FEATURE: CPD


outcomes, that the CFPL is for everyone in our Trust, at any level, and in any role. These colleagues represent 40 per cent of our workforce, and we’re committed to supporting them just as comprehensively as our teaching staff.


What is the Centre for Professional Learning and How Does it Work? The CFPL is the part of Consilium Academies and is based within the Central Team office. We design, deliver, commission, fund professional development for our colleagues in all roles and at all levels. We also evaluate, support, and quality assure all professional development that our staff undertake. Each member of staff has their own PD profile and has control over their training direction. We support those who lead professional


development in schools to design and deliver their internal whole school offer. Each in-school PD lead owns their role, and we don’t seek to be ‘top down’. Instead, we seek to link up these colleagues to share resources, great practice, and avoid duplication of work. We also offer resources, advice, and guidance to colleagues as they lead professional development in their schools. We partner with industry leading professional


development organisations in HR, finance, ICT, estates, teaching, and school leadership, to ensure our colleagues have access to high-quality industry-recognised qualifications. We also support our central school


improvement team with understanding the close link between school improvement needs and the associated training needs for colleagues. We support our Consilium Leaders of Education – our in-house support team of middle leaders who are seconded for one day per week to work in another department in the Trust– with their professional development, with delivering professional development to other colleagues, and in identifying issues which teams in our Trust are facing, and how they might be addressed through professional development.


What have been the challenges and what have we learnt? Firstly, in a Trust that educates over 6,000 students and employs almost 800 staff, there’s a huge amount of activity happening. One of our biggest aims is to reduce workload and where possible avoid duplication of work. That’s why we’ve spent time working alongside the school improvement team to understand the big priorities of each of our schools, and supporting schools with resource sharing. Reading, oracy, and disciplinary literacy are a


focus at many of our schools. Effective curriculum design, understanding the core principles of curriculum theory, and how this practically leads to rich, ambitious curricula for all students is another area of focus. Across our teaching and non-teaching


colleagues, understanding what great line management is, what effective professional conversations look like, and how to balance challenge and support in a way that gets the best out of people, and which best serves our students has been another priority. This means we’ve had to create systems to


gather information effectively, in a way which isn’t bureaucratic or burdensome. We also want to be able to report effectively on the data we gather – what have colleagues asked for? What do schools need? Are we meeting this demand or not? Finally – the most difficult question to answer – is the work we’re doing having an impact on students? Our Trust data team has been helping us to


design systems that does the heavy lifting on behalf of our colleagues and gives us management information that’s valid and reliable and generates useful questions which in turn sparks useful discussion for our executive team and the CFPL board. Yet, despite this, it won’t be until the end of the academic year that we will be able to measure this robustly. We also want to avoid being an ‘initiative


generator’. It’s easy in schools for there to be short flash-in-the-pan initiatives which are launched, founded, and replaced by new


initiatives. We want to take on board the lessons of the EEF Schools Guide to Implementation, and the lessons of Viviane Robinson, and ensure that we think carefully about the difference between ‘improvement’ and ‘change’, and think carefully about how to improve professional development in a sustainable way which works for all our colleagues.


Conclusion Creating lasting changes in habits is difficult (Hobbis, Allen, and Sims, 2020), and professional development often doesn’t have the impact which we’d want it to (The New Teacher Project, 2015). At Consilium Academies, we’ve carefully considered what the literature tells us about, what professional development looks like, when it’s effective and ineffective, and we’ve sought to learn those lessons when designing our offer for colleagues. We take the professional development of our


colleagues seriously because we know that it’s one of the main tools at our disposal to better achieve our mission for students and have measurable and lasting impact on student outcomes. This is an exciting time to be undertaking PD in


the education sector and to be part of Consilium Academies. We still have lots to learn and understand, but we are dedicated to our mission, and are determined to allow our staff and students, be the best they can.


uwww.consiliumcpl.co.uk


References Sims, S. & Fletcher-Wood, H (2018). Characteristics of effective teacher professional development: what we know, what we don’t, and how we can find out. Characteristics-of-Effective-Teacher-Professional- Development.pdf (improvingteaching.co.uk)


Allen and Sims (2018) The Teacher Gap. Abingdon: Routledge


Hattie, J (2003). Teachers make a difference, what is the research evidence? https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= 1003&context=research_conference_2003


Hanushek, E. in Finn, C. and Sousa, R. (eds) (2014). Boosting Teacher Effectiveness, p23-35. In What lies ahead for America’s children and their schools? Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press


Hobbis, Sims and Allen (2020) Habit formation limits teacher effectiveness: A review of converging evidence from neuroscience and social science. Review of Education, 9(1), 3-23. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3226


Leithwood, K., Harris, A., and Hopkins, D. (2008) Seven strong claims about school leadership. School leadership and management 28(1):27-42. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632430701800060


The New Teacher Project (2015) The Mirage: Confronting the hard truth about our quest for teacher development: https://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP- Mirage_2015.pdf


Sharples (2019) The EEF School’s Guide to Implementation: https://v2.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/ schools-guide-to-implementation-online-course/


Robinson, V (2017). Reduce Change to Increase Improvement. Newbury Park: Corwin


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