Dr Sam Sims: Making the most of your PD budget

• 1.
  Professional development comes at a cost in terms of schools’ budgets and teachers’ time.
• 2.
  Some PD has a sizeable positive effect on teaching and learning. However, much of the PD in which teachers normally participate has likely had no effect.
• 3.
  Instructional coaching is a particularly effective form of PD.
• 4.
  PD incorporating multiple active ingredients - such as modelling - is likely to be more effective.
• 5.
  School leaders need to judiciously allocate resources to more effective types of PD if they are to improve teaching and learning in their school.

Hard evidence shows that effective teacher professional development (PD) can improve teachers’ knowledge, teaching practices, and pupil test scores (Gonzales et al., 2022; Sims et al., 2023). Indeed, evidence from replicated randomised controlled trials shows that effective teacher PD programmes can have large positive effects on teaching and learning (Allen et al., 2011; Allen et al., 2015; Clarke et al., 2022). However, a great deal of teacher PD is also ineffective. For example, many evaluated PD programmes have no detectable effect on pupil achievement (Sims et al., 2023). Research based on representative data also consistently finds that average-quality PD has no relationship with improved teaching and learning (Kirsten et al., 2023; Harris & Sass, 2012).

PD also comes at a cost. Schools in England spend about £500 per teacher per year on PD (School Dash, 2024). This is on top of the expense of the five in-service training days per year, which costs the school another £1,123 per teacher.* There is also an opportunity cost in terms of teachers’ time. Data from the TALIS 2018 survey suggests that, internationally, teachers spend an average of 10.5 days per year on PD (Sellen, 2016). 

This leaves school leaders with a pressing question: how should I spend my limited PD budget to maximise the chances that it has a positive impact on teaching and learning in my school? This briefing note provides a concise review of evidence to help school leaders answer this question. To contextualise the findings for non-researchers, the impact of different types of PD is expressed in terms of additional months of pupil progress for an 11-year-old pupil (Hill et al., 2008).

(*This estimate is based on the median teacher salary of £43,801 and 195 days per year of directed time https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.)

A sizeable minority of teachers in England do not think that their PD is beneficial. A recent survey asked just over 9,000 teachers whether the PD they had taken part in in the last 12 months had helped to improve their performance (Allen et al., 2023). Around a quarter of teachers said it had not. Another quarter agreed that it had improved their practice, but only “slightly”.

Teachers’ perceptions of the impact of PD are backed up by studies that directly look at the effects on pupil test scores. An important recent study analysed TIMSS data from 66 countries, including England, collected between 2003 and 2019 (Kirsten et al., 2023). This data contains both maths and science test scores for pupils, as well as information on the amount of PD done in the previous year by their maths and science teachers. This allows the researchers to ask the question: do pupils get better maths test scores when their maths teacher does more PD than their science teacher, and vice versa? The research finds no effects of additional PD participation on pupil achievement. A similar study from 2012 in the US reached the same conclusion (Harris & Sass, 2011).

Rigorous experimental studies of specific PD programmes also show that the impact of PD varies widely. A recent review of 104 experimental studies found that PD programmes had a positive impact on average, equivalent to about 1.5 months of additional pupil progress (Sims et al., 2023a). However, one third of the 104 PD programmes had no detectable effect on pupil achievement. This is particularly striking because these PD programmes are likely to have been carefully designed and developed prior to being selected for formal evaluation by researchers.

In sum, much PD does not have an effect on teaching and learning. In particular, PD of the sort that teachers typically experience does not appear to improve teaching and learning. Even among PD programmes thought to be worth evaluating using experimental methods, around a third have no clear benefit. This suggests that, historically, a considerable proportion of schools’ PD budgets have been spent on PD that has not benefited pupils. 

Instructional coaching is a form of teacher professional development that involves the provision of one-to-one, individualised support to a teacher, structured around multiple observation and feedback cycles spread over time, focusing on deliberate development of specific teaching skills (Joyce & Showers, 1981; Kraft, Blazar, & Hogan, 2018). Kraft, Blazar & Hogan (2018) conducted a meta-analysis of the literature evaluating instructional coaching programs. Across 31 causal studies, they found that instructional coaching increased student achievement by around four months of additional progress (Hill et al., 2007).

Additional evidence for the benefits of instructional coaching come from studies that directly compare the impact of instructional coaching to other forms of PD, while holding the content of the PD fixed. Cohen et al. (2020; 2024) report several classroom simulator experiments showing that PD focused on managing student behaviour was consistently more effective when delivered partly via instructional coaching than when delivered partly via structured self-reflection. Cilliers et al. (2020; 2023) report a field experiment showing that PD on reading instruction resulted in larger and more sustained improvements in pupils' reading achievement when delivered via instructional coaching than when delivered via a traditional off-site seminar. This evidence shows that instructional coaching improves the impact of professional development on teaching and learning.

