The Early Career Framework (ECF) and programme are designed to support ECTs in their new role.

• The programme lasts for 2 years.
• Content is based on the ITTECF (Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework) and ensures that content from your teacher training is deepened and extended.
• Sessions are held face-to-face and online with mentors and ECTs.

Click here to see an overview of the programme.

Our Early Career Teacher (ECT) programme is centralised around the mentor-ECT relationship. 

Mentors are one of our best resources, so we invest time in their training, respond to their training needs and ensure the programme is easy for them to manage – the mentoring sessions underpin everything else that happens in the programme.

We offer three types of live sessions as an integral part of our programme: national expert webinars, subject and phase specialist sessions, and local networking seminars – all of which are facilitated by experts in their respective areas, as well as in their local contexts.

The ECT Entitlement is an entitlement to ensure that ECTs and their mentors get the best possible introduction to the career. We recognise from our work with schools, partners and participants that there are things which we could do better for them in this new programme compared to the existing ECF. So we’ve taken thousands of pieces of feedback and used them to shape something which:

1. It gives flexibility to our schools and teachers – we ensure our live sessions are accessible by arranging these locally with partners in each region of England. Our programme allows ECTs and mentors to select study which is informed by a diagnostic and thus fits their level of expertise and focus at that time. There is no one-size fits all approach so that teachers are valued and their time well spent. We also provide the opportunity for school leaders and induction tutors to change the order of the modules of study to best suit their whole school CPD and priorities to reduce duplication. We are making our materials even accessible, so that we can respect teacher time and workload even further by using podcasts and audio-versions of materials.
2. All of our materials are designed so that they can be contextualised easily in your school/s. We provide exemplification across all phases from EYFS to KS5, so that teachers and their mentors can see how what they are learning would apply in their context more easily and we have designed our second year for ECTs around subject and phase specialist materials and sessions. Our facilitators deliver sessions locally so that the experts your ECTs and Mentors meet know about the challenges in the local area and can speak about their own experiences, rather than reading from a script.
3. Our Mentor programme is designed and influenced by what mentors tell us they need to do the best job. This mentor programme is not just for ECT mentors, but designed to support teachers who are mentoring and coaching others to progress their skills and understanding so they can implement them flexibly in your school, as well as giving them the benefit of the underpinning framework and cutting-edge research evidence from the ECTE.
4. We don’t just use the research from the framework to support the development of our ECTs and Mentors, but we also do our own research and use our findings to influence and improve our programme. For example, our research into coastal, rural and small schools has led us to change our approach to the design of our modules to ensure that the context of all schools is considered in our design.