Continuing professional development

Since the Government Decree of 1997, teachers in Hungary have the professional duty to attend in-service training (Government Decree, 111/1997). There are currently two fundamental forms of in-service training: (a) 120 hours of in-service training obligation every seven years;

and (b) preparation for the teachers’ special examination which leads to a diploma and is a

190 precondition for reaching the category of Master Teacher in the new system of the teacher career path (Eurydice, 2018b). Although the two forms remain separate, there is a clear effort to include the lifelong learning perspective and the continuum thinking by linking teachers’

professional development with the career path system. National policy experts mentioned, however, that the term CPD, although translated into Hungarian, lacks a professional meaning because it still uses a very course-based idea of in-service training, similar to the way in-service training was defined by the 1997 decree.

Continuous professional development is like an artificial word in Hungarian, it doesn’t really mean anything, so you have to keep on repeating that it is not further training. Further training is something that happens to someone, it is not something that you generate to self. However, in continuous professional development, you, yourself generate your own professional development and this has to be explained in Hungarian, because you cannot really say that I took a CPD course. But somehow there was a cultural change because the pedagogical professional communities agreed with the wording provided by the European Commission documents. I have only translated these documents to Hungarian and their adaptation became common knowledge, became more widespread since 2008. (Interview, HU_NPE-1)

Similarly, interviewed teachers seemed ambivalent as to the impact of CPD on their professional practice and development (Group Interview, HU_Teachers-1, HU_Teachers-2).

While most of them acknowledged the professional benefits of CPD, some teachers thought of CPD as a formal duty and not a personal investment or a tool for answering school-based problems, mainly because of the obligatory character and the limited financial support they receive. As of 2010, in-service professional development can only be financed from targeted tender funds because normative funding support was abolished and teachers have to self-finance their participation in CPD (Sági & Varga, 2012), especially if this takes place in universities or private training providers. Participation in CPD is in addition to teachers’ regular workloads.

Moreover, participating in the obligatory 120 hours training every seven years does not translate into financial or career advancements. Only the form of CPD linked to teachers’

special examination can lead to promotion, which is also not guaranteed. Since the specialisation programmes vary (e.g. school leadership, mentorship), the Minister of Education decides on a yearly basis which specialisation is valid for becoming a Master Teacher, based on system needs and capacities and not on the professional merit of individual teachers (Interview, HU_NPE-7). However, the structure has proven to allow flexible career paths through the special examination process. With regard to content, many CPD programmes take the form of traditional courses offered by universities or pedagogical training centres, while informal or non-formal training opportunities, organised by the school or online providers, are considered invalid for allocating the necessary amount of credits. This can be gleaned from the following extract.

Master Teacher: We organise internal trainings in the school and it is very natural thing to organise professional days when we try to learn new things, such as learning how to use an app.

Interviewer: And is that recognised for collecting your CPD credits?

191 Master Teacher: Well, 30 out of 120 credits can be certified by the school

principal based on these internal trainings – but it has never happened in practice! So it has to be an accredited course and it depends on the school provider, because it is easier to keep track of accredited courses.

Teacher II: Many of us collect anyway more than 120 credits. Many teachers do it because of intrinsic motivation, while others have problems to collect these credits. And if someone hasn’t collected the credits in the given period, he/she will receive a warning by the school district. (Group Interview, HU_Teachers-1)

At the moment, the organisation of CPD seems to be rather turbulent (Interview, HU_NPE-3).

A special committee within the Education Authority is responsible for accrediting training programmes which can be organised by any public or private training provider. Training needs are established by the local authorities, schools and individual teachers, while the responsibility of organising a formal CPD plan lies with the school principal (Eurydice, 2018b).

During the decentralisation period in Hungary, schools were receiving normative funding and they could choose from a variety of courses provided in the free market. In 1997, when the CPD became compulsory, it was planned that three per cent of the educational budget should be spent on CPD programmes for teachers through resources allocated directly to schools (Interview, HU_NPE-8). “Teachers’ needs were dominant and many innovations were possible, but sometimes teachers couldn’t actually recognise what they really needed.”

(Interview, HU_NPE-3) Moreover, between 1997 and 2010, CPD worked as a quasi-market, where private providers had the greatest part, since universities did not seem particularly interested in developing CPD programmes, because of the financial risk and time investment involved (Interview, HU_NPE-8).

Since that time, the budget for CPD was reduced and in 2010 the situation changed dramatically because the budget for CPD stopped and the private providers were mostly pushed out of this market:

In recent years, in-service training was a big mess in the country. It was a very simple thing to receive the accreditation from the Education Authority and even within the university there was no coordination. It happened sometimes that a department here from the university thought of an in-service training programme and they sent the application letter directly without even the dean knowing about that. Not even the rector. Nobody knew about it. Only the department who organised that. And then they received the accreditation and started the course. Can you imagine that? This is absurd. (Interview, HU_TE-SD-1)

In an effort to take hold of this situation, the government is currently considering to allocate some responsibilities for organising CPD to HEIs, including the subject discipline faculties (Interview, HU_TE-SM-1), though nothing has been regulated yet. The main idea is that there will be five big universities in the country which will be responsible for organising CPD on a regional basis (Interview, HU_NPE-3). While universities appear willing to receive additional funding, teacher educators expressed concerns that this might be yet another step from the government to control universities and reduce their autonomy by making them even more dependent on public funds (Interview, HU_TE-PP1, HU_TE-PP-4).

Since 2015, the Education Authority has also developed a network of experts who visit schools and provide support when a challenging situation occurs or teachers request

192 counselling (Interview, HU_NPE-1). However, the lack of communication between the qualification, evaluation, support and teacher education systems obscures the process of organising CPD in a way that can effectively address teachers’ and schools’ needs (Interview, HU_NPE-5). To improve the information flow among the different systems, a project has been launched to prepare an online platform that can help to align teachers’ needs and the opportunities for professional development (ibid.).