Regulating on Ambiguity: Why FE Initial Teacher Training Needs Practitioner Research, Not Just New Rules

The quality of initial teacher training (ITT) in further education (FE) is again under review, but this time with a sharper regulatory edge. From 2026, providers of FE ITT will be required to register with government, submit standardised student data and follow new curriculum guidance under the Further Education (Initial Teacher Training) Regulations 2026. These changes are framed as a response to “persistent” poor‑quality provision and the continued use of “contested and outdated theories” in some programmes (Department for Education [DfE], 2025, p.3). Yet the emerging evidence base is more ambiguous than the rhetoric implies.​

“most trainees benefit from a well‑sequenced curriculum that helps them to learn about a range of relevant teaching strategies”

Ofsted’s Thematic Review

Ofsted’s 2025 thematic overview of initial teacher education (sample of 23 providers) reported variation in provision across phases and providers, but did not present a picture of systemic failure. In FE and skills, inspectors found that “most trainees benefit from a well‑sequenced curriculum that helps them to learn about a range of relevant teaching strategies” (Ofsted, 2025, p.38). Concerns were targeted rather than general: “a few trainees continue to study learning styles without critique” (ibid) while mentoring quality and quality assurance arrangements were judged as inconsistent. These are not trivial weaknesses, but they sit uneasily alongside ministerial claims of “persistent” poor quality across the ITT market.​ The evidence from the review does not justify perceptions of an outdated ITT profession.

Evidence and Framing: Building the Case for Regulation

​The DfE’s 2025 call for evidence on FE teacher ITT and development intensified this sense of dissonance. On the one hand, the consultation acknowledged a “renewed focus on the role that high quality training and development plays” by seeking to build a “more secure evidence base” for both ITT and early‑career development in discussion with the sector (DfE, 2025, p.3). On the other, it asserted that Ofsted inspections already showed “significant variability” and “uncritical acceptance” of outdated theories in ITT classrooms (p.3), signalling its appetite for new statutory guidance to regulate curriculum content and delivery. The inquiry thus appeared to both invite and pre‑empt evidence, narrowing the policy space before a robust empirical consensus was established.​

Press stories have a tendency to amplify this negative framing, in which regulation is presented as a necessary response to “poor‑quality provision” (Patel, 2026). It is true that the DfE have been highly critical of some of this provision, notably from the private sector (DfE, 2025) but it is always useful to understand the evidence on which these conclusions are premised.

Almost 2 in 3 FE and skills ITT providers inspected since 2020 were graded ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’

ITT outcomes reported for 2022/23 Ofsted for FE ITT in 2022/23 highlighted that almost two thirds of FE and skills ITT providers inspected since 2020 were graded ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ under the existing ITT regime (Matthews, 29 November 2022, online citation). At a glance, this is certainly worrying, but Ofsted also acknowledged that the findings were based on 14 providers, warning it would be “wrong to draw conclusions about the whole of the FE and skills ITT sector from this small sample of inspections” (Matthews, 2022, online citation).

The next year, Ofsted published an update to its ITT inspection statistics on 8th November 2023 showing the results for 32 ITT providers in FE at their last inspection. 27 of the 32 (85%) were graded ‘good’ or ‘better’, with 3 (9%) judged ‘requires improvement’ and 2 (6%) ‘inadequate’. While the results are slightly less impressive than primary and secondary schools (both 98% ‘good or better’, it is evidence that a significant proportion of the ITT curriculum in FE is effective. In Ofsted’s 2023-4 annual report, in which – curiously – the entire skills agenda is allocated a single page, Chief Inspector Sir Martyn Oliver wrote: “We have seen substantial improvements in the quality of [ITT] for FE and skills since 2020, which bodes well for the future of the sector” (Ofsted, 2024, p31). This is not a concern about quality, quite the opposite in fact, and an opportunity for the sector to celebrate. The sector should stand up and take credit for this. Of course, some of the sector’s more hawkish critics may argue this is not as good as schools, but these criticisms rarely acknowledge the diversity of teachers’ backgrounds, learner needs and curriculum complexities that FE and skills uniquely presents, nor the considerable distance that some ITT trainees travel on their journey towards qualification.

Political Debate and Enduring Paradoxes

Parliamentary scrutiny has been more nuanced. The House of Commons Education Committee’s 2025 report on further education and skills highlighted severe challenges in recruitment, pay and workload, but did not single out FE ITT as a primary cause of the workforce crisis (Education Committee, 2025). Instead, the Committee emphasised structural underfunding, the widening pay gap with schools, and fragmented professional development pathways as key drivers of recruitment and retention difficulties. In this account, ITT is one part of a much wider ecosystem problem, not the obvious weak link.​

Similarly, the Minister for Skills’ 2024 letter to the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) struck a markedly positive tone about FE ITT. Smith (2024) described high‑quality initial teacher education as “of vital importance for building the supply and quality of teachers in the skills sector” and explicitly thanked UCET for “champion[ing] high quality standards in teacher training” (p. 1). Yet this endorsement co‑exists with the absence of any statutory requirement for FE teachers to be trained, which remains an enduring contradiction in the policy landscape. ITT is simultaneously valorised and optional, and there is limited robust assessment of how it impacts on learner outcomes and overall workforce quality.​

Clear, evidence‑based quality standards

The new FE ITT regulations deepen that paradox. During the Lords debate, Baroness Blake of Leeds characterised the regulations as “an important step towards creating a regulated system of teacher training for FE, covering the full range of providers … based on clear, evidence‑based quality standards” (HL Deb, 17 March 2026, col. GC123). However, the regulations quality-assure courses rather than teaching posts; an unqualified teacher in a college will still not be legally compelled to undertake accredited ITT. The state thus asserts a strong interest in the content of programmes that remain, in practice, optional for many employers and practitioners.

