 And good afternoon. Welcome to this Teacher Academy webinar on school education careers. This is the third webinar for 2020 and we're very happy to see you all here. So first of all, just to show you a little bit of the agenda of what is coming up. So we will have four speakers for this webinar. So first, Marba Snoop, talking about diverse career paths in school education, followed by Hannah Granger-Conston talking about the teacher career survey. Perhaps some of you have already taken it. So now you have a chance to see the first look at the results before we publish the full results. And then third, we have Kaye Livingston talking about supporting individual careers, followed by Lisbeth Henn about school heads and the wider picture of professional development and careers. So my name is Asi Hongkonen. I work at the School Education Gateway. So supporting and coordinating this webinar. So today we have done this together with Hannah Granger-Conston for European Commission. And just to know for all the participants that this meeting or this webinar is being recorded and we will share this recording with you afterwards on the event page. In a few days you'll be able to look back to this webinar in case you have to leave early or you didn't catch all the materials here. And also we share the slides with you afterwards. So if you just go back to the webinar page in a few days, you will see them there. If you have any questions for the presenters about anything that they talked about, just type them into the chat box. So we will take them from there. And the presenters can answer to your questions after they have given their presentation. So now I would like to pass it to Hannah to talk a bit more about supporting teacher and school leader careers in terms of this. Okay, good afternoon everybody. I hope you can see me and importantly hear me. Just to check. Yes, good. Excellent. Thank you so much to the school education gateway for hosting this webinar. To of course the speakers that you're going to hear from and also all of you participants at this incredibly busy time. If you're working in schools or if you're supporting the work of teachers and schools in some way in whatever way, you've all been dealing with an incredibly challenging situation in the past weeks and indeed months. And so it's absolutely fantastic to have you here with us for this webinar. The focus actually for this particular webinar is looking at supporting teacher and school leader careers. This is because we are just about to publish a policy guide. And that is after almost two years worth of work by the ET 2020 working group schools. Now they are a group made up of representatives from all of the ministries of education across Europe, as well as representatives from European stakeholder organization. Plus we've also worked with researchers with experts with representatives of school head organizations of student organizations and so on. So we really try to get a rounded view on this topic. And we're really excited to be able to start to share the work with you. And I think also importantly, it's good to point out that the purpose of these webinars are not just necessarily called for action or demanding some kind of immediate change in practice, but they're also for reflection that this is part of everybody's professional development. And so we hope that whatever area you're working in, you will get to gain something from the speakers and indeed from the work that we are presenting today. Now, of course, you may or may not have heard of the the ambition of the European education area. This sets out ambitions, targets concerning education and training for the forthcoming years and particularly concerning school education. We are very much concerned with as always creating meaningful learning experiences for all pupils to support innovative and inclusive education systems. But really the connection with this work is a focus on the teachers and school leaders who are recognized as being absolutely crucial to achieving this. And of course, again, we've mentioned the current situation, which is affecting all aspects of careers, not just the teaching that takes place in schools, but the management of teaching, the mentoring of teachers and also not forgetting the support and evaluation of student teachers who are yet to actually complete their course of study. They might be completing this year and very much looking forward to starting in schools in full time in September. So we very much recognize that and indeed this work on careers includes those student teachers as well as those with some and indeed many, many years of experience in schools. This work that we've been doing also is not the first time that we focused on teachers specifically. You'll see that this is part of 10 years or more of European collaboration of learning between countries where representatives have been sharing policies, reforms, specific initiatives that they've undertaken. It was around about 2015 or just before when we started to really focus and think about a career-long understanding of teaching starting from the beginning of initial teacher education through to the early years and then continuing professional development. And that is something that we started to really look at in depth from 2018, 2019 and that's the work that we're going to be sharing. Now of course again, mentioning the current situation, online and distance learning and reaching out to education in remote areas is now being highlighted of particular concern. And so I think that you'll hear if you've got questions specifically about that and ideas we will be able to maybe reflect on that in this webinar and beyond that recognizing and valuing the diverse roles that teachers and school leaders play in and around schools and the very different ways in which they acquire or undertake professional development is certainly worth considering and worth considering how countries can improve, how systems can improve. Now this might look like a rather bleak picture. It's, we chose it to, it's chosen to represent the rather perhaps a more negative view of a career in school education, one that is one dimensional, might be very flat with few opportunities for taking on different roles, few opportunities for working in different ways. Now it's important to mention straight away that working with children, working in the classroom is indeed very motivating, is the reason that many, most people go into school education careers and working in classrooms brings joy and can do for many, many years. We don't want to say that if a teacher is working in a classroom that is in any way not achieving or progressing. However, we really do, through this work realize that we need to properly consider what is motivating, what are the opportunities to work in different ways in schools. We heard from the OECD yesterday they published more analysis of the TALIS survey and we heard that 22% of teachers said that they were considering leaving the profession in the next five years and we know that a number of countries, not all, but some are struggling to attract new teachers to the profession. So this is certainly something to consider. We also understand that many, there's a lot of professional development concerning teachers is built around the idea of competence, something that your competence is, that you expect all teachers to aspire to, to develop, but also that they have individual talent and that's something that we'll hear about later from the speakers and indeed the diverse opportunities that I've mentioned. Professional identity is also something that we discussed as being a particular challenge. Again, from the TALIS survey, we hear that only 16%, 16% of teachers feel that the profession is valued in society and that, of course, is going to affect not only those who are not yet teachers or might be considering it, but those in the profession and that might be something that you also mentioned if you answered our teacher survey as well. We also heard that only 9% of teachers said that they regularly gave feedback to their peers or had colleagues come and observe their own practice. So that kind of collaboration that is meant to be part of professional identity certainly needs to be looked at and supported. And then finally the school climate. We hear that 20% of teachers desire to change school, but they might not have the opportunity to do so. There's a lot of stress, particularly from administration, from an assessment as well as the planning and the daily teaching responsibilities. And so the wellbeing of teachers is also something to consider along