Spring 2025 Posts

What Are ITaPs Actually Achieving in Secondary ITE? Challenges and Possibilities for Subject-Specific Practice

Since the publication of the DfE’s revised guidance on Intensive Training and Practice (ITaP), ITE providers have been scrambling to unpick its logic and implement something meaningful and manageable. While the guidance gestures towards the noble goal of bridging theory and practice, its operationalisation has been fraught with tension—particularly in secondary ITE, where the disciplinary roots of teaching are critical. In this post, I reflect on what we’re learning from the early implementation of ITaPs and what they might offer (or hinder) in secondary education.

The Promise vs. the Practice

There’s no denying that the original aspiration behind ITaP—creating opportunities for deliberate practice, informed by research, with targeted feedback—is a good one. Many of us in ITE have long been crafting such spaces already, though perhaps not within a four-week silo. But the ITaP format imposed by the reaccreditation process has often felt like retrofitting good practice into a rigid structure that lacks nuance and contextual awareness.

In practice, implementing ITaPs in secondary settings has presented a range of challenges:

• Generic themes versus subject-specific needs: A persistent concern is the generic framing of ITaP foci—“questioning,” “modelling,” “retrieval practice.” While these are clearly important, their implementation is highly dependent on subject and phase. A history trainee needs to explore how questioning draws out disciplinary thinking about causation or significance. A science trainee might instead be focused on scaffolding practical investigations. The one-size-fits-all model does not serve the complexity of subject-specific pedagogy.
  
  

• Placement constraints: Many ITaPs are being run either in university-led blocks or during placement, often depending on the nature of the partnership. But in-school ITaPs, while potentially rich in contextual grounding, are hampered by timetable restrictions, staff availability, and a squeeze on reflection time due to the increased pupil-facing requirements introduced by the new framework.
  
  

• Design and delivery ownership: The guidance’s marginalisation of mentors in the design of ITaPs continues to undermine one of ITE’s greatest assets—experienced practitioners who understand the complexities of learning to teach in their subject. Where ITaPs are designed without their input, the result is often procedural fidelity rather than meaningful growth.
  
  

Emerging Examples of Subject-Specific ITaPs

Despite these difficulties, some providers are beginning to explore how ITaPs can be grounded in disciplinary thinking and subject knowledge. A few examples stand out:

• History: Some providers are designing ITaPs focused on interpreting historical evidence. Trainees examine primary source material, consider typical misconceptions (e.g., source reliability vs. utility), and plan lessons that develop pupils’ evidential thinking. These ITaPs often draw on specialist literature, such as Counsell’s work on second-order concepts, and allow for live practice and microteaching of short tasks with peer and mentor feedback.
  
  

• English: In some cases, ITaPs are focusing on close reading and literary analysis. Trainees explore how to model critical reading, plan cumulative questions, and engage in shared reading activities. Importantly, these ITaPs are also using video reflection and shared pupil work to deepen analysis.
  
  

• Science: Others are building ITaPs around practical work—how to plan, set up, and scaffold investigations with a clear conceptual focus. Here, the challenge is often more logistical, requiring careful school-university coordination and availability of lab spaces.
  
  

In each case, successful ITaPs tend to have certain common characteristics: they are co-designed with subject specialists, rooted in real curricular challenges, and integrated across the course—not isolated.

What Needs to Happen Next?

To move from compliance to coherence, we need to ask deeper questions about what ITaPs are for, and who they’re for. Rather than prescriptive checklists, we need frameworks that support subject-specific experimentation. ITaPs should evolve as sites of inquiry—not performance.

A few key shifts would help:

1. Empowering mentors as co-designers, not mere deliverers, of ITaPs. Their insight is vital to ensure subject specificity and curricular relevance.
   
   

2. Reducing overemphasis on “technique” divorced from content. Yes, practice matters—but not at the expense of substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding.
   
   

3. Embedding ITaPs in the flow of the ITE year. Not as awkward blocks, but as part of a coherent spiral where practice, theory, and curriculum meaningfully interact.
   
   

The ITaP guidance, at its best, recognises that effective teaching is a matter of thoughtful, evidence-informed design. But in trying to mandate the conditions for this, it may risk narrowing the scope of professional judgement and subject expertise. The challenge for ITE providers is to claim back space for disciplinary integrity, while navigating a policy environment that often pulls in the opposite direction.

So are ITaPs working? It depends. Where providers are being bold, collaborative, and subject-aware, they’re showing promise. But where the process has become performative or generic, they risk missing the very thing they claim to enhance: the complex, messy, and profoundly intellectual work of learning to teach well.

About the Author: Dr Rhonwen Bruce

Dr Rhonwen Bruce is the History PGCE Course Leader and Secondary ITaP Lead at Edge Hill University, with a research background in history education, curriculum reform, and the representation of marginalised histories. She works closely with schools and national education bodies to support subject-specific teacher development and is particularly interested in how beginning teachers learn to think historically in the classroom. Rhonwen combines academic insight with practical expertise to champion rich, meaningful history education rooted in disciplinary integrity.