In September last year, I introduced the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) at the ResearchEd National Conference in London, where I said that being ‘school led’ ran through everything we do.

Twitter being Twitter, my presentation provoked some reaction. Is ‘school led’ just the latest edu-buzzword? What does it mean in practice? And why does being school led matter?

Those are fair questions. Let me try and answer some of them.

Why we want to be school led

As to the idea that “school led” is just a buzzword, I disagree. At the NIoT, we’ve considered ourselves school led from the outset.

Our parent charity is called the School-Led Development Trust and was set up by four of the most successful school trusts in the country. Between them, they are responsible for 188 schools and together, they educate more than 100,000 children.

What’s more, our campuses are on school sites, for example, and our programmes are delivered by serving teachers and leaders.

We believe this means we can provide varied and granular exemplification that walks the line between evidence fidelity and context, without compromising on quality.

As to what this means in practice, it comes down to the recognition that it’s all too easy for gaps to open up between the design and delivery of professional development and the realities of school life.

Despite good intentions, continuing professional development can often miss the subtleties and complexities of life in schools, undermining its impact and giving rise to unhelpful “translation gaps”. 

We believe these gaps blunt the impact that good research can have, and mean the research becomes less valuable for teachers, leaders and the children they serve. 

As such, we need to ensure that anything that claims to improve teaching outcomes, reduce workload and develop the necessary skills to grow as an educator, does exactly that on the ground - in schools, classrooms and staffrooms across the country.

This is why it really matters - because if we are not school led, we are not truly benefiting the people we are here to serve and, by extension, the pupils they teach.

Walking the walk

How can we do this in reality, then?

It would certainly be easy to talk the talk but slowly drift away from schools and allow for our own gaps to open up.

As such, we are working to be proactive in creating close links with schools to ensure we can deliver on our school-led ethos.

For example, everyone who joins the NIoT will have to demonstrate a clear commitment to our mission, to helping schools and the children they serve. We’ll encourage joint roles so staff are able to work for both the NIoT and schools.

We’ll make sure our people take an active role in schools by volunteering within our school communities - on everything from career days to exam invigilation or cover lessons.

We’ll also work to support our people to become school governors in their local communities, and develop habits and behaviours that are respectful of teachers’ time, such as not expecting teachers to read emails during the teaching day.

And crucially, we’ll commission and undertake research about professional development based on what schools tell us are the most important questions they need answering.

Guided by the profession

This brings us to an announcement today that we’re launching a new, eight-week consultation aimed at helping to unpick the issues about professional development with which teachers, leaders and those across education want more support.

For example, when is it better to engage with CPD during the school day and when is it better to run twilights? How should self-study be structured to deliver maximum impact in minimum time? Do the same professional development design principles apply at all stages of teachers’ and leaders’ careers? Or do they change with seniority or experience?

This consultation is open now and takes the form of a five-minute survey that has been designed to be as streamlined and efficient to answer as possible. There will also be several face-to-face events in Doncaster and in London.

The insights gathered will help inform our choices about the type of future research we conduct so we can generate research outputs that are genuinely useful to everyone involved in training and developing teachers and leaders, and make a tangible and sustainable difference to how teachers teach and how leaders lead.

This is vital because the research base that informs teachers’ professional development needs to be stronger. Good work has been done in this area by others, of course, but there is much more that needs to be done.

After all, understanding the most effective teacher training and development methods and inputs could have a significant impact on pupil outcomes by ensuring children in our schools are being taught by teachers who are the best they can be.

All this can only work if the questions we’re asking, the experiments we’re conducting and the improvements we’re making are valuable for teachers, for leaders and everyone involved in supporting them.

So this is where we need you as educators to get involved, by taking part in the consultation, sharing it with your colleagues and coming along to the events to give us your insights and opinions on how we can help make teachers in our schools the best they can possibly be.

For me, all this demonstrates exactly what we mean when we say we are “school led” in everything we do.

The consultation is open now and will close on 24 May. Melanie Renowden is the chief executive of the National Institute of Teaching