with the more general working conditions. So just to finish off this introduction, just to summarise the challenges really that we see that there are three main areas of challenges for school education in terms of better supporting careers. That is recruitment, that is bringing teachers, potential teachers into training and into the profession. Retention, as in keeping those who are already teaching in the profession and supporting them. And also what we've called regeneration. This idea that we're encouraging professionals to engage, to want to develop their own practice, to innovate in a way that suits them and the learners that they are working with, but also regeneration for the benefit of the entire profession. Looking after new colleagues, mentoring when you're more experienced and also bringing new ideas when you have the confidence when you feel that that is something, a role that you want to take. So I'm delighted that we have our three experts with us and all of them are representatives of the working group schools. And now they're going to tell us more about how it is possible, based on the examples that we've discussed, based on the work that we've been doing, to have more visible and diverse opportunities for teachers and school leaders. To importantly think about how we can support individuals as well as all professionals and also how that support can actually be brought together more coherently. So I'm going to hand over now to Professor Marcos who's going to talk to us about diverse career paths in school education. Thank you Marcos. Okay Hannah, thank you for the introduction. Greetings from Amsterdam. We're grounded here at home too, although you might think I'm at the beach, but actually that will fiber up my bedroom, but anyway. I'm quite happy to be able to share some insights of the work I've been doing in the Dutch context on teacher careers. Both in the Netherlands and within the working group of the European Commission and the insights we got from exchanges between experts from different countries. But maybe to start off, I have to say that I'm very impressed about how teachers have transformed education in just one week time after the all the disturbance with corona and the closing down of schools. And actually it shows something of compassion and dedication that teachers have to pupils, that they changed their lessons and their teaching to online and virtual activities supporting kids at home. And they did that in just one week time at least in the Netherlands and probably not without any problems. There might be lots of issues, but the speed in which they took up this challenge, I think that really tells something about the passion and dedication. I think that that passion and dedication is key and essential to the teaching profession. But at the same time, and I think that's connected to the topic we're talking about, we're talking about career path, that it's not possible to take that passion and dedication that is at the heart of the profession, to take that for granted. And I think that young novice teachers start off with passion and dedication with their work, starting in schools with novice teachers. But I think the key question is how those young teachers can keep up that passion and dedication throughout their work life in 10, after 10 years, after 20 years or after 30 years being a teacher. And I think that was also one of the issues in the Thales presentation that was presented yesterday. The question is how do we create a teaching profession that is fulfilling to teachers. So one of the key questions is how can we support teachers in keeping up that passion and dedication. And then it's important to realize that actually the structure of the profession we have is not really supporting in keeping up that passion. And I think that has to do with how we organize education. I just put on two slides, one classroom in the 1901 very recent classroom. And although this setting is different, I think there's one key element in how we organize teaching in the schools. And that's that we have a classroom with kids and with one teacher. It actually creates quite an isolated professional surrounding. And I think that problem in professional surrounding is something we need to be aware of. Because having one individual teacher within that classroom makes it necessary for teachers to be able to take all responsibilities and all the different tasks to set goals to plan a curriculum to prepare lessons to teach lessons to support individual evaluation to bring outcomes and to communicate with colleagues. So actually if you look at the teaching profession, then this is what we have within initial teacher education, not just teachers who start learning the key elements of the profession but from the day they graduate and start within schools, this is actually what we expect them to be able to do. So we have a teaching program where from day one teachers must be able to take all responsibilities. And I think that really creates a problem within that profession. Because then we what we actually need in schools is that we need teachers who are ready for the profession and in lots of publications and programs there's focus on teaching profession ready teachers classroom ready teachers but actually doesn't give much attention to the question how can teachers develop throughout their career. So what is the possible development of teachers after having finished initial teacher education taking on steps in their career. And sometimes countries have developed induction programs supporting novice teachers in the first two years. But there's little clear understanding of how teachers can develop after those induction period after initial teacher education for the remaining of sometimes 40 years of a teacher career. So the structure of the profession actually creates often a rather narrow and static view on that profession. And I think the dominant message we have within the way we have structured the profession is that we actually imply that teachers the main job is teaching in classrooms and many support programs focus on the activities that teachers have in those classrooms supporting pupils and the second message is that teachers need to be qualified right from the start. And that actually leaves a number of important questions. The first one is how do we recognize the voice of teachers development and innovation in tasks which goes beyond the classroom with colleagues in schools and stakeholders outside schools. The second question is but if teachers need to be qualified right from the start what is their opportunity to develop and how can they stay passionate throughout their careers. And I believe that to stay passionate throughout your careers is necessary to have variation of to be challenged to have an opportunity to grow and to be recognized in that growth. So the third question is how you can structure the profession in a way that it facilitates this variation challenge growth and recognition. There's lots of expertise from the area of human resource management human resource development was actually focused on three important elements in having a fulfilling job and having an opportunity to develop in your career. And that's the three keywords of ability, motivation and opportunity. And ability is about the competencies that teachers need and they develop throughout their career. Motivation is about their dedication to pupils but also their ambitions of new tasks for role or new experiences or variations they want to have in their job. And the last one opportunity is the way in which they have the opportunity to take the abilities that they have developed and the ambitions to have to take them into actual roles within within schools to have the opportunity for new tasks and roles. So that actually leaves us to the question but how could teacher careers look I think traditional way of looking at a teacher career or careers in general is by understanding it as a ladder where people grow in status, in responsibilities, in salaries etc. But I think through the exchange that we had within the working group looking at educational systems in different countries we actually realized there is a much more variety in the possible career pathways that teachers could develop through their careers. And we tried to identify these with six different images which was actually identified those six different ways to develop through the career. The first one is moving upwards and I think that's a traditional one of teachers who move over to more responsible and managerial roles as a mentor as a department head or as a school leader taking all