T Level support strand 3: top tips for technical teachers

The technical education reforms are a systemic change and an opportunity to create opportunities for learners to thrive in a competitive labour market by developing the skills that are valued by employers.

T Levels will need to be prestigious qualifications which are well understood by employers and attractive to learners and their parents and carers. It will be essential that delivery is high quality as there are implications for staff right across the sector, and challenges for senior leaders to develop and implement a coherent strategy across their institutions.

As the national workforce development body for the Further Education and Training Sector, the ETF will be developing a suite of high quality professional development offers to support the teachers, trainers and leaders who will be delivering T Levels in 2020 and beyond.

There are five main strands of support. The five strands will not only support teaching staff but also help create the right conditions for effective change management by supporting middle tier leaders and increasing interest and awareness of T Levels across the workforce.

This project is part of strand 3 T Level support, providing support in pedagogic skills for teachers coming to T Levels. Pedagogy, like other disciplines, is not a static domain. In the past 5 years there have been various new initiatives and approaches, many of which have been strongly evidenced, which can contribute to improvements in teaching and learning. Whilst it would be reasonable to expect that those currently undertaking FE teacher training would be made familiar with the best/most relevant of these, there may exist staff in the workplace who, having completed their teacher training some years back, are less conversant with recent developments. We are seeking to create an easy to use resource which highlights the best of these ideas from the last 5 years.

We would like to create this resource for each new approach being considered, in two forms:

• a written explanatory guide of no more than 1000 words, with links to further reading.
• a video (approximately 5 minutes) of a teacher explaining what the approach is and how they use it.