It is my firm belief that happy teachers make for happy students. I also firmly believe that to be happy, teachers need to feel that they are being invested in by the schools they work for. Help teachers to grow and develop as teachers, and everyone will benefit.

The best way to invest in teachers is through the in-school professional learning programme. Think of it like a hotel. Three-star hotels “do the job”, but they don’t do much more than that. Four-star hotels are much better; staying in them tends to feel good. But five-star hotels - now we’re talking! Five-star hotels aren’t about feeling good - they are about feeling great. They should make us all feel special.

Teachers are special. Every teacher deserves to be working in a five-star school that offers a five-star professional learning programme. Nothing short of five stars is good enough. Give teachers that, and watch them grow - and watch students flourish.

If we don’t invest in our teachers in this way, then what do we really expect to happen? Will they feel valued? No. Will they develop? Perhaps. But they will probably have to buy their own professional reading books and attend their own professional learning courses in their own time. Many won’t begrudge doing this and they will be prepared to spend their own money, but should they really have to?

Schools should be investing in teachers’ professional learning a lot more - and a lot better - than they currently are. Using their professional learning budget to resource a high-quality professional reading library would be a good start. Kitting this out with some nice furniture and a coffee machine would be a nice touch. Establishing a professional reading group would help to make professional learning a social affair, with teachers learning with, and from, one another in a relaxed setting.

Many schools have already done this, which is great. But if they are going to be five-star schools with five-star professional learning, they need to be doing more - much more. Otherwise, it risks being tokenistic.

Five-star teacher CPD

Setting up a high-quality workshop programme would go a long way. This should blend the workshops that all staff are expected to attend with those that are voluntary. These might run before school starts, over breakfast, at lunchtime or at the end of the school day over a hard-won biscuit. Giving teachers choice about when they can attend would be appreciated because everyone’s personal and professional circumstances are different. It’s small details like this that often make the biggest difference to how people feel and their willingness to engage.

Who should run these workshops? Anyone who wants to: every teacher has something to share. Every teacher has things that everyone else could learn from. School leaders and support staff should lead workshops, too. All it often needs is for someone to be given a tap on the shoulder and asked. People like to be asked to do things. It helps them to feel recognised, appreciated and valued.

Should minutes be taken as evidence for inspectors that such workshops are happening? No, that’s an unnecessary formality. If inspectors want to know about such things, they will ask people about them, not trawl through old files. We don’t need to take minutes every time groups of staff get together to talk about something. That’s just another way to waste time. The formality of it also puts up a barrier we don’t need.

What should the themes of the workshops be? Almost anything! Teachers have a natural, insatiable appetite to learn. What I would say, though, is that there must be a focus on professional learning that has a direct, practical relevance to classroom practice: curriculum and pedagogy. After all, this is the core business of a school; teaching and learning is what matters most. Given that we are talking about schools, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised.

Competing agendas

Instead of having a laser-like focus on teaching and learning, professional learning programmes in too many schools are being sidetracked by competing agendas. These include topics that are incredibly important - health and wellbeing, inclusion and child protection are common examples - but not so much so that they should squeeze teaching and learning from the agenda. It should actually be the other way around: teaching and learning should dominate; other topics should sit alongside and complement this.

Let’s draw a comparison with surgeons. It’s a fair comparison because teachers’ jobs are as important as surgeons’ are - they might not be saving lives, but teachers are transforming them. Do surgeons invest time in professional learning? Yes, lots. No matter how good they are already, all surgeons are focused on getting better at what they do. They have an ethical responsibility to do so. Teachers are no different. School leaders have an ethical responsibility to support them above all else.

However, unlike surgeons, teachers aren’t being allowed to focus their professional learning on the right things. The professional learning of surgeons focuses on surgery. Yes, they also engage with learning that complements this, but the overriding focus of their professional learning time is on the core aspect of their job. Too few teachers are being given the opportunity to do the same.

Think back to the programme your school has offered you over the past year. (I accept that, with remote learning, this has been an unusual year, so perhaps cast your mind back to the year before.) What was the offer? Was there professional reading and discussion? Were there workshops? Did the programme focus on any of the following topics?

• Working memory and long-term memory.
• Cognitive-load theory.
• Rosenshine’s principles of instruction.
• The testing effect.
• Retrieval practice.
• The redundancy principle.

Be honest with yourself: how many of these topics have you heard about? How many of them do you really understand?

If your answer to either or both of these questions is “not many”, then you’re in good company. However, respectfully, I would suggest that’s a problem. The reason is that they all relate directly to the core aspect of your job. For that reason, it’s really quite important that you - and every teacher and leader in your school - learn about these topics.

As your learning about them improves, so too will your teaching. That’s a promise. The delivery of your school’s professional learning programme will also improve because the things you will learn about will be as relevant to delivering learning to teachers as to students. The list of topics I presented is a selective one. I could have included a lot more. It’s actually tremendously exciting just how much there is for everyone to learn about pedagogy - we will never perfect it, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.

Developing the programme

There are many other things that schools could be doing to develop five-star professional learning programmes. Middle and senior leaders could commit to “upskilling” themselves by doing more professional reading and having more discussions based on this. They could watch lessons together rather than separately and get into discussions about pedagogy based on these. As their knowledge and understanding of pedagogy gets better, so too will their leadership, and everyone will benefit. The better the pedagogical knowledge and understanding of leaders, the better the feedback conversations they will have with teachers following observed lessons.

Teachers could be supported to observe each other more by setting up peer-observation programmes. They could be supported to learn more from each other by setting up better systems to share practice. Departmental meeting time could be used better so that discussions focused on developing subject knowledge and subject-specific pedagogy. Middle leadership positions could be created, such as the principal teacher of pedagogy position we have introduced in our school, so that a highly respected and skilled practitioner could work with teachers to help them develop their practice in a nonthreatening way.

At a time when everyone in the teaching profession has been working harder than ever, going at least two extra miles beyond their normal one, let’s make a commitment to our teachers about what they should expect to find when things return to “normal” : a five-star professional learning programme with teaching and learning at its core.

Let’s use this programme to invest in our teachers and let’s watch what happens. It’s not too difficult to predict: what we will see is teachers who are fired up and thriving. We’ll also see teachers who are keen to read more, discuss more and learn more. And we’ll see teachers striving to make their teaching better and better, and who value the support they are getting from their school to do this. In short, let’s invest in teachers by investing in teaching - and watch as our profession is transformed.

Bruce Robertson is rector (headteacher) of Berwickshire High School and author of The Teaching Delusion

This article originally appeared in the 5 March 2021 issue