Summary

Having teachers who are familiar with and using effective teaching practices is important to the quality of education received by our young people. Ongoing professional development is one way to inform teachers about effective teaching practices.

We carried out a performance audit that looked at the Ministry of Education's (the Ministry's) arrangements to support the professional development of primary and secondary school teachers after they have graduated from a teacher education programme.

Professional development can be informal or formal and covers a wide range of activities. It includes training courses, conferences, tertiary study, observed practice, and study groups.

The Ministry of Education's roles in the professional development of teachers

The Ministry, teachers, school boards of trustees, providers of professional development services, the New Zealand Teachers Council, and the Education Review Office all play a part in the professional development of teachers. This means that decisions about who receives what kind of professional development are often made by, or influenced by, more than one organisation.

The Ministry's main roles in the professional development of teachers are:

• funding professional development providers;
• providing operational funding to schools, some of which schools can use for the professional development of their teachers;
• funding other types of professional development – for example, Schooling Improvement initiatives and scholarships for teachers;
• monitoring professional development providers and evaluating professional development initiatives; and
• collating and providing evidence of what is effective professional development.

The Ministry also sets and implements policies on designing and regulating the education system, such as the National Administration Guidelines and the National Education Guidelines.

The Ministry is aware of the range of sources of funding it uses for professional development for teachers. One of the main sources is the Professional Development and Support appropriation. In the 2007/08 year, the Ministry anticipated spending about $92 million of this appropriation on the areas covered by our audit.

The Ministry has not taken into account its total spending on professional development for teachers across all of its sources of funding when considering the relative priority of initiatives or for the purpose of considering the adequacy of professional development funding. We have estimated the Ministry's total spending on professional development for teachers in the areas covered by our audit at more than $200 million in 2007/08.

Our findings

We examined the Ministry's roles in the professional development of teachers against our expectations. When we set our expectations we were mindful that schools, in New Zealand's devolved education system, are self-governing entities.

Within this devolved system, schools have a lot of responsibility for monitoring the quality of teaching, identifying professional development needs, and supporting and arranging access to appropriate professional development for teachers where necessary. We have not examined schools' decision-making practices because our audit was of the Ministry, not schools.

Objectives, information, and support for professional development

We expected the Ministry to have set overall objectives within the education system for the professional development of teachers. We expected the Ministry to have, and use, evidence of what constitutes effective professional development, including sharing this evidence with teachers and the providers of professional development. We also expected that the Ministry would support others within the education sector to carry out their roles in relation to professional development for teachers.

The Ministry has identified effective teaching as the main objective of professional development for teachers.

The Ministry has assembled considerable evidence of the characteristics of effective professional development for teachers, and has made this available to the education sector. The Ministry is increasingly using this evidence to inform its purchase of professional development services.

We have identified some areas for improvement, including a need for the Ministry to ensure that information on professional development opportunities for teachers is presented to the education sector in a more coherent, less fragmented way.

Managing risk and the performance of contractors

We expected the Ministry to effectively manage risks (for example, risks to sector capability and capacity to participate in professional development) in its arrangements to support professional development for teachers, including any risks associated with its contracts with the providers of professional development. We also expected the Ministry to have effective systems for monitoring those providers to ensure that the delivery of the professional development initiatives is satisfactory.

The Ministry's contract management practices compared the delivery of professional development initiatives with contracted expectations. As well as monitoring the providers of professional development services, the Ministry has carried out or commissioned evaluations of many of the professional development initiatives that it funds.

We note that, for one large initiative being implemented, Extending High Standards Across Schools, the Ministry has proposed developing an overall evaluation strategy, but the strategy had not been written at the time of our audit. It is important that the Ministry completes the strategy and conducts the evaluation for this initiative.

In our view, the Ministry could make more systematic use of the range of information it collects, including better use of reports from providers of professional development services, to identify risks and wider lessons learned throughout the professional development initiatives that it funds. From the contract files we reviewed, it was clear that the Ministry could also better document risks and the management of risks.

