TEACHER FOCUS: BEST PRACTICE AND COLLECTIVE IMPROVEMENT
John Port School: Motivating and celebrating teachers’ performance
I
n our first feature this month, we
focus on sharing best practice and motivating teachers through ongoing professional development, looking at John Port
School in Etwall, South Derbyshire. The school was rated “Good, with an outstanding sixth form” by Ofsted in 2015. However, the leadership team wanted to go even further in supporting and cultivating its staff to reach their full potential. Phil Smith, deputy headteacher at the school, discusses how they established a platform to celebrate and motivate teaching staff towards school- wide improvement. John Port School has a growing reputation for
excellence in the education of its young people; we have established a vibrant and energetic learning community through which we share expertise and strive for collective improvement. Student achievement has improved year-on-year and students consistently attain high standards, reflecting the outstanding teaching they have received over time and continue to receive. We are a large academy with over 2,000
students from a variety of backgrounds, but our ethos is that each and every one of these students, no matter how they have performed previously, have their own individual strengths and talents, which we aim to nurture to their full potential. In addition to this, we have over 130 teaching
staff, and we share the same sentiment about their potential – they all have their own strengths and talents which we want to help cultivate. That
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www.education-today.co.uk October 2016
being said, with so many people to keep track of, we wanted to empower our staff to be proactive in their own professional development, while also contributing to the whole-school development plan. At the heart of all we do is a commitment to providing top quality teaching and learning, and we have been on a multifaceted journey to achieve this.
Clear and simple Following research by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) around performance-related pay, many schools, ourselves included, have been under much greater scrutiny when it comes to handling appraisals. Traditionally, we had used a paper-based system which was becoming
unmanageable, not only due to the sheer volume of paper, but also because it brought about problems with consistency and fairness in our reporting and performance management processes. In addition, our teachers and their line managers were frustrated that the only time they had for review had been reduced to just one meeting in September. Because of this, we wanted our professional
development and performance management to be as fluid as possible, and also give teachers the chance to make their own contributions in the process. Moving to a digital platform that kept all of this information in one place that could be accessed by everyone meant that we could keep an eye on all of our staff members’ development; it also meant that they could be proactive in
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