managerial and leadership roles. The second one is about moving sideways where teachers take on different roles next to their teaching job as a mentor to other teachers or a curriculum coordinator or a teacher who is involved with teacher inquiry. The third one is about that teachers do not only need to work have to work within their classroom but also can work at the team level or a school level being involved in school development projects or maybe even regional level with local authority or on a national level in a national curriculum group or even international level. And often they vary their roles throughout the week having sometimes working with pupils in the classrooms sometimes with colleagues inside and outside schools etc. The fourth one is moving up and along where teachers improve their roles and become better teachers. The fifth one is about changing context. The future gains from one school to another or from one context to another from primary to secondary. The fifth one is about moving in and out where teachers can move into the profession or out of the profession or combine working in the profession with working outwards in a kind of hybrid profession. We've tried to evaluate these six elements as possibilities for teachers but also probably for school leaders or school heads to develop throughout the careers gaining a position of increased decision makers moving upwards moving up and along becoming more competent and be recognized in that moving sideways taking different roles in a special needs coordinator or language coordinator within a school changing context moving from urban to rural schools or the other way adding layers of systems moving between local classroom level school level, regional or national level and moving in and out and actually at least when I look in the Netherlands I think all these different career pathways are realistic because I can find examples of teachers who have taken their path during their career. So I think that understanding of those different career paths is important to strengthen the awareness of the opportunities of teachers within a national context to develop. This is just an example of how we dealt with that in the Netherlands how we identified the opportunities for teachers to develop themselves in those circles from students at the inner circle to novice to experienced teachers to expert teacher so to become to improve and to deepen your knowledge and your expertise but at the same time to recognize that there are several areas where you could work in either supporting the learning of pupils and I think for most teachers there will be 70 to 90 percent of the time dedicated to supporting the learning of pupils but there's also the area of developing teaching and learning the area of organizing teaching and learning and the area of supporting the learning of colleagues and this actually creates a kind of map landscape where teachers could navigate themselves and say okay where am I now and what could be a next step where would I want to be in five years time to become more aware of opportunities that are available and another example comes from Finland which actually takes those different levels of the local level, the school level the national level and international level and roles that teachers could play in those different levels and I think these two examples of career frameworks actually help to identify choice through mapping all those opportunities also to show the diversity of opportunities that is possible for teachers and to make those opportunities visible and I think that's I think one of the starting points to create more opportunities for career opportunities for teachers within a country so I think that's more or less the key starting point maybe for a discussion which could be taken up by Hannah and Kay and these guys in the next part of this webinar. Thank you for jumping here very good comments and discussion in the chat box going on as well Hannah posed the question maybe this is also for the audience is how to change these context that you mentioned how to change always is it motivating or is it stressful so I thought that was a quite interesting discussion going on any questions for Marco so far or do you have any other final remark on the topic before we move on maybe one remark to the question you just mentioned whether it's stressful or not and I think that's something that Kay Livingstone will go into more on is that the frameworks I've presented and those six circles actually creates visualized the opportunities within the profession and that means that it's open for every teacher himself or herself to decide what is challenging, what's interesting for me, what's my ambition so it doesn't need to be that every teacher takes all those different opportunities, it actually creates those opportunities so there can be a variation and we can take into account individual preferences of teachers it actually leads very well to, oh there's a question before we move on, what about multi-media I thought that's what it means what about multi-media, art innovation and performative education and gaining multi-task memory I think that's at least what I can answer is how we discuss that in the Netherlands what we try to identify in this image is to say well there are lots of opportunities and we have identified just some age, the different career trajectories that teachers could go into and teachers who want to develop themselves into experts in terms of multi-media or in supporting colleagues or pupils in ICT use in education they can develop either by focusing on the learning of pupils or by developing teaching and learning so teachers who have been developing in last week to redesign their teaching and curriculum in an online version are very active at the moment in the area of design and some who already have experience have been supporting colleagues to mentor them in helping them to set up new ideas for education so I think in all these areas elements of multi-media and ICT could be there organization could be dedicated to teachers who want to be an ICT coordinator within their school so actually the idea of the model we developed for the Netherlands is that it creates opportunities and that within each school you can say okay but what actually are the specific roles within our schools that teachers can can act on so other yes maybe one last question quickly before we move on to the next section how about creating opportunity to attract more young persons to take a teaching career well again I can refer to the Netherlands the Ministry of Education has done a study on how to what extent teacher education is attractive for young people at secondary schools and it has to do with a large teacher shortage we have and actually what young people in secondary schools have mentioned that at least 50% of them that well I don't opt for teacher education because of the lack of career perspectives so I think that understanding in those six circles as possibilities to develop within the teaching career is very important not only to show towards teachers during their career but also to show to young people in secondary schools and to students who opt for initial teacher education to show that the teaching profession is a profession which is not a dead end way although working in classrooms can be for many teachers very inspiring but it has a wide variety of options and opportunities I think well communicating this message and this image of the profession is very important to attract people into the profession actually I want to go back to this six circles that you presented and we would like to do a bit of an exercise with the audience so I will now enable all the participants to draw so what we want to see is take the pen that you should be seeing and add an X to show your career path so we will be interested to hear how you as a participant have progressed so you should be able to have the drawing possibility I hope so if you could all go into take a pen and draw an X on the circle that represents your path the best way possible so where do you feel like you identify so we have already 227 participants in the room so I'm expecting lots of Xs coming up perhaps Marco if you can recognize something that you saw was more likely than another or something that surprises you there's a lot of moving in and out moving upward I also see that actually all those six possible career trade trajectories are identified by people so it actually shows that those six circles we showed are a realistic perspective and possibility for teachers to develop at least as far as all the audience are teachers or