What Is CPD? Continuing Professional Development Explained for Teachers

What Is CPD?

CPD stands for continuing professional development. It is the learning a teacher does after qualifying to keep their practice current and improve it. The CIPD defines it as “learning experiences which help you develop and improve your professional practice”. In English language teaching, CPD is expected by employers rather than required by law.

Key takeaways

• CPD means continuing professional development. It is a habit and a record, not a single qualification you buy once.
• No law requires an English-language teacher to complete CPD, and no TEFL certificate expires if you do not.
• Employers ask for it anyway and increasingly ask to see it in writing.
• The British Council’s CPD Framework for teachers sets out eleven professional practices, which is the clearest published answer to what counts as CPD in this field.
• “CPD accredited” is a private commercial description. It is not the same as a regulated qualification with a level and a number on a public register.
• The useful record is specific: what you did, when, how long it took, and what changed in your teaching afterwards.

What Does CPD Stand For, and Who Uses the Term?

CPD stands for continuing professional development. Some employers write it as “continuous professional development,” and the two phrases mean the same thing in practice.

The term travels well beyond teaching. Engineers, accountants, nurses, solicitors and surveyors all use it, and in several of those fields a professional body sets a minimum number of hours each year. Teaching English is not one of those fields; it is the single most important thing to understand about CPD in TEFL, and the reason so much of the advice online does not apply.

The CIPD, the chartered professional body for people development in the UK, defines CPD as “learning experiences which help you develop and improve your professional practice”. Its framing is deliberately broad: “All learning that helps you to change and improve your practice is CPD”, whether that is “a conversation with a colleague, doing a new piece of work, working in a new team, taking a course, reading something on LinkedIn, or simply reflecting on the last few months of your work”.

That breadth is the point, and it is also where teachers get stuck. If everything counts, how do you show an employer any of it? The rest of this page is about answering that.

Is CPD Needed to Keep a TEFL Certificate Valid?

No. This is worth stating plainly because the opposite is implied by much course marketing.

A TEFL qualification does not expire; there is no renewal fee, and no CPD is required to keep the certificate you already hold. Our separate guide to whether a TEFL certificate expires goes through the detail, including what employers actually check.

What changes over time is not the certificate. It is the gap between the date on it and today. An employer looking at a qualification earned eight years ago, with nothing since and no recent teaching, is entitled to wonder whether your practice has kept pace. CPD is how you answer that question before it is asked, and it is a far cheaper answer than retaking a full course.

So the honest position is this. CPD is optional in the sense that nothing lapses without it, and close to necessary in the sense that a teacher who cannot describe any learning since their initial course is at a disadvantage against one who can.

What Counts as CPD in English Language Teaching?

This is where the general CPD advice runs out, and something field-specific is needed.

The British Council publishes a Continuing Professional Development Framework for teachers, and it is the most useful published answer we know of. In its own words, the framework “describes the professional practices that are considered relevant, along with professional qualifications, to promoting good teaching across contexts, particularly in public sector primary and secondary schools”. It is “intended for English language teachers and subject teachers who teach through the medium of English”, and can also be used “by teacher educators and school leaders in their support of teachers”.

It names eleven professional practices. Read them as a menu rather than a checklist: they are the areas in which an English-language teacher can sensibly develop, and naming the one you worked on turns a vague claim into a credible one.

The framework also grades development rather than treating it as a single event. British Council professional development resources are filtered across four levels, described as Awareness, Understanding, Engagement and Integration, and the progression is exactly the one an employer cares about: knowing a thing exists is not the same as having built it into how you teach.

How to cite this data. Attribute the eleven professional practices and the four levels to the British Council, “Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Framework for teachers”, published on TeachingEnglish at teachingenglish.org.uk, and state the date you checked it, because frameworks are revised. If you are quoting from this page rather than from the British Council directly, cite The TEFL Institute with the check date of 18 September 2026.

Formal and Informal CPD: Both Count, One Is Easier to Evidence

The distinction that matters in practice is not whether an activity is worthy. It is whether anything exists afterwards that another person can look at.

Every row on that table is real CPD. The rows get progressively harder to prove as you go down, which is not a reason to avoid them. The bottom two rows are where most teachers actually improve. It is a reason to write them up while they are fresh.

