You may have heard about some changes coming to the Early Career Framework from September 2025. Firstly, the ECF will now be called the ECTE which stands for The Early Career Teachers’ Entitlement. Secondly, in response to a review of the ECF, lead providers have created new ECT offers to provide:

• More tailoring to specific contexts and subjects
• Support with supporting pupils with SEND
• Less repetition in self study
• Reduced workload for mentors

Our lead provider, Ambition’s new offer is called ECT 25 and you can read more about this below.

IMPORTANT: only ECTs registered from September 2025 onwards will be on ECT 25. All other ECTs will continue with the current ECT programme.

The ECT 25 curriculum will keep the familiar 3 strand model that you are used to. These strands are:

• Behaviour
• Instruction
• Curriculum and assessment (used to be called Subject)

In addition to these three strands, we are adding a fourth strand ‘professional practice’ which you will see at the end of term 5 and all of term 6.

A new approach to the study journey will see ECTs studying across strands within each term. In this diagram you can see how this will look:

Self study modules are designed to be accessed via Steplab every fortnight throughout the two year programme. ECT 25 self-study modules are pitched at a higher level of expertise than in the current programme and each modules contains a symptom checker to help guide ECTs to the exemplification option that best suits their current level of understanding.

The self-study modules have always included a wide range of exemplification. However, the new programme increases this range significantly. Across the programme, ECTs will find examples from all phases, key stages, a wide range of subjects and SEND. They will encounter newly written examples covering post 16, practical subjects and early years. They are therefore much more likely to read examples that match their current experience of classroom practice.

Strong messaging on the importance of supporting all pupils , including pupils with SEND is throughout all the self-study modules. There are also places within the self-study and event materials where you will see a more explicit exploration of how to support teachers to build their practice.

For ECTs in specialist SEND settings, specialist SEND examples have been added to a range of self-study modules and to every clinic. A specialist version of ECT Conference 2 on adaptive teaching has been developed in collaboration with leaders from SEND specialist settings

Under the new ECTE, the mentor training programme has been condensed into one year to avoid over-burdening mentors with additional workload. Mentor training events will be as follows:

• Term 1 – Conference 1: Developing high-quality instructional coaching
• Term 2 – Conference 2: Adapting the instructional coaching model to ECT expertise
• Term 3 – Clinic: Providing challenge through instructional coaching

We also have a range of additional mentor training and support materials that we signpost you to, providing the right amount of support and challenge for your professional development needs.

What stays the same?

These two elements stay the same:

1) Mentor meetings will continue to be held weekly in year 1 and fortnightly in year 2.

2) Instructional coaching continues to be the best way to support ECTs in making effective, long-lasting changes in their practice and so this will remain as the cornerstone of coaching.

How is Instructional Coaching changing?

The only change to instructional coaching is that mentors can opt to do it fortnightly in ECTs’ Year 1, instead of weekly. They can still choose to do it weekly if that is right for the ECT. The expectation of the new programme is that instructional coaching will be fortnightly across two years, remaining tightly aligned to ECT self-study.

Pastoral meetings

We firmly believe that instructional coaching is essential. However, we want to balance this with the need that ECTs have for pastoral support. We are introducing the option of pastoral meetings each fortnight in year 1 ECT-mentor

meetings. This could encompass a wide range of issues such as managing and planning for parents’ evenings, tutor groups, wellbeing, phone calls home, and workload to name a few. The content of this would be based on ECT need and decided by the mentor.

As most schools will be running the current ECT programme and ECT 25 at the same time with different cohorts, we have produced Comparison tables to help you make sense of the similarities and differences between the two. As always, the Pathfinder team will be here to support you to navigate these changes.