Early Career Training Programme

This programme follows the Department for Education’s Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework.

The new framework was introduced in September 2025 and forms the basis of what all early career teachers must know and be able to do.

Our ECT Programme is underpinned by four core areas covering behaviour, instruction, curriculum and assessment, and professional practice.

Across all these modules, participants will also develop an understanding of how pupils learn.

Behaviour
Your ECTs will learn how to:

• Create a positive classroom culture
• Establish and maintain clear expectations and routines
• Respond to disruption and restore relationships with pupils
• Support pupils to steer their emotions and interactions with others
• Foster positive and healthy attitudes to challenging tasks
• Support pupils to monitor and direct their own learning
• Promote a culture that embraces error as a learning opportunity

Instruction
Your ECTs will learn how to:

• Identify, activate and build on pupils’ prior knowledge
• Use explanations to communicate new information
• Use models to illustrate new ideas and processes
• Design effective independent practice tasks
• Design, use and remove scaffolds over time
• Structure retrieval to support long-term recall
• Increase challenge to deepen pupil thinking

Curriculum and Assessment
Your ECTs will learn how to:

• Collaborate with others to identify curriculum purpose
• Identify and sequence knowledge across lessons
• Understand core approaches and debates across subjects
• Anticipate, identify and address gaps and misconceptions
• Use formative assessment to draw conclusions about pupils’ understanding
• Design high-quality feedback to help pupils improve
• Support pupils to think critically about key ideas
• Create an inclusive classroom environment
• Respond to individual pupils’ needs
• Improve pupils’ literacy across subjects

Professional Practice
Your ECTs will learn how to:

• Identify and engage with high-quality research
• Increasingly contribute to the wider school culture
• Manage workload when taking on additional responsibilities
• Use a structured process to make adaptations to practice

Our Early Career Training Programme is designed so early career teachers can engage in live, facilitated sessions alongside modules they complete through our online platform.

Over two years, our ECTP includes:

• Three full day conferences.
• 35 online modules with a recommended frequency of one per fortnight.
• Six one-hour clinics (facilitated sessions).
• Weekly coaching in year one and fortnightly coaching in year two.

The content is delivered through blended learning. This includes a mix of real-time, interactive online sessions and self-guided modules.

Each module includes videos, reflection questions and diagnostic checks that help them engage with the latest research and ideas for practical classroom implementation, all delivered in a manageable and accessible way.

ECTs benefit from regular instructional coaching sessions from an ECT mentor, which are designed to support early career teachers to apply insights from the study materials into their classroom practice.

ECTs also have optional pastoral coaching, which aims to support workload, wellbeing and managing school life as needed.

Our programme includes chances for ECTs to network with other teachers regionally, especially at in-person events.

Our interactive learning platform
ECTs, mentors and induction tutors access the ECT Programme through the online platform Steplab, the marketing leading professional development tool. Through Steplab, participants learn in bite-size, easy to follow steps, while mentors and tutors can easily monitor and track their learning without adding to their workload.

Tailored to the needs of your trainees
Following the introduction of the new ITTECF, we’ve improved our programme to include more specialist content to help pupils with oracy, early cognitive development and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Adaptable to different settings
ECTs and mentors can now access a wider range of training materials, including specific examples for different subjects, phases and settings (particularly for primary and early years), providing participants with a tailored training pathway.

Retain your teachers
By training your ECTs and mentors with Ambition, you’re providing them with professional development which invests in their future. The DfE found that four in five early career teachers who started an ECF based induction were retained in state schools after two years.

Gain a teacher educator
As part of our ECT Programme, your mentors have access to a wide range of training resources to help them better support your ECTs. This includes access to teacher educator materials that can be applied to benefit other departments across your school as well as your early career teachers.

Our ECT approach
By choosing our ECT Programme, your staff will benefit from high quality, structured support with training based on the ‘science of learning’ and instructional coaching frameworks, as well as being able to access DfE funding.

Develop their practice
Our ECT Programme helps new teachers build confidence by developing their practice, knowledge and effective working habits for a fulling career in teaching.

Flexible learning
No two school weeks are the same. That’s why we’ve designed our programme with flexibility in mind, using a blend of synchronous and asynchronous content. This way, new teachers and mentors can fit their training alongside the working life of a teacher.

Boost teaching wellbeing
Through pastoral mentoring, ECTs benefit from wellbeing and workload support, helping them grow into school-life.

New diagnostic tools
ECT mentors have access to our latest diagnostic tools to assess what your early career teachers already know from teacher training, so that they can adapt training to better meet the needs of the ECT.

Personalised mentor training
As part of our ECT Programme, mentors can personalise their own development. This includes access to over 40 hours of online sessions, providing them with the opportunity to make the programme their own and learn through a truly tailored training experience.

Connect with peers
ECTs and mentors get the opportunity to share their learning with fellow peers from other settings as well sharing strategies to improve their practice in their school.

The ITTECF provides an entitlement to two years of evidence-informed development for teachers at the start of their career.

Through the ITTEC Framework we have developed our carefully sequenced and evidence-informed curriculum for teachers and mentors focuses on how teachers learn as well as what they learn. 

We use instructional coaching, one of the best-evidenced forms of professional development, meaning your early career teachers will benefit from bite-sized content and tailored, observational feedback to help them to keep getting better over time.

The Early Career Framework has been replaced with the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF) since September 2025. This framework sets out what trainee and early career teachers need to know, and know how to do, at the start of their careers.

ECT means Early Career Teacher. They are teachers who have gained QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) and are starting their first two years in a teaching role.

ECT teachers are teachers in the first two years in role following the completion initial teacher training. They receive a mandatory two-year training provision that includes mentoring and coaching to help them meet teacher standards.