Leading educational change and improvement from the ground up

Much time, money and energy is spent on Continuous Professional Development (CPD) in Further Education (FE) colleges in England, with the aim of enhancing teaching strategies, sharing good practices, and improving the overall quality of education. The problem is that the importance and value placed upon CPD by practitioners is mixed. This raises a number of questions. The most pressing of these is whether the traditional approach to CPD, characterised by one off “events”, is fulfilling its purpose?

One of the biggest problems in attempts to transform CPD in FE colleges is that CPD managers constantly compete with financial and operational priorities. Pressures towards demonstrations of compliance and the imperatives of what Ball (2003) describes as “performativity”, appear to be endemic features of a culture within FE, which is often fixated on fulfilling the demands of external bodies (Ball, 2003; 2018; Coffield, 2017; Gregson & Spedding 2020), through mandatory, prescribed CPD “events”. To do otherwise, is to risk losing funding and jobs.

This thesis begins by exploring the concept of gamification and the extent to which this may influence the meaningfulness of CPD, in terms of practitioner motivation, individual training needs, and meeting organisational priorities, but, becomes of an investigation of the nature of educational practice and how educational practice actually improves in FE contexts. Influenced by the concept of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015), this thesis offers a deeper critique of the modern FE education system in an “age of measurement” (Biesta, 2009), where an obsession with data-driven, prescriptive learning too often perpetuates a risk-averse culture. In addition, this thesis investigates whether a different model of professional development might be developed, which puts practitioners in control of identifying their own CPD needs in order to rise to the challenges of improving their own educational practice, rather than being required to attend and engage in CPD events and activities organised and directed by others. Practical examples of what this alternative model might look like are also presented.

This thesis adopts a pragmatic-constructivist perspective within a practice-focused research context, employing the methodology of action research to present accounts of experiences encountered and reported in this research. Data are collected through illuminative surveys and semi-structured interviews, which supports the representation of the lived experiences of the practitioners who participated in this study, as well as my own.