The part of the new Ofsted inspection toolkit on ‘Professional learning and expertise’ may be tucked away on page 75, but it piqued our interest as a genuine reason for optimism.
The most significant feature of this section (part of ‘Leadership and governance’) is the sharpened focus on supporting staff to build their expertise, and to use it to ‘make highly effective choices’ and adapt policies to their own context. Adaptation is the lifeblood of great teaching.
It’s encouraging to see that the toolkit is clear that ‘leaders establish a strong culture of staff professionalism, which includes a commitment from all staff to continuous improvement in their expertise and effectiveness’, that leaders ‘act as role models for all staff’, that professional learning should be ‘high-quality, evidence-informed, sustained and coherent’, and, crucially, that ‘leaders allocate appropriate time and other resources to a coherent programme of evidence-informed professional learning for all staff’.
This framing is a crucial starting point for a new, more evidence-informed conversation about supporting teachers’ growth.
Ofsted’s move away from the term ‘CPD’ is also significant, and more than just semantic. It offers an opportunity to reframe how we ‘do’ professional learning from the ground up, and what we’re aiming for when we do it.
This shift is somewhat reminiscent of the changes in Ofsted’s approach to assessment data. Freed from compiling huge spreadsheets, leaders were instead asked to articulate their approach to assessment and its impact.
The new toolkit has the potential to do the same for professional learning, helping leaders to build a more meaningful, intentional narrative about how their school develops the knowledge, skill and judgement of their staff in the areas that make most difference to their learners.
This signals a move towards a considered approach to nurturing teacher growth
In short, this signals a move away from fragmented CPD courses and one-off events, towards a considered, sustained and more motivating approach to nurturing teacher growth.
Professional learning that builds genuine expertise cannot be a bolt-on. To learn and grow, staff need time to reflect on their practice – time that is often scarce and committed elsewhere.
Leaders will need to be proactive and supported in cutting away lower-value tasks like ineffective marking or unnecessary data entry to create the space for high-impact professional learning and engineer opportunities for focused, purposeful collaboration among colleagues.
Collaboration encourages teachers to share their collective expertise for the benefit of their colleagues. Ofsted’s emphasis on “purposeful collaboration”, therefore, is particularly encouraging.
It helps validate a simple idea: teachers’ learning is very similar to anyone else’s learning, and benefits from the same supports: a well-designed curriculum (Ofsted use this word in relation to professional learning) that builds knowledge and skill in the areas of greatest importance: high-quality instruction, credible feedback, deliberate practice, purposeful collaboration.
Teacher expertise isn’t built effectively in a one-off CPD course that is ‘cascaded’ to colleagues. It requires a sustained, structured and supportive environment where colleagues can reflect on and help each other to refine the elements of their practice that make the biggest difference for their pupils.
Of course, this is what many schools do already. Building teacher expertise has always been part of their core business, new Ofsted framework or not.
But for others, Ofsted’s renewed focus on professional learning and expertise provides a useful steer to start a better conversation about how we help teachers to grow, and keep on growing.
All of this has the potential to focus school leaders’ attention more intently on their professional learning offer and to give it higher priority than most do at the moment – but also to help them shape it in ways that are most likely to deliver the impact for learners that it should.
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