INSET

In-Service Education and Training is the standard UK term for ongoing, employer-organised professional development of teachers already in post. The acronym names both the activity (training delivered during employment) and the most familiar institutional unit, the INSET day, on which pupils are absent and staff attend training or undertake school-led development work.

Origin and the five-day allocation

INSET days were embedded in English statutory practice in 1988 under Education Secretary Kenneth Baker as part of the reforms that introduced the National Curriculum. State-school teachers became contractually required to attend five training days each year on top of the 190 days of pupil contact — informally known as Baker days. The structure remains in place: schools schedule five INSET days within a 195-day teacher year, normally clustered at term boundaries.

Provision and content

INSET activity historically included external short courses run by Local Education Authorities and university departments of education. Devolution and the contraction of LEA provision shifted the centre of gravity toward school-led, in-house INSET supplemented by trust-level training in multi-academy trusts and by national programmes from the Department for Education and the Education Endowment Foundation. Common content includes safeguarding updates, statutory training (first aid, prevent duty), assessment and curriculum work, and SEND practice. Subject-specific pedagogy, when it appears, is often led by department heads or by visiting specialists.

Relation to wider CPD

INSET is the umbrella term for in-employment training in the UK; Continuing Professional Development is the broader concept covering all post-qualification learning, including INSET, conferences, postgraduate study, Action Research, coaching, and self-directed reading. INSET sits inside CPD but does not exhaust it. The distinction matters because Ofsted inspections and teacher-standards reviews look beyond INSET-day records for evidence of sustained professional learning.

International usage

The INSET label travels — Council of Europe and British Council documents use it widely — but the legal architecture (the contractual five-day allocation) is specifically English and Welsh. Other systems organise in-service training differently: Scotland through Continuing Professional Learning hours, France through the plan académique de formation, and many other systems through ministry-funded short courses that accumulate toward certification.

References

• UK Parliament. Education Reform Act 1988. legislation.gov.uk
• Department for Education. School teachers' pay and conditions document. gov.uk