Something we’ve been wrestling with in our trust over the past couple of years (and if I’m being perfectly honest, still are), is how to design a professional development (PD) programme that is truly fit for purpose.
To do this, PD must meaningfully meet the needs of individual colleagues, those of the academy in which they are based and those of the wider trust. And ultimately, it must positively impact on the young people in our schools.
This doesn’t just apply to teachers, either. It must support every role in the organisation.
In short, trust culture has to create the conditions whereby everyone is committed to their own PD – but delivering this at scale is a challenge.
In a recent training session, which I co-facilitated on behalf of our Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Teaching School Hub for colleagues studying for the NPQEL, I gave an example from my experience.
We have, for a number of years, hosted what we have grandly called ‘trust training days’. Our 850 staff gather in a central venue and hear from the CEO, other leaders and perhaps an external speaker too.
This is important. People have to feel a sense of belonging to the larger organisation, hear about overarching strategy and accessing motivational input.
But does it really change people’s practice for the better, particularly across all roles and functions in the organisation? The honest answer is no, so we’ve been trying a different approach.
We announced that the morning of our next trust training would consist of volunteer-run workshops. Quickly, we received an encouraging 60 workshop offers from across the organisation – definitely far beyond what a standalone school could aspire to.
We then put these out to staff and asked them to select three – a logistical challenge in itself, to say the least.
Delivering effective CPD at scale is a challenge
We made it work, and learned plenty along the way so that we could manage it better next time, but there were other important lessons too.
Most glaringly, we soon saw that we’d been too loose with our brief. In fact, we hadn’t set one at all. In addition, we didn’t quality-assure the content.
Most were about teaching and learning, with limited relevance to support staff, and the feedback from our post-event survey was very mixed to say the least.
Undeterred, we modified our approach for the next training day. Our school-based PD leads identified relevant workshops from a teaching and learning perspective. Meanwhile, we asked support staff to complete a survey to better understand what would be useful to them across their varied roles.
Then, matching all this information to our trust priorities and academy needs, we facilitated a reduced number of more tightly-focused and quality-assured workshops, including from external speakers. We also offered guidance in choosing which to attend.
Feedback was much more positive, clearly acknowledging that we had tried to meet competing needs and hosted a valuable event.
So we’ve moved forward, but we still face a huge challenge in getting the balance right between localised PD and using the size of the trust to leverage better PD for all.
To keep the momentum, we are trialling having a trust PD lead (a recent NPQH graduate who is well-versed in implementation strategy) to better co-ordinate and map both need and training.
This is in its infancy, but through the development of trust-wide events, systems and processes, including an online repository of training materials, we are seeing increased engagement with PD.
It is difficult to identify cause and effect, but a range of metrics all provide signs of a positive impact from our approach. So our next step is to measure impact.
Around us, the sector is maturing and keen to deliver on the concept of a trust dividend in the PD space. To that end, a lot of work is going into sharing impactful practices in trust-led school improvement strategies.
If the government is keen not just to increase the school workforce but to help them to improve their effectiveness, then this is work it should be supporting.
And one clear way to do this would be to enhance the current – important but relatively narrow – remit of NPQs, ECF and ITT.
Another would be to enhance the role of teaching school hubs to facilitate and coordinate high-quality PD through collaboration, just as the best teaching schools used to do.
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