have been teachers and I'm not sure about that I see there's a lot of it's quite even out it's quite even out and I saw one remark from Tung that all six are recognized but often not in a formal way and I think that is correct that if we talk about we also had it within the working group if we talk about teacher careers then often it is about getting a higher status moving upwards and getting a higher salary and things like that well actually this picture shows it's not only about salaries it's not only about status but it's about a diverse variety of tasks and roles you can have as a teacher excellent so I suggest we will now move on to the next presentation and if you have any questions feel to Marco any of the percentages please then into the chat box and we get back to that later so here so now the draw is Mubu thank you everyone for participating it was a quite interesting exercise so now I will pass back to Hannah to talk about the survey on teacher career that just took place on School Education Hello, thank you thank you to Marco for their really interesting presentation and for the responses to the questions as well and wow what an interesting response from everybody to those different perspectives on career paths maybe we're expecting one or two to be highlighted but it really does as Marco said show the diversity that already exists but whether that is recognised is a different question very quickly from me so as not to delay the other speakers but this survey was something that we wanted to link purposefully to the work and we wanted to hear from you of course the TALIS survey is a very large survey it's an international survey about the work of teachers trying to capture what is going on in schools and how they feel about their careers and working conditions we wanted to have our own survey specifically targeted to our school education gateway community and we also purposefully designed the questions to link to the work that we're presenting so here the exclusive these survey results were handed over just yesterday so you are the first people to look at these so very quickly through the questions the first one we asked about asked you to describe the public attitude towards teacher careers and there you can see that perhaps more positively than the TALIS results 27% said that teaching is considered to be a desirable career that 44% were neutral saying that the public attitude is neither positive nor negative but also 29% if you said that teacher careers are not desirable we also asked about opportunities and this follows on directly from what Marco Snook was talking about in his presentation that I think you can see there the responses that we asked about how realistic were the following opportunities for a position of responsibility so the opportunity to become part of school management or a school head the opportunity to advise other schools become an inspector or evaluator become more of a cultural leader working in with the wider community or the opportunity to become a ministry or regional authority advisor we asked with those opportunities was it possible and do teachers already do it or do they not take the opportunity or is it those are those opportunities not possible however teachers would like this opportunity and we've highlighted just two of the results there or two of the types of responses that 50% said that becoming a school head position of responsibility was possible and the teachers do certainly do that in terms of the other higher responses at the other part of the table that actually almost 50% said that becoming a ministry or regional authority advisor was not possible but teachers would like to have this opportunity and we will publish a full reports on this a full analysis very soon but perhaps you might like to comment and reflect on the other responses you can see there third question we asked about teacher evaluation and the ability to for that to be part of planning your professional development recommendations for career advancement this is something that our next speaker will be talking about but you can already see that 46% of you said that some teacher evaluation to carried out but they are not regular and do not often lead to planning for professional development or to recommendations now you might think that you might have responded that yes there are and this might be a surprise to you in your experience they are more regular and they do link to your career planning you also might be past the 32% who said that there aren't any regular teacher evaluations in the school our fourth question was about the support so the support available for teachers to plan and manage their career path that could be having a particular framework to guide development that you are provided with about different roles or paths or if there are specific courses leading to specialist qualifications there is about almost even spread there but 25% said that there is a lot of support available for career progression more of you said that maybe the support that teachers are unaware of that support and 37% said that no, most teachers feel there is little or no support particularly for managing their career progression so that I think is very important to bear in mind when thinking about the topic of this webinar and finally the last question was about thinking about this particular role or career path that is maybe for some the only career path imagined maybe some people think that moving up to management as a head teacher is the only career goal to have and of course from the presentation we know that career paths are very diverse and 12% of you said that the ultimate goal is to become a head teacher however, 48% of you said no, becoming a head teacher is not the ultimate career goal however, teachers do want to progress to having more responsibility or variety and 40% also said that teachers prefer to focus only on their classroom teaching so that's a quick look at the survey results I'm going to hand straight over now to Professor Kay Livingston who's going to talk indeed about supporting these individual careers thank you Kay how do you know connected we don't hear you yes okay, can you hear us can you connect your microphone again if we do not hear you yet could you try maybe disconnecting and connecting again see if that could help yes, now we hear you okay okay, so good afternoon everybody and as you can hear there are some technical problems so I'm sorry you can't see me but I hope you can now hear me for me in terms of understanding teachers as individuals that would be excellent if you look at this picture and you see a teacher working with a young boy here, our expectation is that this teacher would understand the individual learning needs of the young person and my question to all of you is to what extent are teachers understood as individuals in terms of their learning needs and also in terms of their desires for their careers so first and foremost we have to ask ourselves to what extent do we understand that we are all different everybody that's listening to this webinar would hate the thought of being considered as being all the same each one of us comes to thinking about our professional development and thinking about our career progression as individuals so when we think about that teachers have very different characteristics we have very different abilities and we have very different personal experiences that have influenced how we are as teachers and that is a challenge for all of those who are supporting the professional development and the career progression Marco was showing different career moves and different possibilities but to what extent do people understand the kinds of motivations that teachers have in order for these possibilities to be available to us so when we move to the next slide please what we have is a consideration of how do we recognize teachers as individuals that come with different talents, they have individual characteristics very different motivations in terms of where they see their careers going whether they have the confidence to make some of the moves and also different capacities and capabilities in terms of their professional roles but what we have been discussing in the working group is also thinking about career competence so while there have been many frameworks in relation to thinking about the individual characteristics and the competences that hasn't been the same frameworks in relation to thinking about the capacity to be able to navigate and make decisions about teachers' own career and so what we have been discussing is the possibility in terms of a support structure