There is a version of professional development that everybody in education has experienced and almost nobody believes in. A visiting speaker arrives for an in-service day. They deliver a presentation — usually polished, often interesting, occasionally inspiring — on a topic chosen by the senior leadership team. Teachers listen, take a few notes, return to their classrooms, and resume teaching more or less as they did before. The speaker's slides are emailed out. A feedback form is completed. The CPD log is updated. And nothing changes.
This is not a caricature. It is the modal experience of professional development in schools, and the research on its effectiveness is sobering. The EEF's Effective Professional Development guidance report (Sims et al., 2021), based on a meta-analysis of 104 studies, found that the professional development most likely to improve pupil outcomes was sustained, practice-based, and designed around specific mechanisms for changing teacher behaviour. One-off events, however well delivered, do not meet any of these criteria. They build knowledge — sometimes — but they do not develop technique, embed practice, or sustain change. The gap between what we know about effective professional learning and what most schools actually provide is one of the widest in education.
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The compliance problem
In Scotland, every registered teacher must engage in professional learning as part of the GTCS Professional Update process, which operates on a five-year cycle. The framework is, on paper, exactly right: it asks teachers to self-evaluate against the Professional Standards, engage in ongoing professional learning, maintain a reflective record with evidence of impact, and participate in Professional Review and Development (PRD). The emphasis on self-evaluation, reflection, and impact — rather than on hours logged or courses attended — reflects a genuinely sophisticated understanding of how professionals develop.
In England, the Teachers' Standards and the Early Career Framework serve a structurally similar role — setting expectations for professional development that are sound in principle but inconsistently realised in practice.
The difficulty is that a framework describes what professional learning should look like, but it cannot determine what it looks like in any given school. And what it looks like, in too many cases, is compliance: the accumulation of evidence that professional learning has occurred rather than that it has produced a change in practice that benefits pupils. A teacher who attends three twilight sessions, reads two articles, and writes a reflective paragraph about each has met the technical requirements without necessarily changing anything about how they teach. The system measures activity. It struggles to measure impact.
This is not the GTCS's fault. The Professional Standards — refreshed in 2021 — explicitly ask teachers to demonstrate impact on learners, and the GTCS itself has worked to dispel myths about Professional Update, including the idea that teachers need to cover every aspect of the Standards or traffic-light themselves against each criterion. The problem is structural rather than conceptual: schools are busy places with finite time, and the path of least resistance for both teachers and the leaders who sign off their PRD is to treat professional learning as a box to be ticked rather than a practice to be cultivated.
What the evidence says works
The EEF report identifies four groups of mechanisms through which professional development changes practice: building knowledge, motivating teachers, developing teaching techniques, and embedding practice. The critical finding is that programmes which include mechanisms from all four groups are substantially more likely to produce measurable gains in pupil outcomes than programmes which include only some. A single in-service presentation might build knowledge (group one) and motivate (group two), but it does almost nothing to develop technique (group three) or embed new practice (group four). The mechanisms that produce lasting change — practice, feedback, observation, coaching, collaborative planning — require sustained engagement over time, not a day out of the classroom.
Helen Timperley's Best Evidence Synthesis (2007) reached similar conclusions from a different direction. Timperley's teacher inquiry and knowledge-building cycle — which begins with identifying valued student outcomes, asks what teachers need to learn to promote those outcomes, and then evaluates whether the learning has had an impact — places the teacher's own practice at the centre of the learning process. Professional learning, in Timperley's framework, is not something that happens to teachers (a course, a speaker, a programme delivered from outside). It is something teachers do, using evidence from their own classrooms to identify what is working, what is not, and what they need to learn next.
The evidence for professional learning priorities is already in the building — in observation records, attainment data, and pupil voice.
The classic research by Joyce and Showers (2002) on the transfer of training provides perhaps the most concrete illustration of why most CPD fails to change practice. Joyce and Showers found that professional development consisting of theory and demonstration alone produced almost no transfer to classroom practice. Adding practice to the training improved transfer somewhat. But it was only when coaching was added — ongoing, in-context support that helped teachers apply new techniques in their own classrooms with feedback — that transfer rates rose substantially. The implication, which the subsequent research has reinforced repeatedly, is that professional learning without follow-up is professional learning wasted.
