One of the country’s largest school-centred initial teacher training programmes, Suffolk & Norfolk SCITT, commissioned the Relational Schools Foundation (RSF) in 2017 to carry out a five-year longitudinal research programme, exploring the impact of a trainee teacher’s social and professional relationships on their success as a trainee and thereafter as a teacher. Relational Schools is working with the SCITT’s trainees to identify each individual’s most important and influential relationships, and measuring their quality using the Relational Proximity Framework research tool. The partnership will also identify and trial new relational recruitment and management practices, improving both regional standards and informing ITT providers nationwide.
The partnership is set against the backdrop of a national crisis in the retention of teachers, which is particularly acute for early career teachers. According to the NFER’s ‘Teacher Retention by Subject’ report of May 2017 (and much other research), leaving rates for all teachers are highest in the first few years after they qualify, with maths, science and languages teachers showing a greater propensity to leave in their first five years.
RSF are following two cohorts of 250 primary and secondary trainees from their training year to their fourth year as qualified teachers, exploring why some flourish and others struggle or even drop out. RSF will focus in particular on the interplay between social and relational capital (the collective value of all an individual’s relationships) and their relative success as a teacher.
This is ground-breaking work, which sees the team apply the work of Dr Alison Fox and others in the theory and practice of educational networks.
The first year of the five-year study is designed to enable RSF and the Suffolk & Norfolk SCITT to quickly identify ways to improve outcomes for subsequent cohorts, which will be designed and trialled during the rest of the programme as interventions. These are likely to include the addition of relational modules in a trainee’s study programme to develop pro-social and pro-relational skills, as well as more systemic interventions which address how the training schools can adapt their systems and practice to enable their trainees to develop and sustain key relationships. RSF has partnered with the Cambridge Assessment Group and is using its Cambridge Personal Styles Questionnaire (CPSQ) to provide additional insight into how each trainee approaches tasks and relates to others. These behavioural styles have been found to contribute to educational progress and work effectiveness, and will add another layer to the study.
Other outcomes will include evidence to improve efficacy in relational mentoring (what does and doesn’t work in an effective mentoring relationship); advice for schools on how to engage and support NQTs and early-career teachers’ wellbeing; and advice for NQTs and early-career teachers on the importance of building relationships within a support network for sustained wellbeing. Both parties also intend to use the research outcomes to inform recruitment practice, using relational predictors of success in candidate counselling and to personalise each trainees programme.
The research programme began in September 2017, with the first significant report scheduled for publication in March 2019 at an event to be held at Cambridge Assessment’s new Triangle complex in Cambridge.