082)

7 E E
TU T ENT T T
U U T
 UCET

No 1
The Universities Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) speaks No 2
on all matters concerning the education, training and professional
development of teachers and on educational research. Its members No 3
are the Departments, Schools and Institutes of Education in universi- No 4
ties and university-sector colleges in the UK. It is an independent pro-
fessional organisation, funded solely by its members. UCET con- No 5
tributes to the educational debate from its specialist position within No 6
Higher Education. It supports all appropriate moves to enhance the
quality and status of the teaching profession. No 7
No 8
UCET’s mission is to:
• facilitate communication and co-operation between members. No 9
• provide a forum for sharing information.
• enhance the quality and impact of education by championing and No 1
applying research. No 1
• influence policy by working in partnership, and by campaigning
and lobbying. No 1
• promote education's place as an interdisciplinary-based subject
that adds value to the creation and communication of knowledge No 1
within the HE community.
No 1

No 1

No 1

No 1

Published by
The Universities Council for the Education of Teachers
(Registered Charity No 275082)
Whittington House
19-30 Alfred Place
London WC1E 7EA
T: 020 7580 8000
F: 020 7323 0577
E: info@ucet.ac.uk
W: www.ucet.ac.uk
© UCET 2007
ISBN 0903509814
EVERY CHILD MATTERS and
TEACHER EDUCATION:
A UCET POSITION PAPER

Gordon Kirk and Pat Broadhead

 UCET
 UCET 

Foreword

I
t is a great pleasure to provide a Foreword to Every Child Matters
and Teacher Education: A UCET Position Paper, the latest in a series
of occasional publications which UCET has sustained over more than
two decades.
No one can now doubt that Every Child Matters, which appeared
in 2003, was a seminal document. While it represented, at one level,
the Government’s response to Lord Laming’s enquiry into the unspeakable
events surrounding the death of a child at the hands of those close to her,
it became the watchword of a government policy that was committed to
attacking disadvantage and creating a more cohesive community through
a revitalised educational service, that seeks to respond to all the identified
needs of children and young people. The introduction of a national system
of Children’s Centres and Extended Schools, as well as an extensive
infrastructure to support professional collaboration, is creating the context
in which the needs of children and young people can be assessed and
addressed in the round rather than in piecemeal fashion by specialists
working on their own.
It was because UCET judged that Every Child Matters had profound
implications for teaching and therefore for the education of teachers that it
commissioned a paper that might support the work of member institutions as
they prepared teachers for the new and challenging context. This Position
Paper undertakes an examination of the social and educational policy context
of a major national initiative; it analyses the impact of that initiative on the role of
the teacher and the work of the schools and other agencies; and it identifies six
ways in which teacher education needs to be adjusted to take full account of the
changes which the Every Child Matters agenda entails. These adjustments are
not presented as prescriptions, for UCET has no power to prescribe. Rather,
they are best seen as criteria against which teacher education institutions and
their partners might evaluate the effectiveness of their work in relation to the
changed context in which teachers now work.
The authors of the Position Paper, Professor Gordon Kirk and Professor
Pat Broadhead, are to be congratulated on the thoroughness of their work,
and on behalf of UCET I warmly thank them for their efforts. I know they
would be the first to agree that the Paper is the product of extensive debate
within the UCET community and beyond. Between them, the authors
interviewed a number of those who have been involved in the development
of the initiative at national level, as well as those undertaking innovative work
in institutions; they undertook a detailed study of the official documentation
and of the academic and professional literature; and they received and
welcomed written comments from many individuals and institutions. A
draft of the Paper was widely circulated in November of 2006 and since
then there have been numerous discussions within UCET committees and
with other groups. In these various ways the Paper draws on an extensive
evidential base.
I am therefore confident in claiming that the Position Paper is well
grounded, and that it will be of considerable value in carrying forward
the debate within institutions and more widely, as well as in shaping the
education of teachers and other professionals. I warmly commend it to a
wide readership.
James Rogers
Executive Director
Universities Council for the Education of Teachers
  UCET
Introduction
1. As befits a representative body, UCET has a tradition
of publicly affirming its stance on issues through the
generation and dissemination of position papers. Such
papers perform several important functions: they
articulate policy; they assert the values which UCET
espouses; they provide the basis for discussion and
negotiation with government and other agencies; they
honour UCET’s obligation to contribute to the public
debate on education and teacher education; they draw
on a massive repository of expertise and experience
to enhance quality and standards in teaching; and
they inform discussions within institutions about the
development of their provision, offering teacher educators
a measured statement in the light of which they can
evaluate their own work.
2. At its June, 2006, meeting the Executive Committee
commissioned UCET’s Academic Secretary, and the
member of the Executive Committee who had been
specially co-opted for her expertise and standing in early
years education, to develop a Position Paper, following
consultation throughout the UCET community and
beyond, on ‘the implications, from the perspective of
the higher education-based teacher education sector, of
the ECM agenda’. The original terms of the commission
indicated that the focus of the paper should be on the
early years. To avoid the danger that a paper with a strong
early years focus might reinforce the misconception
that ECM relates to the early years only, rather than
presaging a transformation of educational provision at all
levels, it was agreed that the paper should dwell on the
impact of ECM on teacher education in general, while
devoting specific attention to the major developments
that are taking place in regard to the early years. It was
stipulated that the paper should be completed in time to
be launched at the UCET conference in mid-November,
2006. Following that launch, the draft paper was widely
distributed inside and outside the UCET community; it
was discussed at meetings of UCET committees and in
numerous other national and institutional contexts; and
it was the focus of a major consultation exercise. It would
be fair to record that the draft paper was warmly and even
enthusiastically received. At the same time the discussions
and comments submitted indicated that certain
adjustments and, extensions and changes of emphasis
were required. These have been incorporated in this final
version of the paper.
Structure of Paper
3. The paper is structured according to the following
sequence:
• evidential base and fieldwork
• policy drivers of ECM
• basic principles of ECM
• integration of services
• teaching, inter-professionalism and
‘personalisation’
• the revision of teacher education
• ECM and early years provision
• staff development in higher education
institutions
4. That structure moves from an analysis of the
genesis of ECM and its fundamental purposes to a
consideration of the role of the teacher in the context
of more integrated service provision for children and
young people. That discussion provides the basis for an
elaboration of the modifications required if teachers
and related professionals are to be fully prepared for,
and supported in meeting, the challenges which ECM
heralds for all who work with children and young
people.
Evidential Base and Fieldwork
5. To ensure that the Position Paper was well
grounded, formal interviews were held with 15
individuals or groups, eight of whom were associated
with the ECM initiative at national level, being senior
members of the DfES, the TDA, the GTCE, the
Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC),
the General Social Care Council, and the NCSL, while
the other seven were based in institutions and were
closely involved in ECM-related work. Most of these
interviews were conducted face-to-face but some were
conducted by telephone. The interviews followed an
agreed framework of questions, which were sent in
advance to interviewees. A report of each interview
was compiled and contributed to the project database.
These formal interviews were supplemented by
countless informal conversations and telephone
calls with UCET and other colleagues on one aspect
of ECM or another. The fieldwork also involved
three site visits, which permitted a more extended
consideration of ECM-related provision. One of these
institutions visited is involved in the TDA-funded
Change Management Project, which is examining
how ECM is becoming embedded in institutions. In
addition, the interview questions were distributed
throughout the UCET community with a request
for comments and case studies which portrayed how
ECM is being approached at institutional level. In
all, 29 responses were received, covering programme
and staff development materials, detailed comments

