Challenging the status quo: A coherent approach to teacher development

Virtually everyone working in schools would agree that CPD is important, but in a Teacher Tapp survey, 40 per cent of secondary classroom teachers claimed that it ‘had little or no impact on their classroom practice’ (Allen, 2019). Over the past five years, we have attempted to develop a more fertile environment for teacher professional growth by improving the following features of our school: inset lesson observation appraisal. As well as consulting evidence from research, a key theme of our work has been to avoid piecemeal change. Instead, we have worked coherently, aligning different policies so that they complement each other. Inset We started by identifying aspects of the inset programme that we wanted to improve: CPD was too generic and subject-specific improvement was not prioritised Too much time was used simply to pass on information There was too much focus on Ofsted Ideas were not given sustained attention. In order to make educational re