that aims to stimulate the progression and to have a much more nuanced understanding of teacher strengths and challenges for development those of you who are listening again I ask the question of you to what extent do you think the individual strengths and the challenges that you have as a teacher are understood by those that you work with or are understood by your school leader are they making the most of your strengths is the professional development that you have the possibilities to engage in do they allow you to be able to address the challenges that you face as an individual so again if we can move to the next slide please within the working group we have been discussing this as you've heard for some time and the representatives from the 27 countries around Europe have really understood that there is a potential challenge between on the one hand how do we take account of the motivations and the needs of individual teachers and how do we consider supporting all of the professionals as a whole and so the sense of how do we get the balance right in terms of really understanding the individual needs of teachers and at the same time how do we address the needs of the students that they work with how do we address the aims of the school and how do we address the education system it's a lot of place to be spinning in the air and the complexity of how we address all of these different needs is very challenging however often we're thinking about plans for school development and we don't necessarily link the individual teacher development to school development in terms of how it helps teachers to build their careers and how it's appropriate to the particular context they work in not only have we discussed the differences between countries across Europe but we've also discussed the differences within countries so that we have rural areas we have city areas, we have urban areas we have large schools, small schools we have schools in areas of social deprivation, we have those that are in areas where there is support from parents and so on so the context change, in some cases there's lots of opportunities to work within teams in other cases there aren't so again if you can move to the next slide please what we've been discussing in the working group and you saw some examples from Marco was how can we start to think about a framework for careers in school education so that there's much more clarity and visibility of the opportunities to teachers in terms of how they develop their own career and how might they track an individual path around the kinds of motivations and abilities and opportunities that they have available to them and this example here from Finland is just one and I'll show you another one in a minute from my next slide but just thinking about that framework it can be linked to a competence framework but it doesn't have to be also the framework offers a way to try and make visible the kinds of opportunities within a country and it could help guide the kinds of decision making around the possibilities that you have open to you as an individual teacher some of you who looked at the different circles that Marco was showing in his slides were putting in the chat box that you hadn't thought of these different opportunities as a teacher so these frameworks should make these different opportunities visible so that teachers have a much better understanding about what's possible and also trying to identify the kind of conditions that would enable you to have different opportunities and be able to have different career pathways for you so if we can turn to the next slide what we see is that these frameworks really have the opportunity to be seen as having a developmental purpose so that when Hannah talked about the results from the questionnaire that teacher evaluation shouldn't be seen as something that is judgmental that you step up to the next level once you've done a certain amount of professional development and then you have to do another you know hour of this and that in order to get to the next level the sense of more flexibility in the routes that you take but seeing it as a way of developing a career that is of interest to you, that motivates you, that keeps you attracted to the teaching career throughout the whole of your career that you have as a teacher so it's not something where you are easily put off after the first three to five years thinking you know this is not something that I would see myself doing for the next 30 years the understanding that there are different possibilities, there are different possibilities to move sideways, to move out for a little while from that school and back again so the sense of these frameworks being able to make much clearer for teachers what is expected in terms of professional development, how it links to the system, how it links to the individual schools but also what's possible in terms of teacher professional development and career development and these frameworks shouldn't be seen as something that are fixed, what we should see these frameworks as is opportunities for teachers to start a dialogue about the kinds of strengths that they have the kind of motivation they have in terms of their career and to be able to discuss it with other teachers, between you and other members of staff within your school, within your school leaders and also with the policy makers and again here we have an example from Portugal and the publication that Hannah talked about earlier you'll see frameworks from other countries as well so again if we can move on until the next slide so I talked there about the importance of seeing these frameworks as an opportunity for us as teachers to have dialogue dialogue with our peers, our mentors with lead teachers and so on but that opportunity for dialogue about our careers so that we can make clear the kinds of strengths that we have and the motivations we have is really important but engaging in dialogue is not the only thing that matters of course it's a prerequisite but the quality of that dialogue is really important who can help you in terms of career guidance the people that you are going to engage in dialogue with are they understanding it as developmental and not as simply judging the competencies you have in terms of your professional role are they able to help you in terms of advising you of these different possibilities are they able to give you a signpost to the kinds of things that are possible and some of the things that Marco talked about are quite different career possibilities and it means that you may need support from some that are not within the traditional roles in the school so if we can move to the next slide what we see is the greater the variation in the career possibilities for teachers to meet your individual needs and aspirations the greater the requirement for different types of support and supporters and it means that we have to widen the range of the possible stakeholders who will act as supporters or teacher educators for you at different times of your career somebody that might support you when you are a new teacher might be quite quite different from the kind of person you would look to support you much later on in your career and then within the working group we spent a lot of time in discussions and in peer learning activities thinking about who are the possible stakeholders who are these different stakeholders to enable us to make the teaching career attractive over a longer period and some of these supporters supporters at the moment may not even recognize themselves as teacher educators or traditionally be recognized as teacher educators and it highlights the needs at policy level to be able to identify and map these different supporters and stakeholders who would be there to offer advice to teachers across their career again if you can move on as soon as we look at the slide in terms of thinking about the conditions for quality dialogue when we widen that pool of supporters when we widen that range of people who would be in a position to support as a teacher educator it does mean that there has to be support for the development of how do you have that quality dialogue and meaningful dialogue if teachers are expected to be willing to share their challenges and their strengths in terms of their career decisions it really needs open and honest dialogue you have to feel confident that you can share with your supporter in terms of the kinds of challenges you face or the desire to change the pathway of your career and so it needs that sense of everybody who's involved in supporting teachers across their career need to have the knowledge, skills