An evaluation of the impact of continuing professional development on personal and professional lives

Abstract Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes in higher education have historically been subject to both internal scrutiny by the quality assurance mechanisms of individual institutions and external scrutiny by various bodies involved in the monitoring of quality in higher education. More recently, CPD has come under the scrutiny of OFSTED because of its relationship to the continuum of teacher training and life-long learning. A recent OFSTED inspection provided the impetus for this research. Though the authors received high grades in their OFSTED inspection, they did not feel that the inspection mechanism measured the complexity of CPD, particularly in the area of ‘Impact of Provision’. A questionnaire survey of MA Ed students was conducted, probing the impact of in-service training on various aspects of their professional lives, as well as their private lives.