on the interview questions, research reports, reading
lists and protocols for fostering collaboration with
schools and other settings on ECM. Finally, a detailed
study was undertaken of the extensive official
documentation on ECM and its sub-themes, and a
review was conducted of relevant articles in academic
and professional journals, as well as in the national
press. In these various and complementary ways
an attempt was made to highlight the rationale for
national policy, to tease out the many strands of the
initiative, to discover how ECM was being interpreted
at institutional level by the teacher education
community, and, drawing on that welter of evidence,
to offer a credible portrayal of teacher education in
the new and rapidly changing context.
Policy Drivers of ECM
6. In delineating the social and educational policy
matrix from which ECM sprang it is clear that it was
a direct response to the early death in 2000 of Victoria
Climbie, a victim of unspeakable cruelty at the hands
of those close to her. In the Foreword to Every Child
Matters the Prime Minister explicitly acknowledged
that the Green Paper was the government’s response
to Lord Laming’s report on the case. That report had
roundly criticised the fragmentation of services and
lack of accountability that had allowed a vulnerable
child to be so shockingly abused. Perhaps the most
culpable feature of the case was that it was the most
recent in a litany of child neglect that had besmirched
the record of children’s services over many years,
extending back to the case of Maria Colwell in Scotland
of the mid 70’s. Each of these cases had appalled the
public and each had pointed to serious shortcomings
in service provision. The high-profile response to the
Laming Report and the radical changes proposed in
the Green Paper were indicative of the government’s
determination to ensure that at long last the necessary
reform of children’s services would be effected.
7. The fragmentation of services for children had
widely acknowledged repercussions: information was not
shared, leading to a delay in providing support; there
was duplication of assessments; with the involvement
of several services there was no single person with
responsibility for ensuring continuity of care; resources
were not used to best effect when several agencies
made a partial contribution rather than a single agency
investing an appropriate sum to provide a coordinated
and comprehensive package of support; there was scope
for disagreement between individual services about
where responsibility for addressing a particular set of
UCET 
needs might lie; and those in need of support could
find it difficult to access services that were dispersed. In
such circumstances, it is easy to see how the same child
might be identified as having special educational needs,
as a truant, as a young offender, as having a behaviour
disorder, as a victim of parental neglect or abuse, and
each of these characterisations could bring the child
into contact with a different helping agency, each of
which all too often operated a separate professional
service, structurally incapable of seeing the child in the
round and therefore unable to address that child’s needs
effectively.
8. However, Every Child Matters ranged much more
widely than the circumstances analysed in the Laming
Report. Like the corresponding documents in Scotland
(Getting It Right for Every Child: Proposals for Action),
Northern Ireland (Our Children and Young people
– Our Pledge), and Wales (The Learning Country), the
Green Paper issued a call for urgent and comprehensive
reform. All of these documents chronicled the numerous
initiatives taken since 1997, such as Sure Start Local
Programmes, the Early Excellence Centre programme
and the Children’s Fund, to effect improvements in
children’s services. However, they also adduced grim
evidence to the effect that these services were still falling
short. They catalogued, with worrying consistency across
the different jurisdictions, the incidence of truancy, of
children living in poverty, of ill-health, of mental illness,
of offending and re-offending, of teenage pregnancy,
of drug-abuse, of non-involvement in education and
training post-16, and of children who are the victims of
crime. They pointed to the growing gap in achievement
between young people from different socio-economic
backgrounds, to significant under-privilege and
disadvantage, and to social exclusion and social malaise
on an unacceptable scale. And they documented the
cumulative effects of poverty, of personal breakdown, of
living in stressed and malfunctioning families, and of
neighbourhoods in which aspirations and opportunities
were crushed by the co-existence of multiple adversities.
9. The consensus of these official documents was that
existing interventions were proving inadequate. In the
words of the Green Paper, all of us stood ‘to share the
benefits of an economy and society with less educational
failure, higher skills, less crime, and better health’.
Besides, failure to make proper provision to combat
exclusion increased the likelihood that subsequent forms
of social and personal breakdown would make even
heavier demands on the public purse. Sound investment
in tackling the roots of exclusion was not only a way of
creating a more just and cohesive society, one in which
  UCET
life chances were less unequal, but also represented a
wiser use of community resources.
10. What, then, was required? Firstly, there was a need
for the community to endorse the needs of children
and young people. Secondly, it was essential to structure
services in a way that rendered them more responsive to
these needs. That meant that services should be organised
more coherently, with professionals and agencies working
collaboratively to serve children rather than to protect
professional boundaries. Thirdly, the emphasis should
lie in early intervention and prevention rather than in
belated responses to crises. By championing such an
agenda ECM sought to respond to the problems raised
by the case of Victoria Climbie, but also extended the
arena of reform to re-energise a number of other national
initiatives and to integrate them into a coherent strategy
for service improvement.
11. There were four other aspects of national
educational policy with which ECM articulated. Firstly,
for some thirty years prior to the publication of the
Green Paper there had been sustained pressure from
the early years sector for integrated services for children.
That pressure led to the establishment of Early Years
Development and Childcare Partnerships, which marked
the beginnings of local authority integrated service
provision for children and their families. ECM provided
an impetus to such restructuring.
12. Secondly, there was the political imperative
to raise standards of achievement in schools. That
imperative, manifested in the systematic testing of pupils’
achievements at different ages and the compilation of
league tables based on results in national examinations,
rested on the assumption that the raising of standards
was the antidote to many of the conditions that
imperilled the life chances of young people. For their
part, critics questioned whether the relentlessness of the
testing regime so exalted cognitive development that it
devalued other equally important educational objectives,
and represented a highly restricted view of human
flourishing. ECM of course retains the commitment
to nurture the achievements of learners but it duly
recognises that learners have other needs. The significant
shift in the political discourse is from the promotion
of learners’ achievement to the cultivation of learners’
achievement and wellbeing, a shift that is encapsulated
in the neologism, edu-care, although it is fair to record
that that term is regarded with some suspicion by some
members of the educational community, including
some specialists in early years education. Such specialists
maintain that the nurturing of achievement and
well-being have always been integral to educational
and pedagogical practice in the early years, and they
claim that that broader conception of education has
progressively narrowed in subsequent phases of education
in response to changing political imperatives.
13. A third and related strand of policy concerns the
extended school. The notion of the school as the focal
point for a range of services for children, families and
communities was first implemented in a major way
in the UK in the New Community School initiative
in Scotland in 1999. Drawing on the tradition of ‘full-
service’ schooling in the USA, these New Community
Schools were championed by the Secretary of State for
Scotland as agencies for addressing children’s needs ‘in
the round’, through an ‘integrated approach in which
expert advice and support is at hand, not at the end of
a referral chain to other agencies’. The early research
on the 25 DfES pathfinder projects mounted in 2002
indicated that there was a lack of consensus on what
constituted an extended school, or on how student and
community needs were to be identified and addressed,
other than by reference to a deficit model. The ECM
initiative is interpretable as a way mainstreaming such
schools, as foregrounding them as primary vehicles for
the realisation of wider social and community aspirations,
and of confirming their standing as integral features of a
coherent national strategy for children and young people.
14. The fourth of these policy precursors is workforce
re-modelling. In 2003, that initiative sought to address
teacher workload by freeing teachers from non-teaching
duties and enabling them to concentrate on their core
professional responsibility of promoting learning by
significantly extending the range of support staff roles
in schools. That change may have been perceived as a
way of releasing teachers from their wider professional
responsibilities. ECM may be seen as a corrective to that
perception, by affirming that every teacher, regardless
of specialism, has a responsibility to contribute to the
general wellbeing of learners as well as to their academic
achievement. In addition, ECM reinforced another
outcome of re-modelling, by repudiating the notion of
teachers as solitary operators, by strongly endorsing the
ethic of professional team-working with HLTAs, TAs,
learning mentors (many of whom have experience of
other spheres of education such as youth work), and
others, and by portraying schools as appropriate contexts
for inter-professional collaboration.
15. While, then, the death of Victoria Climbie
may have been the spark that lit the ECM fuse, this
major initiative developed its significant momentum
at least partly because it exploited the political will and
public appetite for radical change to re-energise several

