Essex Teacher training programme to be closed down

The council’s cabinet is set agree it should close its initial teacher training programme and not seek to renew the Department for Education accreditation to continue to be a teacher training provider from September 2024.

Essex Teacher Training is a large provider of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) across primary and secondary school years.

There are 110 schools in the partnership led by Academies Enterprise Trust including St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary in Colchester.

ITT allows the council to train teachers so they can attain qualified teacher status.

It works in partnership with teaching school hubs, multi-academy trusts and individual schools to offer schoolbased routes into teaching.

In total, there were 130 trainees registered on the programme for 2021/22.

To date 36 trainees have applied for a place from this month even though there needs to be 93 trainees for it to be financially viable.

Now Ofsted has rated the service as inadequate, the council acknowledges that will further impact the number of new recruits.

A report published in May said trainees receive an uneven quality of teacher training, their experience is too dependent on the strengths and weaknesses of their placement schools and partnership schools have not made clear what all trainees will learn.

It adds trainers, tutors and mentors lack a shared clarity about what essential knowledge to teach trainees, trainees do not receive consistent and effective support from centre and school-based staff and many trainees receive poor quality mentoring and imprecise targets for improvement.

A statement as part of a decision set to be agreed by the council said: “The quality of the provision is inadequate as judged by Ofsted and is unlikely to secure a judgement of good at its next inspection, this has the potential to create reputational risk to the council.

“Closure of the programme will not significantly impact on our recruitment and retention priorities.”