As a school leader, a big part of my philosophy is that, to see progress in any area of school there must be high-quality CPD for staff.
That may sound like a sensible strategy - but how often do you see businesses cut research and development budgets when facing financial challenges, only to go further into decline?
It would be easy to take the same approach in schools - after all, we’re in a tough financial climate and so reducing time and cost on CPD could be tempting. But protecting the CPD budget is, I think, crucial to continued success.
Indeed, one facet of our work that has contributed to our continued increase in Progress 8 scores for seven years is the research and development focus central to our CPD strategy.
CPD based on research and development
This is most evident in our changes to performance management.
After having a fairly conventional “three objectives per year” for each teacher - one relating to outcomes, another a school objective and a third on personal CPD - we asked ourselves on return from Covid in 2021 the tough question, “What impact is this having on continual improvement?”
Being honest, we had very little evidence that the bureaucratic system made significant improvement to our school or our students.
So we went back to the drawing board and, with a culture of using research to inform our practice, were attracted to the model espoused by John Tomsett, where performance development replaced performance management.
Now each teacher has just one objective per year: to address an area of their own performance through action research.
Teachers set up inquiry questions before beginning a cycle of research, testing models and implementing a strategy to affect change. This is followed by evaluation, and outcomes are finally shared on a celebration CPD day.
We take a postgrad approach to capturing the process, using posters to document the process and findings, helping to underpin the professional research-driven culture that we want to see - and ensuring cross-fertilisation of great ideas.
Where ideas come from
Teachers come up with inquiry questions after exam results analysis, which takes place early in the autumn term.
Heads of subject have a curriculum conversation with the headteacher, where they analyse their summer results and identify elements where our students have performed less well.
A big part of this is ensuring that inquiry questions are tightly focused. Past examples include:
- English: does improving staff confidence in teaching Questions 2 and 4 on Paper 2 impact outcomes?
- Food and nutrition: what makes an excellent long-answer response?
- Languages: will phonics teaching in key stage 3 ensure securer foundations for pronunciation and dictation at key stage 4?
- Chemistry A level: what makes the difference between an A and a B on the unified paper?
- PE: can dual coding help students to make better links between topics and reinforce key knowledge?
- Geography: to what extent does intervention with six-mark questions affect attainment in Year 11?
- RE: can changing our strategy to teaching evaluation impact GCSE results?
This last example from RE is a great one, showing how the approach also leads to organic evolution of great practice. The team’s inquiry question led to them developing a strategy that impacted impressively on their GCSE results.
This was then picked up by the history team as an area they could learn from - and their practice has changed as a result, too.
What is key to this success is specificity and narrowness.
By focusing often on just a single exam question and implementing one strategy, it means that the research undertaken and the actions implemented improve grades across subjects - meaning we can see clearly where a project had a measurable impact.
However, we accept, too, that some research projects may only make marginal or even no impact. If so, that’s not an issue - what’s important is that the approach raises further questions to explore in the next cycle.
And while projects are individual or sometimes team-based, the processes and culture of research are embedded across school. The celebration at the end means that there is a genuine sharing of informed practice for the good of all.
All this means students are being taught by engaged staff who are continually seeking to ensure they can achieve the best possible outcomes.
Jill Silverthorne is headteacher at Bishop Stopford School
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