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Q&A: David Browne, Director for Regulation at the Education Workforce Council (EWC)

The EWC is the independent professional regulator for the education workforce in Wales. It regulates education practitioners across schools, further education, youth work, and adult/work-based learning. We spoke to David Browne, its Director for Regulation, about how it operates and how governors can work with it.

Can you explain what your job entails?
As Director for Regulation, I’m responsible for three distinct areas – registration, data and fitness to practise. That means it’s my job to maintain and develop the register of education practitioners in Wales. There are currently 91,000 individuals on that register across 13 different categories. I’m also responsible for managing the data about the education workforce in Wales, and collating that into our annual statistics report. And I lead our fitness to practise function, which investigates and hears cases referred to us by employers and other stakeholders.

How has the EWC evolved since replacing the GTCW in 2015?
The previous body, the GTCW (General Teaching Council for Wales), only regulated school teachers. The EWC is now more than double the size because we register many more members of the education workforce in Wales. We are alone among the UK education regulators in that we also regulate practitioners in the FE sector and the youth sector. This means that we have a unique registrant profile.

While regulation is the biggest part of what we do, the fitness to practise function is probably the most complex part of our regulatory work. We spend around £1.5 million a year on undertaking our regulatory fitness to practise role. As we have grown and added new categories of registration this area of work has increased in its complexity. In fact, the Welsh Government introduced some new legislation to ensure that we would be able to hear fitness to practise cases for some of the new categories of registration which have been added to the Register more recently. Prior to the introduction of this new legislation, each time we added a new category of registrants, we had to recruit new panel members from that category to ensure fairness and equity. Since some of the new categories of registration contain very low numbers of practitioners, without the new legislation, we may not have been able to regulate across some of those new categories.

How can school governors work with the EWC?
We welcome the opportunity to work with governors. Whenever I meet groups of governors, the first thing I say to them is ‘thank you’. The job they do is very important to us because they have those key strategic and accountability roles for the schools where our registrants are working.

We’ve produced a guide to what governors need to know about the EWC, which you can access here. From a registration perspective, teachers, support workers and peripatetic teachers need to be registered to work in schools. It’s very easy to check the register to make sure a member of staff is registered, and we would encourage governors to do that whenever they are making new appointments.

It’s really important that governors are fully aware of their responsibilities in terms of safeguarding, and they should report their concerns immediately if they become aware of something, following their school’s procedure.

We would also like governors to be aware of the Educators Wales website, which helps educators access information, training and career opportunities. Through this site, schools can advertise their vacancies free of charge, potentially saving them thousands of pounds a year. We also have our own Professional Learning Passport, which allows educators to track and record their professional learning throughout their career. For governors to know about these resources and share them with the staff in their schools would help promote professional development and career progression among the education workforce.

How can governors better support your work around suitability and fitness to practise?
Governors, with their key staffing functions, have a unique responsibility to ensure the staff in their schools are fit to practise, and to make referrals to the EWC for allegations of unacceptable professional conduct. They could also be witnesses in these cases. Therefore, it’s really important for governors to understand how the process operates. We deliver presentations to governors about our fitness to practise work and we are planning to put more content on our website and YouTube channel to provide further information about this.

If relevant governors are aware of cases in their school that are likely to end up with the EWC, they can contact our fitness to practise team to arrange to observe a hearing so that they can better understand what it is like to participate in a hearing. Most hearings are held online these days.

One area in which we feel we could support governors is training. If we can help improve the training for governors involved with disciplinary hearings then this might help to give governors more confidence when considering cases. We’re always available to talk to governing bodies about what we do and how we can work together, so we would encourage governors to get in touch with any questions.