antecedent strands of social and educational policy
that were already in process of implementation, and
wove them into a single, comprehensive and coherent
strategy.
Basic Principles of ECM
16. One of the striking features of ECM and similar
policy initiatives elsewhere in the UK is that they
are unashamedly needs-centred: across the UK its
fundamental purpose is to meet the needs of children
and young people. These needs have been publicly
endorsed as ‘outcomes’ and are advocated by many
as an entitlement integral to all forms of service
provision for children and young people. They are
expressed in these terms:
Northern Ireland: being healthy; enjoying, learning
and achieving; living in safety and with stability;
experiencing economic and environmental wellbeing;
contributing positively to community and society;
living in a society which respects their rights.
Scotland: achieving; being healthy; being included;
being respected and responsible; being nurtured; being
active; being safe.
England: being healthy; staying safe; enjoying and
achieving; making a positive contribution; economic
wellbeing.
Wales declared a commitment in to ‘tackle
disadvantage’; ‘to promote equality of opportunity’;
to overcome ‘the barriers to learning’; and to reduce
‘inequality of achievement’. To that end, the aim was to
give ‘every child a flying start’ and to ‘offer a curriculum
in harmony with each child’s particular needs and
interests’.
17. These are outcomes which all of those working
with children and young people must be committed
to meeting and improving. They underpin the
whole superstructure of services for children and
young people; they are intended to give point to
every professional endeavour; and they are to govern
every engagement which the community arranges to
support the wellbeing of children and to nurture their
educational progress.
18. As listed above, the outcomes are perhaps too
general to act as targets for educational or social action.
In response to that difficulty, in England the five needs
have been expressed as 25 ‘specific aims’, from which
there has been derived an ‘outcomes framework’ to
measure the extent to which children’s needs are being
met. Thus ‘being healthy’ is expressed in more precise
terms as
• physically healthy
UCET 
• mentally and emotionally health
• sexually healthy
• healthy lifestyles
• choose not to take illegal drugs
19. It would be surprising, were the lists for the other
parts of the UK to be expressed in more specific terms,
if any significant differences would emerge.
20. It is further maintained that these needs are inter-
dependent. In the words of Every Child Matters: Change
for Children,
The outcomes are inter-dependent. They show the
relationship between educational achievement and
wellbeing. Children and young people learn and thrive
when they are healthy, safeguarded from harm and
engaged. The evidence shows clearly that educational
achievement is the most important way to improve
outcomes for poor children and break cycles of deprivation.
21. The corresponding Northern Ireland document
refers to the ‘interconnectedness of children’s lives’ and
to the ‘links between good health and good education
outcomes’ and to ‘the links between poverty and poor
health outcomes’.
22. These needs statements are now formally
embedded, in England through the Children Act
of 2004, and now represent the corner-stone of
services for children and young people. They have
been incorporated into the Standards for Classroom
Teachers and form part of the framework of
OFSTED inspections of schools, children’s centres
and local authority provision for children, as well as
of inspection regimes in other parts of the UK. The
watchwords for the reformed services have become
responsiveness, prevention, early intervention,
protection, support for families, all to engender and
build up through policy and practice that ‘resilience’
in children and young people, in their families, and
in their neighbourhoods that is ‘the key to wellbeing
and overcoming the effects of disadvantage’. (Edwards,
2005). It is now accepted that no single agency can
achieve any of the outcomes for children acting in
isolation. Reformed provision must be based on
strong universal services with readily accessed and
targeted specialist support. It is widely acknowledged
that the necessary quality of provision rests pre-
eminently on two essential conditions: firstly, services
need to be reconfigured round the child and the
family, in one place, to permit professionals to work
in close collaboration in multi-disciplinary teams;
and, secondly, the service must be staffed by a well-
motivated and professionally equipped workforce.
How are these conditions to be met?
 10 UCET
Integration of Services
23. Across the UK it is accepted that the traditional
configuration of local education authority and other
provision for children and young people was no
longer fit for purpose and needed to be replaced by a
unified structure under the leadership of a Director
of Children’s Services. In England, this change was
heralded in the Children Act of 2004, which placed a
duty on local authorities to foster cooperation between
agencies, including voluntary bodies, to improve
children’s wellbeing, and obliged other key agencies to
safeguard and promote the wellbeing of children. The
preferred model for effecting change is the Children’s
Trust, which is a partnership of a range of all the
services impinging on children, and which exercises
strategic oversight of the development of children’s
services and mobilises resources and support to secure
the improvement of outcomes for children.
24. It is an expectation that that integration of
governance will be reflected in the integration of front-
line services. To that end, there is a commitment to
have in place by 2010 a national network of Children’s
Centres and extended schools, or ‘community focussed
schools’ as they are known in Wales.
25. The commitment to extended schools was
reinforced by the findings of the independent evaluation
of full-service extended schools (September 2006), which
concluded that ‘extended services can help individuals
and families re-engage with learning’ and can exert ‘a
significant impact on their life chances’, and by the
OFSTED conclusion that, where schools were providing
access to extended activities, children, young people
and families benefited from enhanced self-confidence,
improved relationships, raised aspirations and better
attitudes to learning’. The ‘core offer’ of extended schools
will be:
• high-quality wraparound care…available 8am-6pm all
year round
• a varied menu of activities, such as homework clubs and
study support, sport, music tuition, dance and drama,
arts and crafts, special interest clubs such as chess and
first-aid courses
• parenting support including information sessions for
parents at key transition points and family learning
sessions to allow children to learn with their parents
• swift and easy referral to a wide range of specialist
support services such as speech therapy, child and
adolescent mental health services, family support services,
intensive behaviour support and sexual health services
• wider community access to ICT, sport and arts facilities,
including adult learning
26. Schools based on such provision are thought to
confer significant benefits: to enrich learning; to extend
the exposure of young people to influences that are
educative; to engage parents and carers more fully in
the education of children; and to facilitate multi-agency
working, co-locating those who are in a position to offer
different forms of support and fostering closer and more
open communication between them. That quality of
service represents a significant improvement over the
kind of fragmentation of provision that had become all
too familiar.
27. These multi-purpose extended schools will be
supplemented by the measures recently intimated
under the Youth Matters initiative: to engage young
people in shaping local services; to require local
authorities to ensure that young people have access to
a wide range of purposeful activities; to fund young
people directly to mount local initiatives and to take
advantage of existing facilities that accord with their
needs and wishes; to encourage young people to
undertake volunteering activities that are formally
recognised; to establish peer mentoring schemes in
secondary schools; to enable young people to enjoy a
variety of forms of access to information, advice and
guidance that meet national quality standards; and
to offer targeted support for those with additional
needs. All of these measures will fall under the aegis
of local Children’s Trusts and therefore form part of
the integrated provision these trusts are expected to
provide.
Infrastructure of Collaboration
28. These structural changes by themselves will
not create an integrated service: they need to be
underpinned by mechanisms and procedures that
facilitate communication, promote information
sharing, establish a common understanding of
children’s needs, and serve to foster a culture of inter-
professional and multi-agency collaboration. To these
ends, a battery of measures has been introduced, the
most significant of which are as follows:
The Lead Professional
Where a child is known to more than one specialist
agency a designated professional, who may well not be
a teacher, will carry responsibility for ensuring that a
coherent set of services will be provided and for acting as
a single point of contact.
Common Assessment Framework (CAF)
To reduce the unnecessary duplication of assessments

