Teacher professionalism is a driver for improvement in Scottish education and is underpinned by high-quality career-long professional learning.

In a period of educational reform and financial austerity, it is timely to consider how to maximise the impact of teacher professional learning.

Notably, subject-specific professional learning (SSPL) has been shown to effectively impact teachers’ practices and to aid teacher retention. However, provision of SSPL across Scotland is variable.

Hear from Stuart Farmer, Institute of Physics (IOP) and Fhiona Mackay, Scotland’s National Centre for Languages/Confucius Institute for Scotland’s Schools about the issues around SSPL. Explore how they might be improved across the curriculum.

Stuart and Fhiona will discuss key points from the Subjects Matter report, which looks at subject-specific continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers. The report is based on the IOP’s collaboration with over 50 educational organisations, subject-specific societies and individual specialists, who drew on a wide range of evidence from England, Scotland and Wales.

Following Subjects Matter, in 2021 Laura Thomas, a PhD researcher at the University of Stirling, produced a follow-up paper that summarised the policy and practice in relation to Career Long Professional Learning (CLPL) in Scotland. It went on to discuss the research on what makes high quality and effective (CLPL), particularly in relation to subject-specific professional learning (SSPL) before examining the evidence available on (CLPL) provision in Scotland.