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A strong focus of the Department for Education (DfE) in England has recently been to support early career teachers–for example, through the development of a two-year package to support the professional development of new teachers (DfE, 2020b). Supporting early career teachers is essential, especially as the retention rate for newly qualified teachers (NQT) from their first into their second and from their second into their third year continues to fall (Worth, 2020). However, it is equally important to ensure that teachers at later stages of their career (ie beyond the first five years) receive sufficient support.

The DfE has recently published plans to reform and expand current NPQs (National Professional Qualifications)(DfE, 2020c), which include reforms of existing NPQs in senior leadership, headship and executive leadership, as well as the replacement of the current middle leadership qualification with three new programmes in supporting the training and development of others, developing teachers with responsibilities for teaching and learning (including subject leads) and developing teachers with responsibilities for behaviour and culture (DfE, 2020c). Despite this welcome initiative, it remains the case that the needs of teachers at the middle and later stages of their career typically receive less attention (Kirkpatrick, 2007; Kirkpatrick and Johnson, 2014)–a gap that needs to be addressed if we want to ensure that mid-career teachers (defined for the purposes of this study as those with five to 15 years of experience) have access to professional qualifications and development opportunities that actually meet their needs.