and to help to embed a shared professional approach
across services, the CAF systematically records in a
standard format and in non-technical language, and
based on discussions with those involved, the to flourish in a very different professional world. They
characteristics of the child, parents and carers, and the
neighbourhood environment, the identified strengths
and needs of the child, the forms of support provided,
and a report on the effectiveness of that support.
Information Sharing Index
This electronic tool will hold basic information on
every child, permitting authorised practitioners with
a concern about a child to determine whether an
assessment has been made, or to indicate that they have
information on a child they wish to share with others
who may have been working with the child.
Common Core of Skills and Knowledge
This statement, which has been developed in
consultation with a wide range of professional and other
bodies, identifies the core skills and knowledge that
should feature in the professional preparation of all those
working with children and young people. The skills and
knowledge relate to Communication and engagement,
Child and young person development, Safeguarding
and promoting the welfare of the child, Supporting
transitions, and Sharing information. These have been
subsumed within the revised Standards for Classroom
Teachers.
Integrated Qualifications Framework
The aim is to devise a structure of interlocking awards
and transferable units of study that will create career
pathways and facilitate changes of professional direction
for all those working with children and young people.
Joint statement of inter-professional values
Developed by the GTCE, the GSCC and the Nursing
and Midwifery Council, in response to Every Child
Matters, and still in draft form, this statement seeks to
identify a set of shared values to which all those engaged
in inter-professional work might subscribe and which
might underpin all the engagements of practitioners with
children and young people.
29. These various initiatives are intended to reinforce
the ethic of inter-professional working that is such a
prominent requirement of ECM. While they are at
different stages of development or implementation,
when fully in operation they will help to establish that
professional community of practice upon which the
success of the ECM initiative ultimately depends. These
UCET 11
will all be inescapable realities of the new context of
teaching.
30. Tomorrow’s teachers will therefore inhabit and expect
will find themselves in schools in which the proportion
of teaching support staff has markedly increased; they will
be professionally accountable for their contribution to
improving the outcomes for children, in terms of their basic
needs; they will require to display a deeper sensitivity and
responsiveness to the wellbeing of learners; they will work
in schools - if indeed that term remains in use – which are
designed to address a wider range of professional concerns
than the schools of yesteryear, and which, far from being
insulated from their communities, will become gateways
to a network of dispersed learning opportunities, and will
draw on wider sources of expertise to support learning; they
will have a stronger involvement with parents and other
community agencies than in the past; they will be members
of teams, in some cases in leadership roles, in others as
partners, in addressing shared professional problems;
and they will be expected to engage more frequently in
discussions with others from different walks of professional
life. The effect of all of these changes will be to reinforce
the teachers’ fundamental and distinctive responsibility
for exercising leadership in teaching and learning and
maximising learning opportunities.
Teaching, Inter-professionalism and
Personalisation
31. There are, however, two areas in which there
appears to be a degree of uncertainty. These relate to
the impact on teaching of two ECM themes which
feature prominently in the official documentation:
inter-professionalism and personalisation.
32. The drive in the ECM agenda for inter-
professional collaboration, for multi-agency working, for
the flexible deployment of teams reflecting a variety of
expertise, has opened a debate on the extent to which
the teacher’s specialist contribution to the educational
progress of learners will require to change. While on the
one hand it is maintained that much of the multi-agency
work will be undertaken by non-teaching members of
the school staff, it is clear that the teacher will require
to engage with those other professionals whose work
impinges directly on the classroom, notably the HLTA,
the TA and the learning mentor. However, they will
also require to be aware of the roles and functions of
other members of the school or centre staff and be
able to engage with them on matters that may affect
the learning of individual pupils. Besides, one of the
common interpretations of personalisation is likely
 12 UCET
to have significant implications for the teacher. On
that view, there is expected to be a loosening up of our
educational arrangements, the discarding of uniform
and monolithic provision, the growth of flexibility, and
the multiplication of opportunities for choice – of type
of school (Trust School, Academy, Specialist School or
Extended Community School), of educational setting
(nursery or children’s centre, school, FE college or
workplace), of learning pathway (as in the 14-19 package
of reforms), and of when education should occur in
the lifespan (as in the ethos of lifelong learning) – all in
the interests of enabling learners to navigate their way
through the system to find opportunities for learning
that are attuned to their personal needs and aspirations.
While it has been claimed that these variants of schooling,
with their differing funding regimes and modes of
operation and governance, may well confer advantages
on some pupils and therefore create more inequalities,
the increased diversity of provision is likely to require
teachers to exercise greater professional discretion, to be
able to operate from a broader professional base, and to
engage with a wider diversity of learners, similar perhaps
to what is currently expected of those who teach in the
Learning and Skills Sector.
33. There are other interpretations of personalisation.
When first invoked by David Miliband in 2004, the
term was differentiated from the discredited notion
of individualised learning and the irresponsibility of
leaving pupils to their own devices: it meant ‘shaping
teaching around the way different youngsters learn….
taking care to nurture the unique talents of every
pupil’. A DfES paper added a gloss to the effect
that, since ‘every child comes to the classroom with
a different knowledge base and skill set, as well as
varying aptitudes and aspirations’, there was a need
for the adoption of ‘diverse teaching strategies’. Such a
rendering of personalisation will be perfectly familiar
to teachers and would be a welcome retreat from the
heavily interventionist and centralist direction of
education that has characterised the last two decades.
It is an invitation to assume ownership of the teaching
and learning process, to be suspicious of one-size-fits-
all prescriptions, and to reject a model of the learning
process in which a uniform curricular diet is rigidly
dispensed to all. It challenges teachers’ pedagogical
resourcefulness, demanding of them the capacity
to draw on an extensive repertoire of strategies to
promote learning.
34. A third interpretation of personalisation, associated
with Charles Leadbeater, the prominent government
advisor, presents a more serious challenge. The central
assumption of ‘personalisation through participation’ is
that users should have a much stronger and direct role
in designing, planning and delivering services. In the
educational context, such a change would empower
learners to shape what and where they learned, to
determine, with help, their own targets and learning
plans, how they learned and how that learning might
be assessed. The teacher’s role would be ‘to help unlock
the learners’ needs, preferences and aspirations’; they
would become ‘advisors, advocates, solutions assemblers,
brokers’, their role being ‘ not to provide solutions
directly but to help clients find the best way to solve their
problems themselves’.
35. One of the claims of the personalisation agenda,
asserted explicitly and implicitly in all three senses of
that term, is that services for children and young people
should be much more responsive to their ‘voices’. The
burden of this claim is that schools and other agencies
need to be much better prepared to engage learners
in the discussion of the nature of the educational
experience they are undergoing; they should set in place
mechanisms and procedures which encourage learners
to register their candid reactions to the services they are
receiving and which permits them a significant say in
how these services might be better ordered to meet their
needs and aspirations. A truly personalised educational
service will be one in which the power relationship
between schools and learners has been sufficiently
adjusted to enable educational experiences to be co-
determined, thus increasing the likelihood that learners
become much more active and willing participants in the
fostering of their capabilities and dispositions.
36. These various interpretations of inter-
professionalism and personalisation, with their references
to the ‘blurring’ of professional boundaries, or the ‘fusion’
of specialisms, threaten received notions of professional
identity, subject allegiance, and the authority of the
teacher. They create ambivalence with regard to the
nature of the specialist contribution teachers have to
make to the ECM agenda. These tensions may impact
differentially on early years and primary teachers on the
one hand and on secondary and learning and skills sector
teachers on the other.
37. There is a sense in which education in all phases
is concerned with the development of knowledge
and understanding, for it would be contradictory
to claim that a person had been educated but had
experienced no enlargement of understanding in one
way or another. However, the knowledge base of the
curriculum has been interpreted in different ways at
different phases of educational provision. In early years

education and perhaps throughout the primary school
also, learning has been fostered and the curriculum
has been mediated by a single professional, relying
from time to time on the contribution of those with
specialist curricular or knowledge expertise. If the early
years or primary teacher was regarded as a specialist
that specialist expertise related to the capacity to
nurture the all-round development of pupils. The
various traditions of human knowledge might have
been drawn on, discretely or in one or other form
of integration, but they were invoked to serve pupils’
development in the broadest sense: to enlarge their
understanding; to provide a context for the acquisition
and extension of skills of many kinds; to enrich the life
of the emotions; to reinforce nascent aptitudes and to
promote others; to explore what is valuable; to induce
the disposition to enquire, to create, to question, and
to imagine; and to engender confidence and enjoyment
in the manifold activities of learning. Indeed, it was
precisely because the early years and primary teachers
interpreted the education of young people in these
broader terms that they considered that the elevation
of a limited number of areas of knowledge to a special
place in the curricular sun, and the introduction of
a regime of achievement testing in these areas, to
constitute an unacceptable narrowing of the teacher’s
traditional concern to address all the needs of children
to which a well grounded education should respond.
Consequently, for early years and primary teachers
the ECM agenda marks, to a significant degree, a
welcome return to an education that makes sense, and
the introduction of personalisation is nothing more
or less than an affirmation of the principles of learner-
centred education, which their training and experience
led them to endorse as cardinal to their work in the
classroom and to their conception of professional
life. To be sure, ECM calls for significant adjustments
in the work of early years and primary teachers,
most significantly with regard to collaboration and
information sharing. However, these adjustments are
congruent with an approach to professional work in
which the fostering of human development in its widest
sense is paramount.
38. By contrast, reflecting a curriculum that is highly
differentiated, secondary school teachers undergo a
process of professional socialisation which reinforces
strong allegiance to the subject, which for many
secondary teachers is a badge of professional identity and
the means by which their specialist expertise is asserted.
For secondary teachers in particular, therefore, ECM
is considered to pose difficult questions. Are teachers
UCET 13
to be regarded primarily as learning coordinators, as
generalists with responsibility for cultivating such generic
capabilities as learning how to learn, problem-solving
and critical thinking? In that event, what is to become
of the teachers’ specialist subject expertise? If indeed
subject teaching expertise is to have reduced importance,
will such a change of emphasis weaken the ECM drive
to combat poverty and disadvantage by raising levels of
achievement? Finally, how is that supposed retreat from
subject specialism to be reconciled with a government
policy which appears to favour a strengthening of the
role of subject teaching and of subject specialists, for
example through involving the subject associations in the
revitalisation of the curriculum?
39. For the secondary teacher the reconciliation
of these tensions rests on a reaffirmation and
reinterpretation of subject teaching. There are those who
look upon subject teaching as the transmission of slabs
of content for no worthier purpose than examination
success, and the subject teacher, operating within a
highly restricted pedagogical range, as having no loftier
ambition than to crowd pupils’ heads with facts. Of
course, such characterisations represent an absurd
caricature of subject teaching. Properly conceived,
however they are configured and inter-related, however
they differentiate and coalesce over time, subjects
constitute the available ways we have of exploring
and interpreting the world of subjective experience, of
analysing the social environment and of making sense
of the natural world. It is through subject study that
learners acquire historical, scientific, mathematical and
other forms of understanding; and it is through subject
study that learners develop the capacity to engage in
the distinctive modes of investigation and analysis
through which human experience is differentiated and
extensions of human understanding are achieved. That
rationale does not by any means imply that knowledge
can only be mediated through subject-specific teaching;
nor does it discount the value for particular purposes
of combining knowledge that is drawn from discrete
disciplines. Clearly, for many, including early years
and primary teachers, that integrated approach is the
preferred mode of knowledge engagement. Moreover,
subjects are communities of debate and argumentation,
of exploration and criticism, of conjecture and refutation;
they are pursuits in which knowledge, in due recognition
of its provisionality, is open to continuous reconstruction.
As such, subjects are educational resources of remarkable
power, offering unlimited scope for realising an
enormous range of educational purposes, for enquiry
and reflection, for hypothesising and the interrogation
 14 UCET
of evidence, for adjudicating between the valuable
and the meretricious; for the use of the imagination
and creativity; for the examination of human motive
and the improvability of the social condition; for
coming to terms with the responsibilities of citizenship;
for promoting personal, social and environmental
competence; and much else besides. Nor are these
purposes restricted to what is cognitive or cerebral:
subjects nurture the sense of achievement, the growth
of self-confidence and self-esteem, enthusiasm and
enjoyment, the self-understanding that comes through
challenge, the capacity to engage and interact with others,
and the satisfactions that derive from participation
in sport, adventure, the arts and forms of service to
the community. In all of these ways subjects, whether
approached discretely or in integrated mode, exert a
humanising, liberating and ultimately transforming
impact on learners.
40. It would be profligate in the extreme to
discard the expertise and commitment of those
who thrive in promoting learning of that quality.
Fortunately, the ECM official documentation neither
explicitly nor implicitly requires any such radical and
extravagant measure. On the contrary, under ECM
the educational progress of learners will depend on
how resourcefully teachers will be able to draw on
their subject knowledge base, and how readily they
will jettison the monocular professional vision that is
associated with the blinkered pursuit of the subject,
in favour of an approach that fully exploits all the
opportunities for cognitive and affective development,
and for the nurturing of skill, insight and judgement
that subject teaching at its best involves. However,
that pedagogical subject knowledge, and the capacity
to ensure that it issues in accomplished professional
performance, needs to be generalised so that, within
the context of subject teaching and beyond it, the
teacher is able to induce the disposition to learn, to
relate the activities of the classroom to the social
realities of the pupils’ experience, to structure learning
opportunities appropriately, to remove the obstacles
that can impede learning, and to energise learners to
assume fuller responsibility for, and become more
effective managers of, their own learning. And in
all of that work teachers will be operating from a
professional base in which subject teaching expertise
and proficiency in the facilitation of human learning
will be mutually reinforcing features, rather than being
so antithetical that possession of the one rules out
possession of the other.
41. On this view, there is no incompatibility between
ECM and subject teaching; between teaching a subject
and enabling pupils to learn how to learn, or even
being a learning coordinator or consultant; between
the cultivation of learners’ achievements and fostering
their wellbeing; and between personalisation and
the promotion of high standards. These supposed
dichotomies are all reconcilable in the kind of extended
professionalism that is achieved through a teacher’s
specialism rather than by taking a detour round it or
submerging it altogether.
42. In addition to professing the expertise of the
specialist in human development through learning,
teachers in the new context need to encompass within
their professional scope the capacities for team-working
and collaborative effort. A significant feature of such
work will be information sharing. ECM requires that
all who engage with children and young people need
to become aware of whatever factors in children’s
environment may impinge on their learning. Teachers
therefore must learn to participate in a culture of
information sharing: they are in a position, on the basis
of their interactions with children, to contribute to a
more rounded picture of a child’s needs and how these
might be met. In this sense the relationship between
teacher and teaching assistant and HLTA is bound to
involve close and continuing professional interchange
about individual learners. What is more, teachers will
be able to refer pupils with difficulties that cannot be
addressed within the classroom to the many forms
of specialist support within the school or readily
accessed by the school: the mentor, the learning and
behaviour specialist, the speech therapist, the family
liaison worker, and the counsellor, all of whom form a
professional network of support for pupils’ progress and
wellbeing. The teacher operates within that extended
professional network.
43. That obligation to operate within an extended
professional network has certainly been a source of
uncertainty for some teachers. Some have responded
to that uncertainty by exaggerating the extent of the
adjustment that is expected of teachers if they are
to engage in inter-professional collaboration: they
go on to make the quite extravagant claim that the
implication of ECM is that teachers must become
social workers. That serious mis-reading can lead to
a resolute insistence on professional boundaries in
an effort to protect the professional integrity that is
perceived to be under threat. It has to be insisted, in
reply, that ECM provides no ground whatever for
such professional defensiveness. Rather, ECM requires
teachers to adhere to their distinctive role as specialists

