This September, about 17,000 new teachers began their careers in schools across the country. Accompanying each new teacher is the Career Entry and Development Profile (CEDP)…

What, exactly, is the Career Entry and Development Profile?

The CEDP is a document that has been designed to help new teachers to think about their professional development at key points of their training and their induction period. It focuses on three transition points:

• As you approach the award of QTS
• At the start of induction
• Towards the end of induction

Is the Career Entry and Development Profile the same as the Career Entry Profile?

No. The new CEDP replaces the old Career Entry Profile, which had been around for five years – a long time in education.

So why was there a need for a new document?

The last five years in particular have seen a huge amount of progress and change in teachers’ professional learning and development. When the old CEP was introduced, it was really the minority that thought seriously about their professional learning development, reflecting and planning how they were going to take themselves forward – especially at that transition point between finishing initial teacher training and moving into their first post. Although that’s really why the CEP was brought in, it was quite a formally structured mechanism.

Five years down the line there is now a very different environment. It is much more common for teachers to really think about their progress and development, and to set themselves objectives and consider how they’re going to go about meeting those. That’s certainly true of the profession as a whole, but it applies to an even greater extent to teachers who are beginning their careers.

What is the purpose of the CEDP?

The TTA see the purposes of the CEDP as:

• Helping teachers make constructive connections between initial teacher training, induction and continuing development
• Focusing reflection on achievements and goals in the earliest stages of a teaching career
• Guiding professional reflection and collaborative discussion about  professional development needs as a part of training and induction.

Is the CEDP just for me, as a new teacher?

Primarily, yes, in the sense that you will be at the centre of your profile. But you will be answering the questions it poses in collaboration with your tutors during your training period and with your induction tutor during your induction period.

Do I have to use it?

Yes you do. All new teachers are given the CEDP and should use it to summarise the discussions they have on their strengths and professional development priorities. The CEDP is very much part of the whole early professional development continuum, but it doesn’t stand alone, or achieve anything by itself. It’s part of the wider process of teacher training and early professional development.

Sounds a lot like paperwork to me…

The Teacher Training Agency sees the CEDP, in contrast to the old CEP, as being much more about the process than about what is written on the form. It’s about NQTs having discussions with tutors and colleagues about their progress, about their priorities, their strengths and what they want to do next. Yes, those discussions should be recorded so that you can come back to that thinking at a later stage, but this recording isn’t about putting statements and soundbites in a box.

It’s fine to simply make notes for yourself, or draw together material that already exists. If you’re coming to the end of your training for example, and thinking about what your main strengths are, you may want to draw on examples of what you do particularly well. If you have a strength in a curriculum area, you might want to collect together some of the materials you have developed. In this way, what your CEDP consists of may in fact be a portfolio of existing material, and what is actually written on the profile is not the most important thing.

This is a superficially small, but quite fundamental change from the old profile. At the first transition point, the question to be asked to find out if the profile is being used properly is not ‘show me what you wrote’ but ‘tell me about the discussions you had and how that helped you think about your development’.

More talk and less writing then?

The CEDP is all about discussions. You may want to do some preparation by yourself, but it’s the process of professional discussion that is key in order to get some perspective on what you’re thinking about. It’s really useful to have someone to prompt you and help you to dig down into why you think what you think.

Very often teachers at this stage of their careers are great at identifying what they need to do better and what they need to develop, but need a little help to identify their strengths and what they can particularly offer. For all those reasons it’s very important that using the profile is a collaborative process that reflects other collaborative processes such as initial teacher training and induction.

Ideally all teachers should have somebody who can help them reflect on their progress. Hopefully the profile will help to embed some of those processes at the very start of a new teacher’s career.

What should I, as a new teacher, keep in mind when using the profile at the start of my induction period (transition point 2)?

There are two key things to remember at this stage.

• The questions that are in the profile are about helping you to set objectives, plan actions, help you meet objectives and so on, through discussion with somebody. Hence the importance of using the help your induction tutor can give you over your induction period.
• Although you should look back to what you thought were your development priorities at the end of your training, you also want to recognise that priorities change once you are in your new post. Don’t worry if you have suddenly got new priorities related to your new situation and there are things you want to concentrate on now that hadn’t even occurred to you before.   

The CEDP is an organic process, allowing you to think about yourself as a teacher and to think about your development priorities, with the awareness that these will change according to where you are in your career and the post that you are in. The fact that it may reflect the needs of your school or your department or your year group doesn’t mean that they’re not your needs too. Don’t try to do everything yourself – use the help you’re entitled to, and don’t worry if your priorities change even from what they were a couple of months ago.

 

• Copies of the Career Entry and Development Profile and support materials can be ordered from the TTA Publications Line on 0845 6060 323 or by visiting the TTA website.
• Feedback on the CEDP can be sent to the Induction Team at induction@teach-tta.gov.uk or on 020 7023 8030.