David Weston, Founder and Co-CEO of the Teacher Development Trust
1. Aligning Structures Across a Trust
Creating a strong trust-wide structure for workforce development ensures coherence and alignment among all schools. The level of centralisation of decision-making and budgets is a key strategic choice:
- Centralised model: Amalgamated CPD budget, potentially strong central programs; potential drawbacks include one-size-doesn’t-fit-all approach and disempowered schools.
- Delegated model: Schools make CPD decisions, promoting empowered leaders and coherence across plans; challenges include prioritising individual needs and reliance on quality of local strategic planning and commissioning.
- Hybrid model: Combines central and local budget allocation, balancing local and national needs; limitations include potential budget constraints and risk of circumventing central programs.
Regardless of the chosen approach - and there is no perfect model - collaboration, and communication between trust and school leaders is essential for success. In particular, strong central systems to reflect across school leadership teams, co-planning and systems to create sufficient coherence and flexibility are key.
2. Building Consistency Within and Across Schools
Leaders should:
- Develop a clear vision for workforce development that is communicated to all staff members and that is ‘lived, not just laminated’ to coin the Mary Myatt phrase;
- Create a shared understanding of best practices in CPD leadership, cultures, and processes through shared leadership training approaches; and
- Implement systems for ‘designing-in’ impact to all CPD activity up-front and then monitoring and evaluating the impact of professional development initiatives.
These approaches allow schools within a trust to work together more effectively to drive improvement and achieve their collective goals.
3. Aligning Trust CPD Structures with School Improvement and Executive Leadership
Integrating trust CPD structures with school improvement plans and executive leadership is key to creating a coherent, trust-wide approach to workforce development. This can be achieved through:
- Ensuring that professional development initiatives are linked to school improvement priorities, with clear models of good practice and ensuring that executive leaders and education (or school improvement leaders) conduct consistent discussions;
- Aligning executive leadership development with trust-wide goals and objectives to produce shared understanding;
- Encouraging collaboration and sharing of best practices across schools, rooting this in key shared principles of leadership. For example, generating a strong shared approach to key CPD approaches such as pedagogical (aka instructional) coaching and collaborative enquiry (aka Lesson Study) will pay dividends in creating a common language and generating insights, particularly when combined with work to carefully benchmark and improve CPD culture and leadership in each school to ensure coherence and staff buy-in.
These approaches can ensure that trusts’ workforce development efforts are both targeted and impactful.
4. Utilising Available Resources
Trusts should make the most of available resources to support their workforce development strategies. This includes accessing government funding for NPQs, using the apprenticeship levy, and being rigorous in the commissioning of external CPD providers. But even the best central commissioning will run aground unless each school has strong leadership of teaching, learning and CPD and the right working conditions to ensure that learning sticks and sustains. It is extremely important to create a strong approach to improving CPD leadership skills within and across schools and aligning this carefully with other leadership agendas and plans.
5. Continuous Learning and Improvement
Lastly, it is important to remember that strategic workforce development is an ongoing process. Trusts should continuously evaluate the effectiveness of their CPD initiatives, learn from successes and challenges, and refine their approach as needed. Different schools will be in very different places - even successful schools can sometimes have a lot of work to create a truly sustainable approach to CPD and sometimes the recent history of a school will make or break the success of a trust-wide initiative, requiring local adaptation and sensitivity. In Teacher Development Trust’s work with trusts, we support and develop both central CPD leadership programmes as well as using a careful mix of both expert and peer review to ensure that coherence is being built against the highest quality evidence of what is effective.
Successful trust leaders understand the importance of looking outwards as well as inwards, that school improvement should be evidence based and is ultimately driven by their people. They therefore implement a collaborative, strategic approach to building a culture that allows teachers to thrive and children succeed, across all schools within the trust.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
