What Early Years Teachers Actually Need: A CPD Guide for School Leaders

Most schools in Nigeria spend something on staff development. Far fewer can point at a change in classroom practice that came out of it. The money goes, the certificates get handed out, and by the third week of term everyone is doing exactly what they did before.

That isn’t because teachers are resistant. It’s because of how the training is usually put together.

Why the standard approach fails

The default is a one-day workshop, normally at the start of term, delivered to the whole staff at once, covering a broad topic in general terms.

Three things go wrong with it.

It treats everyone the same. A Nursery 1 teacher and a Primary 5 teacher are doing substantially different jobs. Training that serves both usually serves neither.

It stops at the door. Adults don’t change their practice because somebody told them something interesting once. They change it when they try something, get it a bit wrong, and get feedback. A workshop with no follow-up is information transfer. It isn’t development.

It isn’t grounded in their classrooms. Generic examples get politely received and quietly discarded, because the teacher’s real constraints, forty children and limited materials and a fixed scheme of work, were never part of the conversation.

The six that matter most

If you’re deciding where to put a limited training budget in the early years, these are the areas that pay back most.

1. How under-eights actually learn

This is the foundation, and it’s where most of the gap sits. Plenty of early-years teachers in Nigeria were trained on a model built for older children, then assigned to a nursery class.

They need a working grasp of what develops when. Attention span at four versus six. Why fine motor control gates handwriting. Why a five-year-old can’t reliably hold a four-step instruction. Why play is a mechanism for learning rather than a break from it.

Without that, everything else is technique with no judgement behind it.

2. Structured early literacy

Letter recognition isn’t phonics. A great many classrooms teach children to name letters and sing the alphabet, and never systematically teach the sound-to-symbol correspondences that let a child decode a word they’ve never seen.

Teachers need a proper sequence. Which sounds in which order, how to teach blending explicitly, how to run a decoding session, and how to tell apart a child who can’t decode from a child who decodes fine but doesn’t comprehend. Those two need opposite interventions.

3. Early numeracy with real materials

Young children build mathematical understanding physically before they can handle it symbolically. A child who can write 7 + 5 = 12 without ever having grouped and regrouped real objects has memorised a fact, not understood an idea. The gap shows up two years later when the arithmetic gets harder.

Teachers need confidence with concrete representation, and the patience to stay there longer than the scheme of work suggests.

4. Observation and assessment that feeds teaching

Most early-years assessment in practice is a termly test producing a score nobody uses.

Useful assessment is mostly observational. Noticing what a child does when a task gets hard, recording it specifically enough to act on, and adjusting next week’s teaching as a result. It’s a learnable skill and it’s rarely taught.

If your assessment data doesn’t change what a teacher does on Monday, it’s administration, not assessment.

5. Behaviour management that suits young children

Techniques that work on eleven-year-olds often fail on four-year-olds, and the fallback is volume.

Teachers need age-appropriate alternatives. Managing the environment, transition routines, realistic expectations of attention span, and reading behaviour as communication. A very large share of “behaviour problems” in nursery classrooms are curriculum or environment problems wearing a disguise.

6. Recognising additional needs early

Teachers don’t need to diagnose anything and shouldn’t try. But they do need to recognise when a pattern deserves a proper look, and to know what happens next.

Picking up hearing difficulties, speech and language delay and significant processing differences early is one of the highest-value things an early-years teacher can do. Children caught at five do far better than children caught at nine, and the difference comes down largely to whether an adult noticed.

How to structure training that sticks

Train the year group, not the whole school. Small role-specific sessions beat whole-staff assemblies.

Observe first. Training designed after somebody has sat in your classrooms addresses your problems. Training designed from a generic syllabus addresses generic ones.

Space it out. Three half-days across a term, with practice in between, beats one full day comfortably. The gap between sessions is where the learning settles.

Follow up. A short classroom visit two weeks later, with feedback that’s developmental rather than judgemental, is what turns a good session into changed practice.

Give them something concrete to walk away with. A sequence, a set of prompts, a planning format. Teachers implement tools far more reliably than they implement principles.

Protect the time. Training squeezed around a full teaching load is training that gets half-attended.

How to tell whether it worked

Attendance registers and satisfaction forms measure nothing that matters. Use these instead:

• Classroom observation against a short list. Three or four observable behaviours tied directly to what was trained.
• Work samples over time. Pull the same five children’s books before the training and again eight weeks later.
• What teachers ask for next. Teams that have absorbed training start asking sharper questions. It’s a soft signal, but a reliable one.
• Retention. Teachers who feel genuinely developed leave less often, and early-years turnover is expensive.

A realistic word about budget

Not every school can fund extensive external training, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.

If your budget is tight, concentrate it. One well-designed, properly followed-up programme for your early-years team will do more than a broad shallow programme for everyone. Structured early literacy is usually the best place to start, because its effects compound through every year that follows.

Where funding is the real constraint, it’s worth knowing that corporate and NGO sponsors increasingly fund teacher-training cohorts directly. We run several such programmes and we’re always glad to talk about whether a school qualifies. There’s more on our partnership page.

Where to start

If you’re a school leader weighing this up, the honest first step is finding out what’s happening in your early-years classrooms right now. Not what the scheme of work says, and not what gets prepared for an inspection. What happens on an ordinary Tuesday.

Our educator training and school systems consulting both start there, because training designed without that information is guesswork.

Get in touch and tell us where your team is. If we think you need something other than training, we’ll say so.