in human learning, but to deploy that expertise, not
in isolation, but openly and in collaboration with
others who have a contribution to make to the
educational progress and wellbeing of children and
young people. That approach to professional work
calls for teachers to extend their pursuit of personal
and individual efficacy, which is such a pronounced
feature of early professional socialisation, and to
embrace what has been called ‘relational agency’,
the capacity to contribute to the shared solution of
professional problems through collaborative working.
On this view, effective professional action includes
the capacity to align one’s response to a learner’s
difficulties with those of other professionals. The ‘new’
professionalism incorporates this key dimension: it is
not a matter of insisting on a specialist and possibly
unique expertise, but of practising that expertise in
close association with others in contexts in which
a uni-professional approach is insufficient and the
sharing of professional perspectives therefore essential.
Moreover, that kind of sharing, far from undermining
professionalism, is a confident affirmation of what
professionalism in the new context properly involves.
No doubt, changes in initial professional preparation
and programmes of CPD, through the provision
of shared learning opportunities and in other ways,
will serve to weaken those professional boundaries
that inhibit effective action on behalf of children
and young people. However, the ultimate success
of ECM will depend, more than anything, on the
extent to which teachers can be encouraged to make
that conceptual shift from teaching as the individual
mastery of pedagogical skills and approaches to one in
which that mastery is embedded in collaborative and
relational professional action.
ECM and Teacher Education
44. If that characterisation of teaching in the new
context is valid it provides some pointers to the kind
of teacher education now required. One response,
considered intermittently by Scotland’s GTC over
the past two decades, is to institute a new type of
teaching qualification, one that is a blend of subject
study, sociology and psychology, health and counselling
studies, and draws on community education and social
work approaches. The case for such a change is that,
if established interventions are proving insufficiently
effective, there is perhaps a need to attempt a new
approach, and to introduce the teacher who would
perhaps be a specialist in lifestyle education and who
might parallel the new Early Years Professional to be
UCET 15
discussed below. However, there is no support in the
official documentation or in the UCET community for
such a teacher. The consensus clearly points to the need
to prepare tomorrow’s teachers by making adjustments
and refinements to existing approaches which faithfully
reflect the changing role of the teacher.
45. The revised standards for classroom teachers
already impose certain requirements with regard to
the ECM agenda. Thus, institutions are expected to
ensure that those entering the profession are familiar
with the legislative background within which they will
work and the professional responsibilities that flow
from that legislation with regard to the protection
and care of children. In addition, they must be able to
demonstrate that they can relate their work to achieving
the key outcomes for children that underpin ECM
as well as the six areas of the Common Core of Skills
and Knowledge referred to above. Already there is
widespread evidence that institutions are incorporating
these features into programmes, and one institution
visited produced a grid to demonstrate how each of the
ECM aims was addressed in all the programme units of
study. Beyond that, there are six changes of emphasis
that need to be effected in initial teacher education to
take full account of ECM.
46. Firstly, initial programmes of teacher education
need to engage students in the analysis of the policy
context of ECM. It is to trivialise ECM to see it as
amounting to nothing more than the more careful
orchestration of services for children and young people.
ECM has to be interpreted as an ambitious government
initiative to improve the education and well-being of all
children by redoubling our efforts to remove children
from the blight of poverty and disadvantage, to arrest
and then reduce the widening gap in achievement
between children from different social backgrounds, to
render life chances less unequal, and to create a fairer
and more cohesive society. Children’s Centres, extended
schools and integrated services all derive their meaning
and purpose from that central commitment. Becoming
a teacher is to acquire a critical appreciation of what it
means to share that commitment. The key word in that
sentence is ‘critical’: ECM is an ambitious initiative and
one that is being taken forward for compelling reasons,
but teachers and representative bodies like UCET must
continue to monitor its development and impact on
schools and other centres, and be prepared to offer a
measured critique of its implementation.
47. Secondly, there is a need to re-assess the
place of knowledge in teacher education. However
they may evolve in response to advances in human
 16 UCET
understanding or technology, or to fluctuations of
intellectual fashion, these domains of knowledge will
continue to constitute the principal vehicles through
which the educational objectives of schools and
other settings are realised. However, the approach
to knowledge engagement now required, in line
with the emphases that have been explicated in the
preceding section, calls for a more explicit recognition
of the psycho-social and other educational aims
that are to be pursued. That is, student teachers
need to understand, analyse, apply and, importantly,
demonstrate in their interactions with learners, just
how the domains of knowledge can be exploited
as resources for addressing the needs of children
as defined by ECM, for equipping them with the
tools of autonomous living, for nurturing their
affective as well as their cognitive development, and
for cultivating a wide range of social and practical
skills. They need to learn to relate to pupils in such
a way that they can make pupils’ personal and social
experience the starting point for their exploration of
all that the domains of knowledge have to offer. On
this interpretation, student teachers should come to
regard the ECM agenda not as an adjunct to their
central task but as deeply integral to it.
48. Thirdly, beginning teachers need to undergo
sustained study of the theoretical perspectives on child
development, on human learning, on the environmental
and other obstacles to human flourishing, on the
conditions which maximise learning, and on the
manifold ways in which learning is facilitated and
managed. There is no doubt that it is helpful to have
a system-wide statement of the capabilities and other
qualities that a teacher should demonstrate before entry
to the profession. More than anything, such statements
or standards affirm what a teacher should be able to
do. However, it can be a weakness of such statements
that they so emphasise technical accomplishment in
the efficient management of learning that they do not
sufficiently explicate, and therefore may devalue, the
theoretical understandings that should inform teaching.
The generalisability of what is learned at the stage of
initial teacher education depends on the thoroughness
of the student teacher’s grasp of the knowledge base of
teaching. What is sought here is more than a superficial
familiarisation with the conceptual underpinnings
of teaching but rather sufficient analytical power to
maximise the transferability of teaching skills, insights
and strategies across a wide range of contexts, thus
equipping student teachers with the professional
versatility that the new context requires.
49. Fourthly, initial teacher education programmes
will need to ensure that their students understand
the inter-professional context into which they will
be moving. For example, while it is not expected
that classroom teachers will be expected to
play the role of the lead professional or to carry
responsibility for completing a CAF, they may well
engage professionally with those who carry such
responsibilities or contribute evidence from their
own interactions with a pupil that becomes the
focus of inter-professional exchange. They are also
entitled to be made aware of the various ways in
which their membership of an inter-professional
culture is to be reinforced, for example through the
joint statement on inter-professional values, and the
ethic of information sharing. In that connection, it is
vital that beginning teachers come to understand the
importance of confidentiality to effective practice but
acknowledge that it should not suppress professional
dialogues that are in the interests of the child.
Furthermore, if engagement with other professionals
is to be a feature of their subsequent careers there
is probably no better time to begin nurturing inter-
professional understanding than during the initial
teacher education programme. That is now being
developed through shared learning opportunities,
for example in child development, understanding
communities, child protection, and other cross-
professional themes, through paired placement
exchanges in which a student teacher and a student
social worker take it in turns to mediate for each other
the features of their respective working environments,
through the personalisation of the student’s own
professional learning, and through closer inter-faculty
collaboration within higher education.
50. Fifthly, the blend of skills developed requires to be
adjusted to give greater prominence to the subtleties of
the interpersonal interaction skills required in discussions
in inter-professional contexts, in the kind of relationship
with learners that personalisation requires, in handling
the pressures of team working, in exercising leadership
roles, in managing the tensions implicit in the extended
range of expectations that teaching entails, in seeking
to penetrate a learner’s difficulties or reluctance to
participate, in being sensitive to needs that are not always
obvious, and in respecting the confidentialities involved
in information sharing. In effect, teacher education
programmes will require to devote rather more attention
to the nurturing of the skills and dispositions that are
involved in collaboration and team working. How many
of our existing programmes cherish the ideal of ‘flying