Taken together, these developments construct FE ITT as both problem and solution. Where evidence is available, it is partial and sometimes internally contradictory. Ofsted’s thematic review emphasises examples of well‑sequenced, research‑informed curricula and trainees using “a range of relevant adaptive teaching strategies’ to meet learners’ SEND needs (Ofsted, 2025, p.41), while ministerial and media narratives have disproportionately focus on ‘outdated’ and ‘inconsistent practices’ from a minority of cases (e.g. learning, styles, SEND integration). The DfE’s call for evidence promised to build a robust knowledge base (DfE, 2025), but its focus on statutory compliance will raise concerns that it will simply narrow the intellectual foundations on which effective ITT is grounded. The House of Commons report calls for systemic investment in FE staffing and professional development, but the most immediate policy response is tighter control of ITT curricula and market entry.

What Needs to Happen?

This is by no means a defence of poor or inexpert provision. In the last 15 years, notions such as kitemarking, registration and licensing have been regularly debated as solutions to the ‘consistency’ problem but never acted on, unlike other social practice professions like nursing and social work where mandatory training is a signal of professionalisation and competence. If providers cannot deliver high-quality curricula, they should rightfully have their funding removed. Teachers exert a profound influence on learners and we should expect them to be highly skilled and trained appropriately. That is where the new regulations will be welcome. However, neither should the existence of ‘rogue’ providers surprise us. In a deregulated market, where diversity and choice are predominant policy values, customers will pick provision that suits their end-goals – speed, affordability, flexibility, simplicity – and unfortunately a few ITT providers have cut corners and proved to be substandard. The ITT profession recognised these risks when statutory ITT was deregulated in 2012 and today’s regulations are dealing with the fallout. The concern is, as with other policy initiatives, to what extent is the FE sector driving these changes?

This is precisely where practitioner‑led research in FE ITT should come to the fore. The current discourse is dominated by inspection snapshots, consultation responses and political framings, each shaped by its own institutional logics. What is largely missing is rigorous, impact-driven evidence about how different forms of FE ITT actually influence teachers’ classroom practice, learner outcomes and professional trajectories. Ofsted itself notes examples of trainees whose “expert learning” about speech, language and communication needs has transformed their applied practice (Ofsted, 2025, p.9), but these vignettes are presented as illustrative rather than systematically evaluated. Likewise, the DfE consultation anticipates that “for most providers, the evidence that is produced will confirm that their current curricula include appropriate evidence‑based teaching and assessment content” (DfE, 2025, p.4), yet offers no mechanism for practitioners to document that evidence beyond citing external research.

​There is, then, a risk that FE ITT is re‑engineered from the top down on the basis of selectively interpreted inspection findings and consultations dominated by institutional voices, rather than by grounded analysis of practice in colleges, adult community settings and independent providers. In this context, practitioner research is not a luxury add‑on to policy; it is the only way to test whether the new regulatory settlement delivers on its own stated aims. Mixed‑methods studies that follow trainees from programme to classroom, explore how they negotiate contested theories in real teaching, and examine how different mentoring models operate in diverse FE contexts would provide the kind of “secure evidence base” that current documents rhetorically invoke but do not yet contain (DfE, 2025, p.3).​

Such work cannot be done solely from Whitehall or by inspections conducted every few years. It requires teachers, mentors, teacher educators and trainees to be positioned as co‑researchers of their own practice, supported by universities and sector bodies but not subsumed by them. Some of this work is starting to take place, but we need much more of it. A genuinely evidence‑informed FE ITT system would treat practitioner research as part of its quality infrastructure, not as an optional extra that providers undertake between cycles of regulatory reform.

If policy is about to lock in a new statutory framework for FE ITT on the grounds that current practice is “not good enough,” then the sector has a responsibility to ask: on whose evidence, and with what consequences? The contradictions across recent reports and speeches suggest that we are regulating in conditions of uncertainty, not consensus. In that situation, the most responsible next step is not simply to comply, but to research – systematically, collaboratively and from the standpoint of FE practitioners themselves.

By Dr Paul Tully is the Chief Executive of FEthink, a specialist analytics and research agency serving the further education and skills sector.

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References

Department for Education. (2024). Further Education (FE) Initial Teacher Training (ITT) reform Government consultation response. January 2024. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65b10330f2718c000dfb1c5e/FE_ITE_Reform_consultation_response.pdf {Accessed 26/03/26].

Department for Education. (2025). Further education teacher initial teacher training and development: Call for evidence.​ London: Department for Education.

Education Committee. (2025). Further education and skills: Sixth report of session 2024–26 (HC 666). London: Parliamentary Copyright House of Commons 2025.

​Further Education (Initial Teacher Training) Regulations (2026). HL Debate Vol. 854, 17 March 2026, Grand Committee. London: Hansard.

​Matthews, H. (2022). ‘Inspection outcomes for further education and skills (FE and skills) initial teacher education programmes in the current ITE inspection cycle’. Ofsted. 29 November 2022. https://educationinspection.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/29/inspection-outcomes-for-further-education-and-skills-fe-and-skills-initial-teacher-education-programmes-in-the-current-ite-inspection-cycle/ [accessed 26/03/26].

Ofsted (2023). Initial teacher education inspection statistics as at 31 August 2023 charts tables and data. 8th November 2023 release. London: Ofsted.

Ofsted. (2025). Initial teacher education thematic monitoring visits: Overview report.​ London: HMSO.

Smith, J. (2024). Letter to J. Noble‑Rogers on the importance of ITT for FE and skills.​ 31 July 2024. London: Department for Education.