and disposition to engage in dialogue that you see as worthwhile in terms of your career development and these conditions need understanding how to build a trusting relationship so you feel able to share not only your strengths but your challenges time has to be set aside for this dialogue and also it has to be recognised as a valuable way of professional development and career guidance so just to summarise if we can move to the last slide what we're saying is that it's not only about competence frameworks but it's also thinking now about career competence and they need to be recognised in terms of enabling teachers to make informed decisions about their professional development and understanding these different career paths that we've been talking about and so a step in policy action is for the development of career competence and to become an accepted system-wide part of teacher development and a routine way of teachers having opportunities to discuss their professional practice and also to discuss how they might progress their career not just along the traditional steps moving towards a school leader but other less traditional possibilities and what we think within the working group is that a framework for teacher careers would be helpful in terms of making these different pathways visible and hence you've seen different countries that are represented have been developing frameworks to enable that to become a possibility also in terms when we think about school development these should be linked to personal development of teachers as individuals and also we've recognised within the working group how important that structured dialogue, meaningful dialogue enables reflection and helps to identify specific training or other means of professional development through these conversations according to the individual teacher and helping them in terms of their own individual and unique professional development and also their career progression and I will pause there and hand back to the administration of the webinar Are there any questions? Maybe we have time for one question for Kay now before we move on to the next presentation by Mr. Ken Otherwise if you still have questions you can slide them into the chat box as well so we can take them after the presentation too I suggest we move on to the fourth and the last presentation by Mr. Ken Welcome If you have any questions to any of the speakers please put them into the chat box and we'll take them after the presentation Can I start? Okay In this last part of the presentation I mean you heard already a lot about the work we did on teachers and their career options but we also wanted to focus on another important group in the education sector and that's the school head and before I'm going to elaborate exactly on the results and what we did I have to clarify something about definitions and wording because we made sure our experience is that it's quite a strange thing in this report and also in the presentation we will talk about the school head and with school head we mean the person having an overall responsibility for the pedagogical administrative management of the school In some other countries this might be referred to as a head teacher school principal or school director and it's just to make clear that it's that level that we are talking about In my own country in Flanders we will speak about school leaders or we would speak about school leaders so if I make the mistake of using school leader instead of school head I actually mean school head so I hope it's not going to solve a lot of problems Okay so why are we talking about school leaders well of course and you all know that school leaders are very important actors to achieve school quality but if you don't look at their careers and we try to look at them you saw that it's a bit neglected because there's not a lot of information on school head careers and in some countries being a school head or becoming a school head is the top of career options for teachers but being a school head is not seen as a career on itself so it's just a step in a career of a teacher but it's not a career or a profession on itself and some of the issues, problems and challenges that you heard of for the guidance of careers of teachers also apply to a school head but maybe not all of them and I'm going to share an exercise we did during the last two years and actually it's to open your mind on what we talked about school heads it's just to give you a bit of a wider view and we had three possible persons applying for a job as a school head in a school who was without a school head and it's just a very short CV and then people could say who they would choose and of course we can now type it in the chat box who you will who you would choose but I guess that most of the people actually will choose Bernard it wasn't a case in a working group it's a case if you do it with other people because he has been a school head he has the expertise and we think of that but if you don't start thinking a bit more about who would be the best person for the school who would help teachers to develop their teaching capacity who would be able to provide teachers more support to their own career development and that opens the discussion a bit on who would be the best teacher or the best school head to be applied in a school who wants to be or who wants to stay a school head so first we have to find them and then we have to make sure that they want to stay as a school head while the first thing that's parenting to mind is having the right motivation and like in all profession having the right motivation is a key factor to be a successful school head but motivation can be both intrinsic or extrinsic like money or other circumstances and then the question is how is it defined can we do something with that and motivation is a very very individual thing given the complexity of factors it's not very easy to make systematic approaches to the motivation of school head in order to motivate more candidates a bit earlier in the presentation we already stated that becoming a school head is a possible career step for teachers sometimes it's the only career step that's formally recognized but tell them that there is in practice a place to identify future school heads for teaching populations so it's a bit that we don't care if there are teachers who would be good school heads or not so it would be a great thing if we could invest in talent spotters to facilitate transfer from being a teacher to starting to think about being a school head and becoming the key actor in finding high quality school heads an important risk in this thing is that people tend to select people who mirror themselves or who mirror the school head they've known so that there's not a lot of diversity in changing that profession and the different backgrounds could actually be a very good thing for schools to look into so having the diversity in selection boards could also be a solution to have more diversity in the teaching profession another thing and I think it was already raised as a question in the chat box during this session is that in most European countries it's common practice or the common preparation for becoming a school head is being a teacher in most countries you have to be a teacher or at least have a teacher education degree in order to become a school head and this might be a bit surprising because the role of a school head is different from the role of a teacher they require other competences and skills and during initial teacher education in most countries also in mind there's no or very very little attention for leadership competences so it's a bit weird that we actually ask a diploma which has no real link with the job as an entry requirement for the job the opposite seems very very scary to a lot of education people and a manager with no educational experience at all becoming a school head that is very scary to a lot of people but on the other hand maybe it's not the degree that we have to talk about maybe it's having a bit of experience with the education sector and investing in more staff development in order to get good leaders for all our schools and in most countries it's not easy to attract people to a school head profession it's just that the teacher's profession is not always regarded as very attractive it's the same with the school head profession or even worse sometimes the job of the school head is sometimes really perceived as lonely at the top well it's you who have to make the decision and it's you who have to deal with all the workload and isolation and you have to deal with all the problems and