solo’, of demonstrating a sure grasp of the technicalities
of classroom teaching and being able to do so unaided,
in a display of individual excellence? Without in any way
weakening the importance of individual mastery of the
complexities of teaching, might our programmes give
rather more prominence to the demands and professional
rewards of collaboration?
51. Finally, as is already occurring, teacher
education institutions need to re-work their
partnership arrangements with schools. These are
the settings in which many of the features of ECM
are already in operation and much of the students’
learning of ECM will take place off-campus. Indeed,
it will be essential to relate not simply to schools but
to schools in their communities, in recognition of the
ways in which the boundaries between the school and
the community are becoming more porous and in
order to afford the student some experience of non-
teaching settings. Besides, since it is inevitable that
schools and other settings will be at different stages
in the implementation of ECM and all that it entails,
teacher education institutions will surely require to
develop even more intensive partnerships and even
stronger relationships of trust, so that perceived
shortcomings or disagreements in relation to ECM
become opportunities for enhanced collaboration
and the shared understandings that are the fruit of
conjoint professional learning.
52. It is important to emphasise that these adjustments
to teacher education should not be seen simply as
additional to existing programmes, a supplementary
module which creates an even more overcrowded and
compressed teacher education curriculum. Just as ECM
calls for a re-conceptualisation of teaching so also it
demands a re-conceptualisation of teacher education. It
demands a re-structuring of the total programme in such
a way that ECM principles become embedded and are
made to permeate the student teachers’ university-based
studies and placement activities, as indeed the revised
standards for QTS require. The proper response therefore
is not to look upon the six proposed adjustments as
amounting to the inevitable extension to programmes
and the imposition of a net increase in burdens, but
rather as criteria that might be deployed to test the extent
to which ECM principles are integral to the experience
of teacher education.
53. Fears have been expressed that the revitalisation
of teacher education which ECM encourages may place
institutions in a position in which they fail to meet the
criteria underpinning OfSTED inspections. There
is no reason why any such conflict of interpretation
UCET 17
should arise, for OfSTED is bound to assess the extent
to which institutions meet the criteria required by the
revised standards for QTS and these explicitly endorse
ECM principles and require those who are candidates
for admission to teaching to demonstrate the range of
capabilities and dispositions that ECM emphasises.
54. Of course, ECM calls for more than adjustments
to initial teacher education: the overwhelming majority of
those whose efforts will determine the success or otherwise
of the initiative are already in service in schools or other
settings. A substantial investment of resources has been
made by the TDA and others to develop a world-class
workforce for a transformed service for children and young
people. In that undertaking there is an expectation that
schools and centres themselves will carry responsibility
for ensuring that their staff are fully attuned to the new
demands. UCET institutions will continue to contribute
to that important work. At the same time, these institutions
are extending the range of their CPD provision to take
account of ECM. For example, one of the centres visited,
in anticipation of the Integrated Qualification Framework,
had set in place a comprehensive and interlocking structure
of awards ranging from foundation degrees to doctoral
level work, characterised by credit accumulation, work-
based learning and flexible delivery, and involving three
institutions of higher education and ten neighbouring
authorities, one of which had office accommodation on site,
and looked upon that collaborative venture as the principal
means by which the development of the whole school
workforce in the authority will be taken forward.
55. As the predicted decrease in teacher education
numbers begins to impact on the sector, institutions
may well see strategic advantage in these more
extended forms of provision. The roles of TA and
HLTA are now established and demand for these
forms of professional support for teachers will not
diminish. The demand for the Early Years Professional,
discussed below, is likely to be even greater. It is
not otiose to envisage a number of institutions
which, while continuing to make provision for
teacher education, designate themselves as centres
for the professional education of the whole children’s
workforce, drawing on education, social work, health
and other forms of relevant expertise to offer a full
range of programmes and forms of professional
support, including multi-professional master’s degrees.
56. In a different region of the country, it is planned
to respond to the Children’s Workforce Strategy by
establishing a Children’s Service Professional Learning
Academy. Envisaged as a partnership involving the
county council, four institutions of higher education
 18 UCET
and other agencies, the Professional Learning
Academy is committed to improve ‘ the capacity
and quality of those who plan, manage and deliver
services at the front-line’ through the provision of
programmes which ‘address the skills, knowledge and
understanding required for effective inter-professional
and multi-agency work’. The target groups include
centrally employed county council professionals,
school-based staff, including the full range of support
staff, front-line carers such as foster parents and
children’s service professionals, and professionals in
private early years and childcare settings, health care
and other organisations.
57. As these and other patterns of CPD provision
emerge there will be a need to establish a greater
degree of coherence and harmonisation of practice in
the national arrangements for funding and regulating
professional development opportunities. Currently, in
England, there are too many separate agencies at work,
some with overlapping responsibilities: the CWDC,
the TDA, the Learning and Skills Council, the NCSL,
and the General Social Care Council. The direct
consequence of such fragmentation at national level
is inequality of opportunity. As the front-line services
these agencies exist to oversee are brought into closer
relationship with each other, it would be encouraging
to see an equivalent degree of integration of these
separate regulatory bodies, and with that integration
there might emerge uniform quality standards,
equivalences of CPD opportunities across what are
now separate sectors, and a single and equitable set of
funding arrangements.
58. One sphere of CPD for which ECM has especially
important implications concerns educational leadership.
As the range of expertise in Children’s Centres and
extended schools diversifies, special consideration will
require to be devoted to the professional development
of those who perform leadership roles in such multi-
professional settings. The national professional
qualifications that equip leaders in integrated children’s
centres and other extended educational settings with
the demanding repertoire of skills and understandings
necessary for their work will need to take full account of
the additional demands that are imposed on educational
leaders by the ECM agenda.
59. These various developments may be characterised
as a movement from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ systems: from a
closed and separate systems of schools to one in which
they are open to the influences of other agencies; from
teaching as a closed and somewhat private engagement
between the teacher and a group of learners to a more
open one in which the teacher mediates learning in a
range of contexts in collaboration with others; from the
closed teaching of subjects to the more open nurturing
of learners’ educational progress through the exploitation
of knowledge to achieve a wide range of psycho-social
objectives; and from a teacher education that was
professionally isolated and was preoccupied with technical
competence in the classroom to more open and varied
forms of engagement with other professionals.
ECM and Early Years Provision
60. While the foregoing discussion has been
concerned with ECM and teacher education in general,
and will therefore also have relevance to teaching
in the early years, there have been such significant
developments in that phase that they warrant separate
consideration. There have been three key developments.
61. The first of these is a new curriculum: the
Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), a single quality
framework for services for children from birth to
five. Due for implementation in 2008, and already
in circulation, this document is integral to the ECM
agenda and its successful implementation in the early
years. By incorporating the extensive work undertaken
in relation to the period from birth to age three, it
extends the early years curriculum from birth to the
August after the child’s fifth birthday (usually the end
of the reception year), bringing a degree of continuity
of learning for young children that has generally
been welcomed in the sector. However, a view was
also expressed to us that the EYFS was ‘designed for
use by people who have not been trained to think
about children’s learning’. Understanding learning
is undoubtedly the key to successful curriculum
implementation and it is hoped that the final version
of this important curriculum specification fully
recognises the professional and other demands of early
years education as a subject for lifelong learning for all
education professionals.
62. The early years curriculum (in its broadest
sense) and the related literature have always been
concerned with fostering independent learning in
the young child and this emphasis aligns with current
policy perspectives on a ‘personalised curriculum’. In
these early years, learning through play has long been
acknowledged as central and this renewed emphasis in
the EYFS is most welcome. Some, indeed, would have
preferred to see it afforded more extensive and explicit
recognition. The pedagogy of play will now need to
be substantially addressed for all those intending to
work in the early years sector. Thus, for example, they

