‘In a small school, it's just capacity all of the time’: Delivery and experiences of a national early career teacher development initiative across diverse school settings in England

Abstract

Effective early career support is associated with a variety of professional and personal benefits for teachers and their schools. However, research indicates that the contextual features of schools, such as their size and geographic location, influence the support that new teachers receive. This mixed‐methods study explores an initiative for the support and development of new teachers in England, the ‘Early Career Framework’ (ECF), as a case study to examine links between early career teacher support and school context. Drawing on ecological perspectives and conceptual approaches for addressing wicked problems, we employed a predominantly qualitative mixed‐methods design, combining semi‐structured interviews with 17 participants and a mixed‐methods survey across 68 schools. Building on prior cross‐context evaluations, we examined the factors that supported effective delivery and positive experiences of the ECF across diverse school contexts in England, focusing particularly on small schools and those in rural and coastal settings. We found a range of differences in ECF delivery across these contexts and identified a framework of several core components that we consider particularly essential for successful delivery of the ECF in school settings in our sample. This framework also highlights the types of support that government and programme providers can offer to schools and provides a tool for schools to reflect on and advocate for their needs. These findings contribute to an understanding of how recent government initiatives in England are being delivered in diverse school settings and how the delivery of national professional development initiatives in heterogeneous settings, more broadly, may be strengthened.