Funding, prioritisation, and value for money

We expected the Ministry to have a strategy or plan to help ensure that all of its funding for professional development is directed to areas of need and the highest priorities. We also expected the Ministry's contract management practices to support value for money.

The Ministry could not provide us with strong evidence of an established and coherent funding and procurement strategy that consistently prioritises the supply of professional development funding to the areas of greatest need. However, we acknowledge that the Ministry's Schooling Improvement initiatives are specifically targeted at high-needs schools and that the Ministry has begun work that will help it better manage the whole of its spending on professional development for teachers.

In our view, the Ministry needs to include all of its spending on professional development for teachers when it decides the priority of initiatives to fund, and when it considers the adequacy of funding for professional development.

In the files we reviewed, we did not see evidence of regular reviews of provider efficiency or the consistent use of efficiency-related performance measures across professional development programmes.

Specifically we identified:

• a lack of a systematic approach to prioritising the full range of professional development initiatives over which the Ministry has some control or influence (although the Ministry has set out in a draft document a process for setting priorities);
• limited documentary evidence of reviews of value for money in contract files, despite such reviews being a requirement of the Ministry's contract management guidelines;
• potentially high compliance costs for some provider milestone reporting, relative to the benefits gained from the reports; and
• limited recovery of funds from providers for undelivered services (although in some cases substitute services were provided).

In 2006, the Ministry identified gaps in its information on how successful the regulatory, funding, and infrastructure arrangements for professional development were in promoting and supporting effective professional development for teachers. Specific examples that it identified were some gaps in the information on the effectiveness of multiple, centrally-driven contracts; on time-bound initiatives; and on the capability of the providers of professional development for teachers.

We acknowledge that the Ministry has recently worked to improve the efficiency of professional development services.

Our recommendations

We have made 11 recommendations. We appreciate the Ministry's commitment to responding constructively to our recommendations, including preparing a work plan to address the recommendations.

Setting objectives, sharing information, and supporting professional development

We recommend that the Ministry of Education:

1. document and publish its approach to professional development for teachers, including the criteria it uses to prioritise initiatives and its funding and contracting intentions, in an easily accessible format;
2. regularly review the professional development initiatives for teachers that it funds against the evidence of what is effective professional development, and use the review to ensure, wherever possible, that its funding decisions and the operations of providers are consistent with that evidence;
3. review the range and content of Ministry-funded professional development initiatives for teachers to determine whether it is building enough capability within the education sector to implement an evidence-based approach to professional development; and
4. make information on the full range of Ministry-funded professional development initiatives for teachers easily accessible in a central repository.

Risk management, contracting, and evaluation

We recommend that the Ministry of Education:

5. document in its contract files the risks to effective professional development for teachers and the associated risk management activities, and actively manage the risks, where possible, for each professional development contract; and
6. make better use of the information it collects from all relevant sources (for example, monitoring and reporting information from providers of professional development for teachers, informal and formal school reporting, and schools' planning documents) to identify emerging professional development trends, needs, and issues.

Funding, prioritisation, and value for money

We recommend that the Ministry of Education:

7. include all of its spending on professional development for teachers when deciding the priority of initiatives to fund, and when considering the adequacy of professional development funding;
8. reduce the risk of over-commitment by schools to, or waste in the provision of, professional development initiatives that can occur when schools participate in too many or too many similar Ministry-funded initiatives;
9. include value-for-money considerations when purchasing new, or evaluating existing, professional development initiatives for teachers;
10. continue to work with the contracted providers of professional development initiatives for teachers to ensure that contract monitoring reports are useful and do not create inappropriate compliance costs for providers or the Ministry; and
11. prepare clear guidance for staff about using the provisions in contracts to recover funds for undelivered services from the providers of professional development initiatives for teachers, and ensure that the guidance is followed.