will need to understand the pedagogical implications
of promoting child-initiated and teacher-initiated
learning opportunities. Of course, it is not being
maintained that all learning in the early years is play-
based, for such learning can incorporate appropriately
scaffolded subject or integrated knowledge for young
learners. There is even a case for play-based learning
in Year 1 and Year 2, although it is maintained that
such an approach is likely to be tokenistic as long as
SATs exert their impact. If substantial and increased
opportunities for play are recognised as a fundamental
entitlement of all early learners, as enshrined in
the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child, the early years classroom could look
substantially different over the coming years and new
teachers will need to understand and implement these
changing approaches to learning.
63. The informed and skilful use of observation
has long been recognised as an important feature
of the early years educators’ repertoire, integral to
understanding children’s interests and development
and how these relate to curriculum planning
and pedagogy. The EYFS re-affirms its centrality,
after some years on the margins of initial teacher
education. Programmes will need to reflect this
renewed emphasis in their structure and help
students to understand the relationships between
observation, learning, assessment and classroom/
setting organisation. Observation and pedagogy are
key elements in the successful co-construction of
the early years curriculum, with adults and children
both contributing to a process which the EYFS
highlights as a mark of effective early years practice.
The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) offers a
standardised approach to conducting an assessment
of a child’s additional needs and deciding how those
needs should be met. The Common Core of Skills
and Knowledge that underpins CAF can be readily
integrated into ITE and related programmes, as
previously discussed; within the classroom, the
contribution of teachers and other educators to this
process will arise, quite substantially, from close, well
structured, observations of children in a range of
contexts. In particular, observations in the early years
will be a key part of the contribution of teachers and
other educators to multi-agency working and inter-
professional dialogues for children in need. Staff in
schools and other settings are well placed to recognise
changing circumstances for children, and need to
understand how to share information of this kind
with colleagues and other professionals as part of the
UCET 19
early identification of need that is such a key issue in
supporting children and families within ECM.
64. One of the substantive criticisms of the EYFS
was the relatively limited emphasis on promoting
diversity or ‘the value of diversity’. If ECM is to
manifest itself effectively in educational settings,
then all educational experiences - not just those
in the early years - should inherently respect the
entitlement of all learners to have their cultural
heritage and family/community experiences valued
and reflected within the curriculum and within their
broader learning experiences, including their playful
learning experiences. Most especially in the early years,
effective practice will need to be inclusive of both
children and parents/carers, taking full account of
home and community-based experiences. To that end,
the construct of ‘partnerships with parents’ will need
to be substantially unpacked and embedded in ITE
and related programmes, taking full account of the
ECM agenda.
65. Those who are learning to teach need to know
of these trends and of their underpinning rationales in
order to engage in these debates as professionals and
in order to exercise informed and, where appropriate,
constructively critical judgements in their own classes
and schools in relation to their role as early years
teachers and in conjunction with the other adults with
whom they are working.
66. The second major development is the emergence
of Children’s Centres, which, with extended schools, will
provide a national network of integrated early education
and full day care, health services and family and
parenting support. The government’s aspiration is that all
children in the 20% most disadvantaged wards will have
access to Children’s Centre services, a rolling programme
of considerable ambition. Current requirements are for .5
of a teacher in every established Children’s Centre. Local
authorities carry responsibility for implementation, and
some have already committed to a full-time teacher in
every centre. UCET and its members must remain alert
to any trends or intentions to reduce this commitment
over time, for teachers are essential contributors to young
children’s learning.
67. Children’s Centres have grown out of
government policy developed since 1997. Early
Excellence Centres, (EECs) funded and directed
by DfES represented the first national initiative
in England to support the integration of care and
education for children and families. These provided
extended day care for children from birth to age
four and a wide range of other family support
 20 UCET
services, including adult education. They were
intended to provide a ‘one- stop shop’ alongside
cutting edge provision in disadvantaged communities.
These EECs were followed by the Sure Start Local
Programmes (SSLPs), which fell under the auspices
of the Department of Health, and were intended to
create a range of support activities which integrated
health, education and social services in innovative
ways within the community. They broke new ground
in terms of ‘combined services’ to combat poverty
and its detrimental effects on children and families.
While the aims of the EECs had been predominantly
educational, with teachers having a substantial
involvement, the aims of SSLPs, where the teacher
involvement was lower, were predominantly health-
related. The intention was to combine the best of
both in the establishment of Children’s Centres. These
come under the jurisdiction of local authorities which
hold the responsibility for their development in areas
of disadvantage under the Director of Children’s
Services and with local authority funding drawn from
budgets across education, health and social services.
68. The Children’s Centre teachers will need:
• a commitment to flexible, innovative multi-agency
and team working
• an understanding of the roles and responsibilities
of the other professionals working in the centre
• the ability to establish effective and professional
relationships with colleagues from different
backgrounds
• a commitment to developing themselves and
their colleagues as learners
• experience of leading early years provision
• strong communication skills, including
diplomacy and sensitivity to the needs of others
• an ability to translate their own knowledge and
understanding into effective practice
• a knowledge of child development and children’s
learning a knowledge of planning, observation- based
assessment and documentation and the importance
of sharing this with families
69. These requisite attributes demonstrate that a
teacher working in a Children’s Centre will need to be
an experienced professional with the capacity to draw on
well-developed underpinning knowledge.
70. It is widely recognised that all teachers will need
to understand the changing roles in the profession
relating in particular to inter-professional practice and,
more recently, to looked-after children. It is likely that
teachers in the early years sector will encounter other
professionals at a relatively early stage in their career
because of the need for strong home/carer-school
links. While senior staff members in schools may
have overall responsibility for this aspect of provision,
nevertheless new teachers may need to engage with
family link workers, social workers, health visitors,
speech therapists and others in relation to children’s
needs. They must therefore understand the importance
of professional dialogues and interaction and learn
respect for the contributions made by other professional
agencies in supporting children and families, key
features within workforce re-modelling and a core
feature of professionalism.
71. In the longer term, ECM should involve greater
levels of participation in policy and practice development
from local communities. That was a key principle
underpinning Sure Start Local Programmes and is
also manifested in other government initiatives. It also
underpins the roll-out of Children’s Centres. Whilst
it might be very challenging for ITE programmes
to incorporate a deep understanding of community
participation in policy and practice, it is nevertheless their
responsibility to ensure that trainee teachers understand
and can act upon the promotion of good home-school
links. These links are especially important in relation
to young children, who are more susceptible to the
vulnerabilities created by transitions, from home to
school, from setting to setting, and from phase to phase
within school. Teachers, therefore, do need to understand
the implications for their own practice and attitudes in
relation to building strong relationships with parents and
others who have shared responsibility in some way in the
care of children, including, for example, childminders.
72. The third key development in early years
education is the introduction of the Early Years
Professional (EYP). This initiative – the establishment
of a wholly new role – is intended to raise the
professional level of the childcare workforce as a whole.
It was founded on the EPPE study which showed
that the key factors contributing to the quality of
early years experience were ‘well-qualified leaders,
trained teachers working alongside and supporting less
qualified staff and staff with a good understanding of
child development and learning’. The EYP is expected
‘to lead practice across the EYFS’. This development
certainly complicates the position of the early years
teacher, and again is an aspect of provision which
UCET will continue to monitor as numbers of EYPs
increase across the workforce.
73. The EYP will be recognised as achieving a
Level 6 graduate equivalent status. A teacher qualifies
at Level 6 and is a graduate who is also awarded