of course shared leadership could be an answer to that where you have a more management team in a school in order to deal with the leadership of a school team and then I'm going to talk a little bit about the picture you see because during the work we did we asked a lot of stakeholders to tell us what their view on a good school head was or what their view on school head competences was and at the slide you see the input of their student the location on this work what was really surprising wasn't really difficult from all the input to define what a good school head was or what the school head competences were because there was a very very fast agreement on three big domains and it was the pedagogical competences the managerial competences and leadership competences a fourth domain is the judicial competences it was seen as very important but not as necessary for all school heads so that's the one that's a little bit on the flip between the yes and no and of course beside these competences it's very important to have the right attitude the right capacity, beliefs you have to be a team player you have to be able to look into the future being open to new things, to new models being a lifelong learning these are all very important characteristics of a school head I'm going to try to change that okay so if we have identified who can be a school head and if we have invested in some clear well how do you become a school head well since school heads are usually drawn from the pool of existing teachers they don't always have the right training to become a school head and in that way I think it's very important that we invest in formal training and formal training that can be initial training it can be any kind of induction it should be CPD but in any case you have to take into account a whole continuum of training and not one specific moment of the training and it's very important that we prepare teachers who become school heads or other people who become school heads for their specific role as a school head on the other hand especially for this job it's quite unlikely that somebody will enter the school head profession or will enter a school head training without any skills at all and it can be both educational skills or leadership skills most of the time these are not 18 year olds who enter this profession people have done something in their career before and we have to make sure that we take that into account when we organise tailor training and recognition of the prior learning and competences of these people in order to make sure that they get the right training which is specifically in order for them on the slide you see two examples of training that organised and two examples we have on the left bottom you see the example of Norway where there is a national school leadership education already in place since 2009 with five big topics pupil learning processes leadership and administration corporation and organisation development and change and the leadership role and you see that all these four different competences or groups of competences which are actually well in place in this training another example on the right side of the slide is one of the institutes of advanced studies of education training in France where they have quite a very, very large training package for future school leaders or future school heads which has different parts like the management of schools education system performers the law and education policies so the judicial part is a part of this training learning and success, networking and local professional approaches where you actually have a broad view of what school leaders all talk so if we have them there and we have them trained how can we support their careers we are actually two important things that I'll talk about and I will talk first about in school conditions and then I will talk about something that we have called the middle ground that can support so in school conditions earlier within the context of your European commission we already made a study or a document on schools as learning organizations and actually being a learning organization if something that helps you as a leader to develop in your school and of course you have to it has to be linked on what school heads want what teachers want, what society wants what they need, what their wishes are in order to take the best possible solution if you look at the middle ground or what we call the middle ground is actually that we saw that school heads are a bit of linking pins between schools, local communities parents, other stakeholders national policy makers and that they are expected to manage the need of individual pupils and teachers but also the needs of the schools and balance those with a wider society so they are really in the center of all this and then the support the external support for school heads is in most cases not very well developed it's in a lowly profession where all the responsibilities have to be fulfilled by one person and then we talk about the middle ground and the middle ground is a group of stakeholders which can be local or can be national if it depends on your country's situation like for instance the head of an administration of a municipality, a local school advisor who actually acts as a supporter of the school heads and link them with central authorities and can manage the school heads' expectations so it's about their expectations and not the school expectations they can assist by organizing training but also by sharing experiences evaluation, peer learning and organizing inspections the middle ground will be different in different countries because of course every country is differently organized if you really think about it there is always a group of people who can be identified as the middle ground for school leaders and they should be activated as middle ground for school leaders so it's not enough to say we have something in place like that but they should be activated, respected and involved and having the knowledge to support school heads in their functions so to conclude this part I want to focus a bit more on system requirements well the things that are on the slides are probably not new things for you but I like to stress the importance of bringing everything together and linking all the dots the first one is to link CPD of teachers and school leaders to their career progression to talk about different options and try to balance the need and wishes of the individual, the organization and the society think of short term possibilities if needed but also make into account a long term perspective because you want them to be in the profession for more than one year facilitate networking between providers together everyone knows more and we are stronger if we collaborate so share your resources and work towards common goals and the 13 is really bringing it all together overall most food is nice when you combine the best grown ingredients with the right seasoning and the perfect cooking time all processes in education are linked somehow try to keep an overview and identify the linking processes it makes no sense to only focus on career options if you don't have a vision of employment conditions workload, CPD, evaluation procedures and on and on and on work preferably together with all stakeholders towards something like a common vision on education professions and it will make work much much much easier so that was my concluding message for this part and I will hand back to the Central Administration thank you any questions and comments there is a good comment and discussion going on in the chat box and to discussing the points that you make how to recruit the headmaster or school head is it through the experience of the teacher or some other competencies and as you said this is a controversial perhaps to what skills to look for for that profession and also the questions of how not only teachers but how teachers and school heads and middle management can support each other so I think the conclusion was that everyone should support each other and not to isolate in their own bubbles and I think the time is usually the biggest obstacle here because it might be a busy school and busy profession so those things were mentioned this is one question do you think principals should be teaching at the same time ruining the school or like heading the school so what are your thoughts that's a very difficult question if I think of the ideal situation or my wish my dream situation the answer is no I think that being a school head or being a school leader principal is a job on its own and that you have enough work dealing with the teachers