Early Career Training Programme

Each term ECTs will work across modules that cover behaviour, instruction, curriculum and assessment and professional practice. They will also develop understanding of how pupils learn.

The key learning from the four strands is outlined below:

What will ECTs learn?

Behaviour
How to…

• Create a positive classroom culture
• Establish and maintain clear expectations and routines
• Respond to disruption and restore relationships with pupils
• Support pupils to steer their emotions and interactions with others
• Foster positive and healthy attitudes to challenging tasks
• Support pupils to monitor and direct their own learning
• Promote a culture that embraces error as a learning opportunity

Instruction
How to…

• Identify, activate and build on pupils’ prior knowledge
• Use explanations to communicate new information
• Use models illustrate new ideas and processes
• Design effective independent practice tasks
• Design, use and remove scaffolds over time
• Structure retrieval to support long-term recall
• Increase challenge to deepen pupil thinking

Curriculum and Assessment
How to…

• Collaborate with others to identify curriculum purpose
• Identify and sequence knowledge across lessons
• Understand core approaches and debates across subjects
• Anticipate, identify and address gaps and misconceptions
• Use formative assessment to draw conclusions about pupils’ understanding
• Design high-quality feedback to help pupils improve
• Support pupils to think critically about key ideas
• Create an inclusive classroom environment
• Respond to individual pupils’ needs
• Improve pupils’ literacy across subjects

Professional Practice
How to…

• Identify and engage with high-quality research
• Increasingly contribute to the wider school culture
• Manage workload when taking on additional responsibilities
• Use a structured process to make adaptations to practice

How they'll learn

• 3 full-day conferences (focused on deepening their understanding of how pupils learn, the principles of adaptive teaching, and effective implementation).
• 6 one-hour virtual clinics to support early career teachers to address a typical teaching problem faced by most teachers, based on their study materials and key areas from the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF).
• Regular modules of online learning. Self-study modules help early career teachers engage with the latest research and ideas for practical classroom implementation in a manageable and accessible way.
• Regular instructional coaching sessions designed to support early career teachers to apply insights from the study materials into their classroom practice. Mentors will provide teachers with a specific, bite-sized step to practice each week that responds to their own classroom context and practice.

Want to join our ECT programme?

Find one of our delivery partners for your school.

1. Identify your local delivery partner from our helpful map here.
2. Contact your local delivery partner directly to establish that you’ll be working together.
3. Your delivery partner can help you with the next steps to register your ECTs and mentors.

Already working with us?

1. Contact your Early Career Training delivery partner to let them know you want to continue your relationship.
2. Your delivery partner can help you with the next steps to register your ECTs and mentors.

The Early Career Training programme is funded by the Department for Education.

What is the duration of the Early Career Training programme?

The Early Career Framework provides an entitlement to two years of evidence-informed development for teachers at the start of their career.

What is the Early Career Training programme and its primary goal?

Through the framework we have developed our carefully sequenced and evidence-informed curriculum for teachers and mentors focuses on how teachers learn as well as what they learn. 

What is the role of instructional coaching in the Early Career Training programme?

We use instructional coaching, one of the best-evidenced forms of professional development, meaning your early career teachers will benefit from bite-sized content and tailored, observational feedback to help them to keep getting better over time.

ECTs will also benefit from our innovative Steplab platform, designed by teachers, for teachers. An accessible learning platform designed to provide carefully structured support, to ensure that mentors can provide high-quality mentoring without adding to their workload.

We’ve been perfecting our programme for early career teachers since our early pilot in 2019, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation. We use what we learned to further develop our programme offer for schools across England.

You can download our free Expert Edit publication now for more information about how our Early Career Training programme can support your teachers from the start of their career.

Through the framework, early career teachers are entitled to additional support and training, including one-to-one mentoring from an experienced colleague. Mentors are similarly offered support and guidance on how to get the most from their role and their early career teachers.

At Ambition Institute, we have delivered the programme to over 58,000 new teachers and their mentors.