qualified teacher status. A number of organisations
around the country are providing a range of training
routes to EYP status in both part-time and full-time
modes. Whilst all teachers in England, including
those working in the early years, remain under the
jurisdiction of the TDA, the EYP is located within
the auspices of the CWDC, which exercises overall
responsibility for all other members of the children’s
workforce, including, for example, playgroup workers,
workers in the private sector, childminders, children
and family social workers. The CWDC will award
the EYP status, thus denying the EYP the professional
solidarity and other benefits that could follow from
membership of the GTCE, despite the fact that TDA
and CWDC have been asked by the DfES to work
in partnership. The CWDC aims to bring an EYP to
all Children’s Centres offering early years provision
by 2010 and to every full day care setting (including
those in the private, community and voluntary
sectors) by 2015, whilst still retaining a commitment
to ensuring that graduates with QTS are attracted to
and retained in the early years workforce. UCET must
seek to ensure that this commitment is honoured.
74. Student teachers will need to know of this
emerging role, to reflect on the development of
professional relationships with EYPs, and to consider
the potential value to themselves of gaining this
status in addition to their teaching qualification,
possibly through the shorter, validation- only, route
to EYPS. However, the value of dual status remains
uncertain. It remains unclear who would have overall
responsibility for curriculum development should
a teacher and an EYP find themselves together in
a setting and this uncertainty has the potential to
create inter-professional tensions without some
previous knowledge and consideration of roles and
responsibilities. The complementarities of their
knowledge and experience require to be settled
officially.
75. The EYP may have wider experience of the
birth-three curriculum, but teachers may have wider
knowledge of learning processes; some, indeed might
also claim an equally sound knowledge of birth-three
if they have followed one of the many early years
programmes which cover the earliest years. They
may, for example, have qualified through an early
years PGCE which followed on from a Childhood
Studies/Early Childhood Studies degree programme.
If teachers with early years expertise are to be retained
in the early years workforce these and other difficulties
need to be swiftly resolved.
UCET 21
Staff Development in Higher Education
Institutions
76. The effectiveness of the reform of programmes
of initial teacher education and the new forms of CPD
will depend on how well the staff of UCET institutions
prepare themselves to address the ECM agenda. There
is evidence across the country of HEIs responding
positively and energetically to this key initiative: regular
engagements between HEI staff and senior managers
in Children’s Centres and extended schools about the
developing professional roles of teachers; discussion
of the findings of research into inter-agency activity
and multi-professional working and practice to inform
programme development at initial and CPD levels; and
the creation of inter-school and inter-faculty teams to
consider multi –professional practices and programmes,
in this way eroding some of the institutional boundaries
that helped to isolate teacher education in the past.
For example, one of the HEIs visited had appointed a
new senior member of staff to oversee the institutional
response to ECM. One of the projects was to mount
a level one module, which provided a full briefing
on the ECM initiative and encouraged participants
to relate the content of the module to their ongoing
professional activities. To date, some 200 members of
staff have completed the module, which is now being
made available to staff in other institutions. At a second
institution a senior member of staff chairs a steering
group, which includes a ‘champion’ for each academic
unit, and three cross-institution working parties
have been established to support a series of modular
interdisciplinary learning programmes, in conjunction
with a neighbouring authority, for staff employed in
integrated children’s services.
77. These examples encapsulate a number of features
that typify the response of HEIs across the country:
inter-faculty and inter-departmental collaboration;
close and new partnerships with local authorities;
staff appointments to lead ECM developments; the
involvement of relevant school-based and other centre
staff to lead discussions within institutions, reflecting
the results of the GTCE survey of 2006 which showed
that a majority of teachers felt that ECM was helping
teachers to make a difference in improving education;
presentations by DfES, TDA and others involved with
ECM at national level; the appointment or secondment
of staff with experience of Children’s Centres and
extended schools; and ambitious plans for programme
review and new programme development, building on
a wide range of staff development initiatives. This paper
is a contribution to that change process. v
Selected Bibliography
CWDC (2006) Early Years Professional Prospectus. London.
DfES (2003) Every Child Matters. London.
DfES (2004) Every Child Matters: Next Steps. London.
DfES (2004) Five-Year Strategy for Children and Learners. London.
DfES (2005) Children’s Workforce Strategy. A strategy to build a world-class workforce for
children and young people. London.
DfES (2005) Extended schools: Access to opportunities and services for all. A prospectus.
London.
Edwards, Anne (2005) Working with other professionals: the implications of the Every Child
Matters Agenda for ITE and CPD. Keynote lecture at the Escalate Conference, St Martin’s
University College, Lancaster, 19 May 2005.
Edwards, Anne (2007) Collaborative Approaches to Preparing Effective Teachers: Implications
for Research. Keynote address at the Joint UCET/HMI/STEC Symposium, Glasgow, 6 March
2007.
Leadbeater, Charles (2004) Learning about Personalisation. DfES/Demos. London.
Newby, Mike (2006) Teaching 2012: The Regional Seminars. TDA. London
TLRP (2004) Personalised Learning. ESRC. London.
Reid, Ken (2005) The Implications of Every Child Matters and the Children Act for Schools.
Pastoral Care. March 2005.
Scottish Executive (2005) Getting it right for every child: proposals for action. Edinburgh.
Smith, M.K (2004, 2005) Extended Schooling – some issues for informal and community
education, Encyclopedia of Informal Education. www.infed.org/schooling/extended_
schoolingHTM
Rowe, Linda (2006) Every Child Matters: the role of the teacher in the changing context. Paper
presented at the TDA conference, London 18 October 2006.
Scales, S (2006) Every Child Matters, Extended Schools and Teacher Education - The Vision
and the Future. Paper presented at the TDA conference, London 18 October 2006.
Totterdell, M (2006), Teacher Education and Schools: Taking the Parenthesis from around
Partnership. Paper presented at the annual SCoTENS Conference, Belfast, 13 October 2006.

Acknowledgements
The authors are most grateful to those who participated in the interviews and did so with such
candour; to the many members of the UCET community who responded to the interview
questions and submitted comments and case study materials; to those who generously
hosted our visits to institutions; and to all who contributed to the discussion and revision of the
draft paper.

Authors
Professor Gordon Kirk is Academic Secretary to UCET
Professor Pat Broadhead holds the chair of Playful Learning at Leeds Metropolitan University

4 April 2007
UCET Occasional Papers:

No 1 Our Teachers (1994); ISBN 0903509210

No 2 Developing Partnerships in Initial Teacher Education (1994); ISBN
0903509334
No 3 Funding Initial Teacher Training Partnerships (1995); ISBN 0903509342
No 4 A National Framework for the Career-long Professional Development of
Teachers (1996); ISBN 0903509369
No 5 The Research Base of Effective Teacher Education (1996); ISBN 0903509377
No 6 Recognising Quality in Primary Initial Teacher Education (1996); ISBN
0903509385
No 7 Ethical Principles for the Teaching Profession (1997/2000); ISBN 0903509393
No 8 The Role of Universities in the Education and Training of Teachers (1997);
ISBN 0903509407
No 9 Initial Teacher Education: TTA/OFSTED Quality Framework (1997); ISBN
090350944X
No 10 Subject Specialists - Primary Schools (1998); ISBN 0903509466
No 11 The English Exception? International Perspectives on the Initial Education and
Training of Teachers (1998); ISBN 0903509474
No 12 The Role of Higher Education in Initial Teacher Education (1999); ISBN
0903509490
No 13 Improving Schools: The Contribution of Teacher Education and Training
(2001); ISBN 090350958X
No 14 The School Curriculum Ten Years Hence: Providing Effective Teachers (2002);
ISBN 0903509652
No 15 The 14-19 Reforms: The Contribution of Teacher Educators (2005); ISBN
0903509725
No 16 Collaborative Approaches to Preparing and Developing Effective Teachers
(2007); ISBN 0903509806
No 17 Every Child Matters and Teacher Education: A UCET Position Paper (2007);
ISBN 09035098014
 ET ET E E CE C
UC U U TU TU T E
C C
ET ET E E CE C U
UC U U TU TU T ET
ET ETCE CE CE C UC
U U T T
CE C C UCUCTU TU E
TU TUET ET ET E CE
C C U U U T
ET E E CE CE CUC
UCUCTU TU TU T ET
C C U
TUET ET ET ETCE C
U
CE C CUC UCU TU
TU T ET ET ET E CE
U U T