What “CPD Accredited” Means, and What It Does Not

You will see short courses advertised as “CPD accredited”, “CPD certified” or carrying a number of “CPD hours” or “CPD points”. This is worth understanding before you pay for one.

Those phrases come from private membership services that review courses and allow providers to display their marks. They are commercial arrangements, not government regulation, and the organisations behind them are not qualification regulators. There is no public register of CPD hours, no statutory body counting them for English language teachers, and no central standard that makes one provider’s “CPD hour” equal to another’s.

That does not make such courses worthless. A well-built short course on teaching young learners is useful whether or not it carries a private mark. It does mean the mark itself tells you very little, and it should not be confused with a qualification that sits at a stated level on a public register.

The difference is the subject of the other two pages here. What Ofqual is and what Ofqual-regulated means cover the register and the phrases that sound official but are not categories, and what an awarding body is covers who actually issues a certificate. If a course claims a level, ask which organisation awards it. If it claims CPD hours, ask who counts them, and expect the answer to be the provider.

How to Record CPD So an Employer Can Read It

A CPD record is not a filing cabinet of certificates. It is a short, dated list that someone else can skim in a minute. Five fields are enough.

• Date and length. The day or period, and the hours. An honest two hours beats a rounded-up twenty.
• What it was. Course, observation, reading, webinar, mentoring, conference session.
• Which practice it developed. Name one of the eleven above. This is the field most teachers leave out and the one that makes the entry credible.
• Who provided it, and any reference. Provider name, certificate number (if there is one), and awarding organisation (if it is a qualification).
• What changed. One sentence on what you now do differently. If nothing changed, say so, and say what you would try next.

Keep it in a single document or spreadsheet, add to it during the same week, and take a digital copy of every certificate as soon as it arrives. When an employer or a recruiter asks what you have done since your certificate, you send the list rather than reconstructing three years from memory.

There is a useful discipline hidden in the last field. The CIPD makes the same point about reflection, noting that “the key to making and truly embedding that change is reflecting on your learning”. A log that records only attendance is a register. A log that records what changed is evidence.

For the practical side of building a CPD habit around a teaching timetable, our longer guide to CPD for TEFL teachers goes into more detail on the routines.

How Much CPD Should an English Language Teacher Do?

There is no published number for this field, and anyone quoting one is quoting a different profession.

What does exist is a description of what good professional development looks like in schools. The Department for Education publishes the Standard for teachers’ professional development, described on GOV.UK as “a description of effective practice in professional development for teachers” and published on 12 July 2016. It is written for schools in England rather than for language centres, so treat it as a quality benchmark rather than a rule that applies to you.

A reasonable working answer, and the one we give when graduates ask, has three parts. Do something substantial once a year, meaning a course, a qualification or a sustained project rather than an hour of video. Do something small every term, usually an observation, a reading, or a webinar. And write it all down, because an unlogged year looks identical to an empty one.

If you are returning after a break, invert that order. Start with the written record of what you already have, and the gaps will tell you what to do first.

Where CPD Sits Next to Qualifications

CPD and qualifications are not rivals, nor are they the same thing.

A qualification is a single, assessed, dated award from a named organisation. CPD is everything after it. A regulated qualification can itself count as CPD, which is why teachers with a 120-hour certificate often later take a Level 5 diploma and count it as both.

Where the distinction bites is in job adverts. An advert asking for a qualification is asking for a specific credential at a specific level, and CPD does not substitute for it. An advert asking for evidence of ongoing development is asking for the log. And an advert for a qualified teacher post in a state school in England is asking for something different again, which our page on what QTS is explains, because no amount of CPD confers it.

If the acronyms in this area are what is slowing you down, the TEFL qualifications and terminology page sets out the whole family in one place.

Your Next Step

If you already hold a TEFL qualification, the cheapest, most useful thing you can do this week costs nothing: open a document, list what you have done since the course with dates, and note where the gaps are. That list is the thing employers ask for, and almost nobody has it ready.

If your record is thin and you want the substantial item for this year, a regulated qualification is the version of CPD that an employer can verify without contacting anyone. Our 180 hour Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is listed on the Ofqual register as 610/1571/4, awarded by Highfield Qualifications, organisation number RN5219. You can look that number up before you enrol, which is the practical difference between a qualification and a badge.