and dealing with all the work that you have to do and make a vision for the school and educational development for your school and your team in being a school head on the other hand I know that in a lot of cases school heads have to also be teaching because the schools are not big enough because there's not enough money there are a lot of reasons to do it so it's a little bit of a tricky thing it will of course make sure that they are involved in the whole teaching process and they know exactly what's going on in their countries and in their schools but on the other hand it might give them not enough time to do the tasks they have to do as a school leader and that might be very difficult for them and it might also be even more lonely for them than it would be otherwise so yeah I hope that my thoughts are inspiring it's not a yes no answer Could I add to that because I think the question to what extent school heads can be teachers I think one of the problems is that we often think about something in terms of them so school leaders from teachers and then the idea that teachers that school leaders must be teachers is to make them part of the teaching profession to understand teaching but I think when school heads have been teachers they know a lot about about teaching but they take on a different responsibility should be to think about how to support teachers within my school to become the best teachers they are so I think instead of maybe next to thinking about how can I strengthen the learning environment for pupils I think one of the key challenges for school leaders is to think about how can I create the best learning environment for the teachers within my school because actually the quality of teachers is key for the quality of the learning of pupils so I think sometimes when I sit with school leaders my question is to what extent do you dedicate time to support teachers to become better teachers and I think for school leaders it should be at least half of the time because that's the key assets that they have within their schools and that they need to support Any other comments I also want to ask a question the other way around if I can find it is it possible for them to go back to being only a teacher in the same school so this is what we saw earlier that to move from different roles to another Okay also I think wanted to make a point Hello yes We don't hear you yet No we don't hear you The point I wanted to make is to the beginning of my presentation where I was asking you to think about whether as a teacher you felt your learning needs were understood and also your desires around your career progression I think that one of the things that a school head should be understanding of is of the individual teachers within their school in relation to their strengths and their challenges and also in relation to their views about their professional learning needs and also their career development so I think in order to be able to have that kind of dialogue they do need to have an understanding of teaching and so that sense of a pedagogical head is important for me but at the same time they've got to balance understanding the school as a learning environment and understanding the relationships not only of those within the school who can support teachers but also how as a school leader they can connect to those other stakeholders that are external to the school that can support and develop their individual teachers so I think that while we have to have school heads have some pedagogical experience it isn't a necessary prerequisite for them to be teaching within the school because as we know there is a wide range of expectations of the kinds of things that a school leader should be doing and the most important aspect is do they see it as a learning environment for the students but also do they see it as a learning environment for the teachers that they actually have in their own school would I add to that because I think the way in which the position of school heads is organized differs between countries in some countries it's a permanent position in other countries it's a temporary position and especially when it's a temporary position teachers will come back again after some time as being a school head back to the teaching profession and then I think that the question is that possible is that a challenge to teachers is a realistic one but I think it's a question both in terms of the challenge for a former school head but also it's a question of acceptance I think it's a challenge for school heads have a job which feels exciting again and I've seen quite a number of examples of people who have been a school head or department head and then went back into teaching and discovered well being a teacher is challenging again because all the questions I'm confronted with about learning of pupils, about supporting them are still as exciting as it used to be when I was a teacher a long time ago and I think that's one of the fascinating things I think about teaching that you could go up on a career level and then go back again into teaching and still have a challenge of how to support my colleagues in the best way but the other thing is about acceptance in the last session of the working group we had in Brussels we had an example of a teacher who became a school leader and then went into the ministry and worked for the ministry and now was back again into teaching and actually he liked very much being a teacher again and to deal with all the challenges of that but he didn't dare to say to his colleagues that he had worked in the ministry so what it actually showed for me is that we often have a problem to recognize specific qualities or experiences that people have in their previous career steps and I think school heads can go back into teaching but we need to recognize that they have comments from the speakers or any final questions before we close this session there's one question from Portugal once a school leader he or she should keep the role in a different school when they apply I think the question is about the limitation of the years in the same school do you have any comments on limitations for school leaders or switching from one school to another if I understood the question I could try to give an answer to that one I think I'm a bit linking it to what Marco just said it's about competencies people have and it's about recognizing competencies that people have more than we do now in the education sector and if it's in the same school if the person is really capable and happy with doing that it should not be a problem to have somebody who was a principal working back as a teacher in the same school but if he or she prefers to do it in another school that should also not be a problem it should be a choice and every school should be happy to have an experienced teacher and school head in his teaching crew final comment Hannah hello again I realized that we're now at the end of our time for the webinar so I just wanted to answer it was a question on the guide itself just to say you can see it covered there on the left of the slide it is written as a policy guide so it's written for ministries for those also authorities and agencies working in school education with the hope that they will be able to initiate and reflect on possibly quite significant changes in the system but also perhaps more localize changes so we also encourage local authorities school heads and even teachers to take a look at that report it's got lots of examples from different countries and all of the ideas we've talked about are explained in a bit more detail as well and it will be published on the school education gateway in the coming days we hope so I just wanted to share that with everybody as a closing remark from me also to say thank you very much to the speakers and the participants I think everybody in all sectors of society but including school education so now that we are coming to the close to the webinar I also want to say a big thank you for all the speakers and thank you so much Hanna for also coordinating this webinar and now to answer one question from the one more participant for the certificate for this session you need to fill in the feedback survey and after you complete it there will be a link on teacher academy to download your certificate and for that you need to be logged in on teacher academy to be able to download it I also put the link in the chat and so a really big thank you from me to Kaye Lichten and Marco thank you so much and thank you so much the participants for coming and having your wonderful comments and questions and it was an excellent webinar