Taken together, this evidence suggests that instructional coaching is likely to be an effective form of PD. However, there are two important caveats here. First, there is some evidence that coaches differ in their effectiveness (Blazar et al., 2023) which shows the need to carefully select and support coaches working in your schools. Second, the individualised nature of instructional coaching makes it relatively expensive. The costs of year-long programmes delivered by coaches from outside the school have been estimated at between £2,400 to £4,700 per teacher (Knight, 2012; Clark et al., 2022). This far exceeds the £500 per teacher per year budget for PD in England. School leaders may therefore wish to develop in-house coaching expertise to make instructional coaching affordable within their budgets.

As well as thinking about the format of PD, such as instructional coaching, we can think at a smaller grain size about the active ingredients within PD that affect teaching and learning. A recent Education Endowment Foundation project (Sims et al., 2023a) developed a framework drawing on cognitive science, social psychology, and the literature on expertise to suggest a list of 14 such active ingredients. These active ingredients can be divided into four groups based on whether they are primarily aimed at building teachers’ knowledge (e.g., revisiting material over time), motivating changes in practice (e.g., setting goals around changed practice), developing new teaching techniques (e.g., feedback on teaching), or embedding new teaching techniques (e.g., practising in real classrooms). Sims et al. (2023a) show that the number of such active ingredients embedded in a PD programme is correlated with the effects of that PD programme on pupil achievement. Across a sample of 104 PD programmes, those incorporating zero of these active ingredients tend to have zero impact on achievement, while those incorporating ten active ingredients are predicted to have impact equivalent to about a quarter of a year of pupil progress.

One particularly promising active ingredient is modelling – the provision of an observable example of some good practice. An experiment conducted in schools in the US found that inviting teachers to observe the good practice of their colleagues in particular areas of teaching resulted in small but meaningful improvements in the test scores of the observing teachers (Papay et al., 2021). A recent experimental study in England reached similar conclusions (Burgess et al., 2021). It is noteworthy that effective instructional coaching programmes also place a strong emphasis on the use of libraries of video models of good practice (Allen et al., 2011). Sims et al. (2023b) conducted a classroom simulator experiment, which showed that the provision of video models to early-career teachers helps them develop evidence-based teaching practices. Taken together, this evidence suggests that incorporating modelling into PD is likely to improve the impact of that PD on teaching and learning. 

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Burgess, S., Rawal, S., & Taylor, E. S. (2021). Teacher peer observation and student test scores: Evidence from a field experiment in English secondary schools. Journal of Labor Economics, 39(4), 1155-1186.

Cilliers, J., Fleisch, B., Prinsloo, C., & Taylor, S. (2020). How to improve teaching practice?: an experimental comparison of centralized training and in-classroom coaching. Journal of Human Resources, 55(3), 926-962.

Cilliers, J., Fleisch, B., Kotze, J., Mohohlwane, M., & Taylor, S. (2022). The challenge of sustaining effective teaching: Spillovers, fade-out, and the cost-effectiveness of teacher development programs. Economics of Education Review, 87, 102215.

Clark, M., Max, J., James-Burdumy, S., Robles, S., McCullough, M., Burkander, P., & Malick, S. (2022). Study of Teacher Coaching Based on Classroom Videos: Impacts on Student Achievement and Teachers' Practices. NCEE-2022-006a. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

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Cohen, J., Wong, V. C., Krishnamachari, A., & Erickson, S. (2024). Experimental evidence on the robustness of coaching supports in teacher education. Educational Researcher, 53(1), 19-35.

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Papay, J. P., Taylor, E. S., Tyler, J. H., & Laski, M. E. (2020). Learning job skills from colleagues at work: Evidence from a field experiment using teacher performance data. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 12(1), 359-388.

Sellen P. (2016). Teacher workload and professional development in England’s secondary schools: Insights from TALIS. Education Policy Institute.

Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Goodrich, J., ... & Anders, J. (2023a). Effective teacher professional development: new theory and a meta-analytic test. Review of Educational Research, 00346543231217480.

Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., Godfrey-Faussett, T., Mccrea, P., & Meliss, S. (2023b). Modelling evidence-based practice in initial teacher training: causal effects on teachers’ skills, knowledge and self-efficacy (No. 23-09). UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities.