On following the golden thread
A chat with Professor Haili Hughes about Standards
If there’s one thing that bothers me most about the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST), it’s Standard 1: Know students and how they learn. The Graduate Standards mention knowing the research, but I also happen to have witnessed university academics and leaders of professional learning who can’t help but hold their fingers in the air to assign scare quotes to the word “evidence”, in derision and mockery. If anything is certain in our profession, it’s that the world of education research is so diverse in its methods and points of view that one really can find “research” to support any teaching practice. How do students learn? According to the Standards documentation currently, who really knows?
If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been on a bit of a crusade to have the Standards updated to bring them in line with the Strong Beginnings report, which recommended mandated content to be taught in initial teacher education courses. The report concluded that we do indeed have a body of rigorous research that points in a particular direction: that working memory is limited and novices learn better when taught explicitly by an expert adult, rather than exploring the content and skills by themselves. That’s not all the report said, but it signals the largest holes in the APST as they currently stand.
One of the things I love about my work is the network of people it brings me in touch with. I’ve passively known of Professor Haili Hughes’ work for a number of years, but a recent interaction alerted me to the fact that she has been involved in the development of England’s Early Career Framework (ECF). I referred to the framework extensively in my analysis of the APST, and if I had a magic wand, I would kick-start the process of refurbishing the Standards with the ECF as a model. Of course, I wouldn't import them wholesale because I think consultation is the key to the success of any big reform. I got the chance to interview Haili, where we nerded out for half an hour, she in her evening Snuggie and I in my pre-makeup, puffy-eyed morning state.
She explained some of the differences and similarities between the policy spaces in the UK and Australia. Just as in Australia, she says education is a “political football” in England. Also similar to policy of the past in Australia, the evidence informed movement was, Haili says, spurred and supported by consecutive conservative governments, from (arguably conservative) Tony Blair in the beginning to Michael Gove and Nick Gibb later on. Unlike in Australia, education policy has become increasingly centralised, which makes large-scale change more feasible. It stands in stark contrast to Australia, where every state in what is a relatively small country has to be persuaded to adopt change.
Haili recalls that the Department for Education “ripped up what was there before, really, and started again.” Several years down the track, the evidence-informed movement has real coherence, something that Haili says is referred to as the “golden thread”, which ensures that initial teacher training, right through to early career support, all draws from the same evidence. She describes the base as “very Kirschner, Sweller, Clark”, which is indicative of the impact of cognitive load theory on what we now know about learning and teaching.
I asked Haili how she came to be involved with the development of the ECF. Just as in Australia, initial teacher training had been subject to multiple reviews over the last decade. It started with the Carter Review led by Lord Carter and then resulted in the formulation of the ECF, the Core Content Framework (CCF) and Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Market Review led by Professor Sam Twiselton, Reuben Moore and Ian Bauckham. Around 2015—yes, they’re about 10 years ahead—the review found that ITT was “old fashioned and not up to scratch, really, in terms of looking at the latest evidence,” she says. “And research was very ideological; and it hadn't moved with the times actually, to reflect what we were expecting in schools.” Graduating teachers felt like they’d been “chucked off the deep end without a paddle. What they were getting in ITT was inquiry-based learning, Piaget and Vygotsky—which has its place—but it also didn't seem very relevant for what they were doing,” she says.
In addition, Haili recalls that the government commissioned a large body of research in 2018 called ‘Factors Affecting Teacher Retention’, which revealed that England was “sleep walking into a crisis of teacher recruitment and retention.” One in three teachers had left the profession within five years, a lot of experienced teachers were leaving, and one of the key factors was poor professional development. The Market Review of ITT was commissioned and Haili was asked to be involved because of her role—which is ongoing—as an ITT Quality Associate. She had also written a highly successful book on mentoring and was an ITT lecturer. She recounts that “every teacher training institution in England had to reapply to train teachers, or lose their accreditation.
She jokes that the role has sometimes made her unpopular with academics, but it was essential to have highly qualified teachers on board for the development and consultation process. “I was a teacher—I wasn't a professor or an academic, so I was still teaching full time in schools,” she recalls. She was part of a steering group for the ECF and later the CCF, which is the ITT version of the ECF. Teachers like Jon Hutchinson and Caroline Spalding were more heavily involved in the writing early on, whereas Haili was involved in the later peer review, when it was shared with key people in the sector. The ECF was trialled for a year in regional areas and Haili was one of the leaders who facilitated it, delivering material in her local region in Greater Manchester, for both UCL and Teach First. If Teach First is anything like Teach for Australia, the fast paced training provided would have provided a true litmus test of whether the frameworks were adequately preparing teachers.
I was also interested in how quality assurance worked now that the shared understanding of good practice was almost securely in place. In New South Wales at least, the now-abandoned attempts to bring rigour have resulted in a bastardisation of an already-questionable evidence base and additional administrivia for leaders, without much impact. Haili says that the ECF has had an impact on this as well, with some forward-thinking multi-academy trusts using it as a “blueprint of what great teaching looks like”. She says that for early-career teachers, professional learning used to be a “postcode lottery”, where, if you landed in a school that was “hot on evidence, you had a really great time. But if you had a crap mentor who was telling you to teach poetry by sitting on the desk pretending you were a canoe or whatever, yeah, you were going to fail. So it's brought a consistency, I would say.”
Even though it feels like the UK is light years ahead, Haili explains that there are downsides to this reform. She says that most teachers and leaders know Rosenshine, Willingham, and Baddeley’s simple model of memory. But she talks about an illusion of knowledge where instructional leaders claim to be very research informed, but have only really engaged with a one-pager like Jamie Clark’s fantastic book, which is a great end-user teacher summary, but as Haili says, “15 steps removed from the original research”, which she feels strongly that leaders should know.
Haili also worries about what she calls “identikit teachers”, arising from schools that “lead by numbers”. She talks about an overreliance on pre-prepared curriculum materials. Teachers “click through the PowerPoint” because that is what they perceive they need to do, but she says, “I’m not sure if it’s producing the kind of responsive, adaptive professionals that we want.”
There have also been unintended effects of the move towards a strong framework, backed by evidence. Paradoxically, Haili says that some experienced mentors have been driven out of the profession by the workload of being a mentor. She says, “It's huge because mentors used to be very much tea and tissues. And now you’ve got to be an expert in evidence. I’ve led this work because mentoring now is actually instructional coaching. It hasn’t made teacher retention better, but it hasn’t made it worse either.”
I ask Haili what the impact has been and she reflects that even England has a way to go. “I think what the frameworks have brought is a shared language of teaching and learning and a consistency.” But she notes that the ECF has been criticized for being very secondary-centric, unlike our Australian Standards, which are general to a fault. She says, “It's not an all-encompassing framework. More has recently been added for SEND and early child development.” The various frameworks are about to be rolled into one, but Haili predicts there will also be moves to customise it to be more subject-specific. And the new Labour government is already tinkering at the edges, adding elements like guidance on collaborative learning, speaking to Haili’s earlier comments about perennial games of political football.
Too frequently, policy is imposed upon us as a profession; we’re not often seen as true stakeholders. If a more coherent policy picture is emerging in Australia, it may well be happening without the voices of teachers and leaders like Haili. I couldn’t say. But the process does offer a blueprint for Australia to adopt—and adapt.
Dr Nathaniel Swain and I are teaming up for a new podcast series where we break down real classroom footage to uncover what makes great teaching great. Each episode, we pause the play, slow things down, and analyse the moves teachers make—connecting them to the research on how students learn best.
🎧👀 When we launch in a few weeks, you’ll be able to listen to the audio version (with audio from real classroom clips) or watch the full video to catch every visual detail.
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