Mosaic

Mosaic Book of the Term Prize Draw – Autumn 2025 –

Book of the Term Autumn 2025: cover of Early Career Teacher Entitlement: Great Expectations

Mosaic Book of the Term Prize Draw Autumn 2025

Rob-Caudwell-circle grey

Written by Rob Caudwell, Co-Founder of Penrose Education

30 September 2025

At Penrose Education we are on a mission to fill the (teacher development) world with thoughtfully designed and effective EdTech. But we also want to fill the (teacher development) world with books.

Each term we will be reviewing a book we have found helpful, interesting and/or thought-provoking in our attempts to develop our understanding of what exceptional teacher training, education and professional development looks like.

Best of all – you could win a copy of one of these books in our Book of the Term Prize Draw!

Our chosen book this term is: Early Career Teacher Entitlement: Great Expectations by Tanya Ovenden-Hope and Holly Kirkpatrick.

Why we chose this book?

Back in the Spring of 2023, we chose The Early Career Framework: Origins, outcomes and opportunities, edited by Tanya Ovenden-Hope, to be our second ever book of the term. We chose that book, because at Penrose Education we care deeply about how new teachers are being welcomed into the wonderful profession of teaching, and we are always so grateful to those who are working to understand and explain where things are working, and where improvements can be made!

Fast forward to September 2025 and Tanya is back, this time with Holly Kirkpatrick as her co-author, with a follow-up to this earlier book. Four years into the nation-wide implementation of the Early Career Framework, Tanya and Holly offer a fascinating, rich analysis of how the Early Career Framework has impacted Early Career Teachers themselves as well as those working in the schools hosting them. As the new Labour government prepares for further reviews of Early Career provision in 2027, this book offers timely, expert insights, and thought-provoking advice on how best to build on the successes – and learn from the shortcomings – we have all been experiencing over the past few years.

I was incredibly honoured to be asked to write the foreword to this fantastic, important book. In lieu of my usual book review, I have decided to simply share my foreword here (with kind permission from the authors!), as I hope it summarises exactly why I think anyone working in teacher education, training and development (or “didagogy”?) might want to get their hands on a copy of this book!

If you aren’t lucky enough to win, you can always pick up a copy from Hachette Learning!

As part of our partnership with the Chartered College of Teaching, we run termly webinars on topics related to teacher education, training and development. In the Spring of 2025, Tanya, Holly and I met to discuss the book as it was just being finalised,  the recording of which can be accessed here.

Foreword to the Book

Towards the end of Great Expectations, the novel’s protagonist, Pip, reflects on his love for one of the other characters (avoiding spoilers here!). He muses, ‘if you can tell me that you will go through the world with me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you’ (Dickens, 1861, p. 261). Pip’s hope is for a loving companionship based on a long-term, two-sided commitment: that each party will at least try to make the world better for the other.

As we think about how best to guide new colleagues into the teaching profession, we are really talking about a similar two-sided commitment:

  1. What can we expect from and ask of early career teachers? How are new teachers being prepared and equipped to make a positive, long-term impact in the classrooms and schools they are going into. And:
  2. What can our new colleagues expect from and ask of us as a sector? How are we best preparing the sector to welcome these new colleagues, so they feel cared for, supported and valued?

Early Career Teacher Entitlement: Great Expectations is an exploration of both halves of this relationship. As a sector, we want to benefit from wonderful new teachers coming into the profession. Education is far too important to not put considerable effort into helping every new teacher become brilliant at their new job, but the sector needs to offer wonderful careers to every new teacher too. There are obvious ethical reasons to seek to provide excellent employment to our newest colleagues, but there are also pragmatic ones: if we don’t, they may well simply leave!

We need to enable this long-term, two-sided commitment between new teachers and their chosen sector. We hope to make a better world for them, and them for us.

In this important book, Tanya Ovenden-Hope and Holly Kirkpatrick show that legislating for long-term, mutually beneficial early career provision at a national level has proven far from easy! Over the past few years, successive Conservative and now Labour governments have invested a huge amount of time, effort and money in revising and reforming how the sector welcomes new teachers into the profession – with the next round of reviews planned for

2027. As we consider the policy changes that have already happened, and further reforms that may come, we must keep these questions of a two-sided commitment in mind: Are we succeeding in supporting new teachers to positively impact the teaching world? Are we succeeding in making the teaching world a better place for these new teachers?

This book unpacks some of the progress that has been made, as well as some of the opportunities that seem to have been missed. Drawing on extensive expertise, evidence and experience – including their own primary research – Tanya and Holly thoroughly explore both the benefits and challenges that the various national approaches have encountered over the past few years. Pulling together emerging themes, they offer encouragement that some real, identifiable progress has been made in how the sector inducts early career teachers into the profession.

Alongside this, they identify where there may have been mistakes and shortcomings – both in the efforts to prepare early career teachers for their careers in teaching, and in efforts to prepare the sector to support and welcome these new colleagues well.

Alongside their own expert analysis, Tanya and Holly have woven through this book the voices and stories of early career teachers, their mentors and their induction tutors. This is so important. This is a book underpinned by the first-hand experiences of those who have recently joined the teaching profession and those who have been helping to welcome these new teachers into our sector. Many of these stories are truly inspirational, as in them you will read about the wonderful commitment and professionalism that early career teachers and those supporting them are showing to one another and to their work. But these stories are also often sobering. They are important reminders that it is possible for policy and implementation decisions to have significant negative impacts for the very people these initiatives were designed to help. We must listen to these accounts carefully.

The book culminates in a fantastic set of recommendations for how best to build on these successes while addressing the challenges the sector is still facing. As the government moves towards its next review of the Early Career Framework (ECF) in 2027, these recommendations offer a clear, comprehensive alternative to how early career teachers are currently being developed and supported If we agree that our ultimate aim is to foster a two-sided commitment between early career teachers and their chosen sector – to make the world better for each other – Tanya and Holly’s ‘model for the future’ offers a bold, exciting vision for what this could look like.

How can I win a copy?

We are giving away three copies of Tanya and Holly’s book to anyone working in positions related to teacher education, training and development.

Click the button below to be in with a chance to win.

Entries close 11:59pm on Sunday 7th December 2025We will randomly select the lucky winners on the 8th December 2025.

See last term’s Book of the Term review here.

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