Dylan Wiliam, whose own professional development programme — Embedding Formative Assessment — was tested by the EEF in a randomised controlled trial of 140 secondary schools, has argued that teacher professional development is the most important lever for improving pupil outcomes because teacher quality is the single largest in-school factor affecting student achievement, and because teachers can and do improve throughout their careers, provided the conditions for improvement exist. The EEF's evaluation found that pupils in schools using the programme made the equivalent of two additional months' progress — a modest but real effect produced not by a new curriculum or a new intervention but by sustained professional learning focused on a specific set of teaching practices.
What this means for schools
If the evidence is so clear, why do schools persist with models of professional development that the research suggests are ineffective? The answer is partly structural — in-service days are built into the calendar, visiting speakers are easy to organise, and there is a genuine need for whole-school communication that in-service days serve even when they don't serve professional learning. But the answer is also partly about what schools count as professional learning and what they don't.
Effective professional learning starts with evidence from practice — and that means rethinking what classroom observation is for.
Consider classroom observation. In most schools, observation sits within the quality assurance framework — it is something done to evaluate teaching, not something understood as professional learning. But when observation is structured developmentally — with a specific focus, a feedback conversation grounded in what was seen, and a concrete next step — it is one of the most powerful forms of professional learning available. The observer learns from watching. The teacher learns from the feedback conversation. And if the observation evidence is aggregated across the school, the whole institution learns about its collective practice. The EEF framework would classify this as including mechanisms from all four groups: it builds knowledge (about what is happening in classrooms), motivates (by making practice visible and valued), develops technique (through specific feedback), and embeds practice (through follow-up and repetition). Yet observation is rarely counted as CPD. It does not appear on the professional learning record. It does not generate a certificate.
The same is true of collaborative planning, lesson study, peer observation, and the kind of structured professional dialogue that Timperley's inquiry cycle depends on. These are among the most evidence-supported forms of professional learning, and they are among the least likely to be recorded, recognised, or valued by the systems schools use to track professional development.
The result is a strange inversion: the professional learning that is easiest to record (courses, conferences, webinars) is the least likely to change practice, and the professional learning that is hardest to record (observation, coaching, collaborative inquiry) is the most likely to change practice. Schools that take professional learning seriously will need to resolve this inversion — not by abandoning formal CPD, which has its place, but by ensuring that the professional learning which develops teaching is given the time, structure, and recognition it deserves.
From CPD to professional learning
The distinction between CPD and professional learning is not semantic. CPD — continuing professional development — is a compliance category. It describes activity that a teacher undertakes to maintain their professional standing. Professional learning is what happens when that activity actually changes how they think about and enact their practice, in ways that benefit pupils. The two can overlap, but they often don't, and the systems schools use to manage professional development tend to optimise for the first rather than the second.
The GTCS Professional Standards get this right in principle. They ask for evidence of impact, not evidence of attendance. They place the teacher at the centre as the lead learner, not as the passive recipient of external expertise. But turning these principles into practice requires schools to create the conditions that the evidence identifies as necessary: sustained engagement over time rather than one-off events; a focus on specific aspects of practice rather than generic themes; mechanisms for developing technique and embedding change, not just building knowledge; and a culture in which professional learning is understood as the most important thing a school does, because the quality of teaching is the most important factor within a school's control.
Professional learning only works when it's connected to an improvement process that prioritises it, not bolted on as an afterthought.
This is not a counsel of perfection. It is a practical argument about where schools should invest their most scarce resource — teacher time — if they want that investment to produce a return in the form of better teaching and better outcomes for the young people they serve.
When professional learning priorities need to be grounded in what classrooms show, Learning Lens captures structured practice evidence. Book a conversation if it might fit your setting.
References
Education Endowment Foundation (2021). Effective Professional Development: Guidance Report. London: EEF.
Education Endowment Foundation (2019). Embedding Formative Assessment: Evaluation Report. London: EEF.
Joyce, B. & Showers, B. (2002). Student Achievement through Staff Development (3rd edition). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O'Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J. & Anders, J. (2021). What Are the Characteristics of Effective Teacher Professional Development? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. London: EEF.
Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H. & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration. Wellington: Ministry of Education.
Wiliam, D. (2016). Leadership for Teacher Learning. West Palm Beach, FL: Learning Sciences International.
Jamie Scobie writes from extensive experience in Scottish secondary education, including pastoral care, data for improvement, and school self-evaluation. This blog is an independent publication: he writes in a personal capacity as the creator of Learning Lens, writing about classroom observation, teaching evidence, and education policy. He speaks here only for himself and for Learning Lens, not for any employer or other organisation. He holds an MSt from Cambridge (Distinction) and a Masters from Stirling.