Framing trust-wide professional development through self-determination theory

BETH GREVILLE-GIDDINGS, LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT LEAD, RALEIGH EDUCATION TRUST, UK

Developing a central offer of professional development (PD) that meets the needs of a diverse range of roles and schools, while maintaining fidelity to the features of high-quality PD, is a challenge that many multi-academy trusts face.

Following a recent review of PD across the Raleigh Education Trust, it was clear that there are still some colleagues who feel that they don’t get the most out of our offer, don’t know where to find PD and aren’t aware of available opportunities. Alongside supporting leaders, we wanted to address this at trust-level by setting out what is available to colleagues, signposting existing options, outlining opportunities with external providers and using this process to identify gaps that we could fill with internally developed programmes. Raleigh Education Trust is going through a period of growth, and it is also important that we can clearly articulate our PD offer to existing and future partners.

The aims of our central offer are to promote job satisfaction and wellbeing; to help colleagues to be better in their roles, leading to improved academic and non-academic outcomes for our students; and to develop a culture of professional learning, collaboration and growth across the trust and with external partners. We needed to produce a central offer that is useful for individuals across all roles of the organisation in identifying their next steps, and for leaders to support developmental conversations.

What makes a good PD offer?

Sam Sims and colleagues’ (2021) systematic review and meta-analysisA quantitative study design used to systematically assess the results of multiple studies in order to draw conclusions about that body of research of the characteristics of teacher PD that increase student achievement, which informed the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) effective professional development guidance report (Collin and Smith, 2021), identifies 14 mechanisms essential for effective PD, grouped into four categories: building knowledge, motivating teachers, developing teaching techniques and embedding practice. This is not designed as a checklist but, at individual event level, provides useful support to check PD against. The EEF guidance, however, covers ‘teacher’ PD, which they define as ‘structured and facilitated activity for teachers intended to increase their teaching ability’ (Collin and Smith, 2021, p. 7), and our offer needs to go beyond this definition.

A whole-trust offer has different needs to a whole-school offer. The Raleigh Education Trust schools include SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), AP (alternative provision), mainstream, EYFS, primary and secondary, plus central and operational teams, covering a wide range of roles and stages of career. The Confederation of School Trusts conceptual model of trust-led school improvement considers how trusts can support improvement across a trust through ‘vertical’ (individual school) and ‘horizontal’ (trust) improvement, to ‘facilitate and enable collective capacity and expertise’ to maximum effect (Rollett, 2024), and goes beyond the EEF guidance, highlighting the importance of culture and connections for improvement.

With such a broad scope, it was felt that it would be helpful to set out our own guiding principles to ensure that each element of our offer meets our intentions.

Why self-determination theory?

In my role as learning and development lead, I started by considering the outcomes that we want from our offer. We want a motivated workforce who are better at their jobs; we want people to stay with us and those who move on to be part of system-wide improvements. We want an attractive offer that supports recruitment and we want our PD to be centred on best bets for improving student outcomes.

Deci and Ryan’s (2008) self-determination theory (SDT) offers a way in which to understand motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, and how this relates to developing a culture of professional learning and growth. They outline three interdependent psychological needs that underpin intrinsic motivation: competence – skills to perform well in role; autonomy – direction over own decisions and actions; and relatedness – connection with and support from colleagues. Teams who work in conditions that promote intrinsic motivation report higher levels of job satisfaction and wellbeing, increased performance and, in turn, we hope improved student outcomes (Worth and Van den Brande, 2020).

We wanted our offer to balance each of the three core psychological needs:

• competence: ongoing learning, reacting/adapting to changes (policy, theory, student needs)
• autonomy: an adaptive workforce trusted to develop the skills to adapt independently within a framework of priorities
• relatedness: horizontal improvement and a collaborative culture.

Our framework

By aligning the features of effective PD to the three psychological needs identified in SDT, I established a guiding framework to support the strategic design of PD and ensure a balance of each of the PD mechanisms and psychological needs as our offer grows and changes (Figure 1). 

I used the detail for each mechanism outlined in the EEF guidance report (Collin and Smith, 2021) to map the mechanisms of effective PD onto the three psychological needs of SDT. For some I used the whole category, while some categories are divided. I rephrased some mechanisms to remove reference to ‘teaching’, as we intend this to guide PD for all roles.

Figure 1: Raleigh Education Trust PD framework

We have already used this framework in planning our initial central offer and during the development of internal programmes. Within these programmes, we will be supporting colleagues leading PD to engage with what the guiding framework means in practice. Through this, we hope to maintain the integrity of the mechanisms and make it easier for people designing/sourcing PD in individual schools to make effective choices. Our intention is to use our framework throughout planning, implementation and evaluation, to check our evolving offer against and to ask ourselves: Is our design balanced? Does it meet all three needs? Is there something missing? Do we need to do something else?