Several influential reviews and two meta-reviews have converged on the position that teacher professional development (PD) is more effective when it is: sustained, collaborative, subject-specific, draws on external expertise, has buy-in from teachers and is practice-based. This consensus view has now been incorporated in government policy and official guidance in several countries. This paper reassesses the evidence underpinning the consensus, arguing that the reviews on which it is based have important methodological weaknesses, in that they employ inappropriate inclusion criteria and depend on an invalid inference method. The consensus view is therefore likely to be inaccurate. It is argued that researchers would make more progress identifying characteristics of effective professional development by looking for alignment between evidence from basic research on human skill acquisition and features of rigorouslyevaluated PD interventions.

Inquiry-based science teaching involves supporting pupils to acquire scientific knowledge indirectly by conducting their own scientific experiments, rather than receiving scientific knowledge directly from teachers. This approach to instruction is widely used among science educators in many countries. However, researchers and policymakers have recently called the effectiveness of inquiry approaches into doubt. Using nationally-representative, linked survey and administrative data, we find little evidence that the frequency of inquiry-based instruction is positively associated with teenagers' performance in science examinations. This finding is robust to the use of different measures of inquiry, different examinations/measures of attainment, across classrooms with varying levels of disciplinary standards and across gender and prior attainment subgroups.

Teacher shortages are a recurring problem in publicly funded schools, in part because of poor retention. Working conditions in schools are an important predictor of teacher job satisfaction and retention, yet research has so far made limited headway in identifying the specific aspects of the working environment which matter. This research uses representative data on state secondary school teachers in England in 2013 to derive an unusually rich set of working conditions variables. Regression analysis is used to model the relationships between working conditions, teacher job satisfaction and turnover intentions. The results show strong associations with the nature of school leadership, whether teachers have received training in the specific subjects they are assigned to teach and scope for career progression within the school. These results are robust to checks for common source bias. The study identifies ways in which schools can improve retention.

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the UCL Institute of Education. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions.CEPEO Workings Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

There is much interest in comparing latent traits, such as teacher job satisfaction, in large international surveys. However, different countries respond to questionnaires in different languages and interpret the questions through different cultural lenses, raising doubts about the psychometric equivalence of the measurements. Making valid comparisons depends on the latent traits displaying scalar measurement invariance. Unfortunately, this condition is rarely met across many countries at once. Different approaches that maximize the utility of such surveys, but remain faithful to the principles of measurement invariance testing, are therefore needed. This article illustrates one such approach, involving multiple‐pairwise comparisons. This enables us to compare teacher job satisfaction in England to 17 of the countries that participated in TALIS 2013. Teacher job satisfaction in England was as low, or lower, than all of the 17 comparable countries.