FEATURE FOCUS: CPD AND SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT
Staff that stay: developing a culture for increased teacher retention
With “shockingly high” unfilled vacancies at
secondary schools and over 1 in 10 teachers leaving the profession for other sectors, schools and colleges need to do their utmost to create a desirable working culture that makes staff want to stay for the long-run. The research evidence is clear that investing in high quality, sustainable professional development activities not only taps in to your staff’s need to feel valued but also ensures that regardless of their level of experience, teachers are able to keep improving, year on year, for the benefit of pupil outcomes. Enabling powerful professional learning is one of the most important things you can do as a school leader not only for your staff, but also your pupils. Through our network of over 200 schools
across England and Wales, at the Teacher Development Trust we have the privilege of visiting our members to understand, examine and review their CPD practices. Here are some of the key ways in which our schools have been able to develop a motivated, engaged workforce that crucially, sticks around for the long haul.
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n our second feature this month on CPD and school improvement, we speak to
Maria Cunningham, Network Officer at The Teacher Development Trust, the national charity for effective professional development in schools and colleges. Maria is a former Year 2 teacher at a London primary school and participant in the Teach First leadership development programme. Here she explains how investing in high quality, sustainable professional development activities can increase teacher retention and improve your school’s practice.
Retention is an increasingly urgent crisis faced by schools in England, as pupil numbers are set to rise to 3.3million by 2025 and an extra 26,500 extra teachers needed to ensure these children are educated.
Prioritising teacher development It is important to set a vision for effective professional learning and ensure that its value within the school is understood by all. For professional learning to be a priority it needs to be visible at all levels, so it is important that head teachers or senior leaders do not neglect their own CPD needs, rather, actively modelling their own development and even taking part in a potentially vulnerable process such as volunteering to be observed or filmed in the classroom for peer-sharing. At one of our TDT member schools, St Mark’s Primary School in Bromley, Deputy Headteacher Jennifer Richards enrolled herself this year on to our professionally recognised Lesson Study course co-developed with Sheffield Hallam University. She said “I’m always learning, I talk about that all the time. It’s important that my staff trust me, but know that I’m still improving.”
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Finding the time and space for professional learning In an educational landscape where budgets are shrinking, there has never been a more important time to safeguard your CPD budget allocation. Great development and a supportive environment can improve morale and reduce stress. By investing a portion up-front into a dramatically improved CPD programme, schools can reduce long-term costs of high staff turnover and the stress of the annual recruitment challenge. Similarly, when we visit schools and speak to staff, they frequently cite time as one of the greatest barriers to making CPD visions a reality. Time is indeed one of the most precious things in a school, but our most successful members allocate as much as this as possible to CPD so that senior leaders and teaching staff alike recognise that professional learning is a priority activity. This means thinking beyond the realms of
INSET days or disaggregated twilight sessions and being more creative. Many schools begin by organising regular weekly or fortnightly CPD time, which could for example comprise year-group joint lesson planning for 90 minutes per week in a primary school, or 2 hours of subject time in a secondary school. One multi-academy trust we’ve worked with blocks off an afternoon per half term to assemble teachers from across its schools to work on Lesson Study, a Japanese teacher enquiry model, while others host ‘teach-meet’ style gatherings over breakfast to share research, ideas and best practice. Of course, how this time is used is also crucial.
The most effective professional learning is sustained over the year, with iterative opportunities to reflect, collaborate and refine practice. CPD activities should also draw upon research evidence and external expertise to identify the most pressing issues and align with the most plausibly successful teaching approaches. In many schools, a research champion draws upon syntheses such as the EEF Toolkit, as well as banks of academic journals
October 2018
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