How do you measure the worth of your staff? In most schools around the country, teachers’ pay and progression are linked to pupil performance. Success is measured by test results and league tables.

On the surface, this approach offers a clear picture of who is getting it right and who needs to make improvements.

But this approach is flawed. In every school, so many factors contribute to a pupil’s ability to achieve, including previous teaching and attainment, their home situation and their mental and physical health.

This means that holding a teacher accountable for pupil outcomes is unfair. Not only that, but the effectiveness of this system is also rooted in fear, and this can lead to performance-related stress, professional dissatisfaction and good teachers leaving the profession.

When we link teachers’ progression to pupil performance, without a mechanism to support and recognise professional growth, we also risk compromising the health and happiness of our teaching communities.

Worse still, by measuring teachers’ success in test results, we overlook the need to nurture our craft to be the best practitioners we possibly can be - putting the long-term sustainability of a whole profession in jeopardy in the process.

At the Raedwald Trust, an alternative-provision multi-academy trust in Suffolk, we were determined to do things differently. So we devised a new system for staff professional development in which progression is linked not to pupils’ academic performance but to the self-improvement of teachers.

How did we do this? To start with, it is worth pointing out that our trust is relatively young; it was established in 2016 and our newest member school joined last year. We therefore have the benefit of being a growing learning community with a developing culture.

We had a great opportunity to establish a new trust-wide approach to professional development, whereby every member of our team would be given the tools to achieve their professional goals, and their practice would be nourished as a priority.

The big question was: what would such a system look like in practice? After all, there are no specific or mandatory requirements for self-improvement in teaching. Teachers’ Standard 8 - “fulfil wider professional responsibilities” - feels fairly elective.

We also had few existing models to work from; pupil performance is by far the most common measure of professional success.

This would be a huge change and, given the scale and scope of it, we knew we would need outside help to guide us. We found this support in an experienced teaching school - Ipswich-based Orwell Teaching School Alliance, which engaged Halifax Teaching School - and education consultancies Everyday Leader and Greenfields Education.

With the input of these organisations, we set about creating a programme that emphasises professional growth, rather than performance management.

So, what does this programme involve?

The first thing to note is that our model sits separately from accountability. This is a crucial aspect, as we need our teachers to feel confident talking about areas in which they can improve, without fearing that it will be seen as admitting a shortcoming that can then be used against them if pupils’ results are not as good as hoped.

Of course, identifying gaps in knowledge is not easy, as teachers don’t know what they don’t know - this is as true for senior leaders as it is for junior teachers.

To overcome this obstacle, our programme starts with teachers rating themselves as “red, amber, green” (Rag rating) against the Teachers’ Standards for their associated grade. This is a simple way to identify areas for development.

Staff are then given access to associated professional growth modules (created by us and hosted on a dedicated shared platform), which provide relevant reading material, including links to online research documents, TED Talks, videos and school-wide policies and documents.

Not only are we signposting key research available on a given topic, but each piece of research has also been carefully unpicked by the project leaders to identify specific pages or paragraphs of most relevance.

It was essential for us to go to these lengths to ensure that each module of learning is consistent in its quality and accessible for teachers, who simply don’t have a great deal of time to dedicate to the task. The hope is that the modules will lead teachers to conduct more in-depth study in areas of particular interest to them when time allows.

In addition to focusing on the quality and accessibility of the modules, it was also important for us to prioritise sustainability and scalability.

Schools are bursting with expertise and the programme encourages teachers to identify areas of mastery within their team and to make use of them through training sessions, mentoring, observations and discussions.

To support this work, we have created a “talent directory”, which signposts those members of staff who are best placed to help colleagues to develop in a particular area. The idea is that teachers become experts within their field and then lead others in developing their own practice.

Too often, ticking the professional development box has been about booking yourself on to a training course. But a training course is only as good as what you do with the knowledge when you get back to school.

Ultimately, our programme is about supporting the growth of professional communities from the inside, and creating a model that other schools can engage with and help us to refine. We see this as an infinitely more self-sustaining way of developing the teaching leaders of the future.

Of course, you can expect a level of discomfort when introducing a pretty radical cultural shift. We’re asking our people to go back to self-directed learning in a way that many won’t have experienced since university.

In the future, we would like to find a way of giving everyone more time to invest in their learning within the programme, but, for now, it’s essential that staff can engage with it in the time they have. It has to be heavily scaffolded and delivered in digestible chunks, and our expectations of achievement have to be realistic, because the day job is massive.

However, by doing all this, we believe we will help to improve the wellbeing of our teaching staff and enhance their professional skill sets, too. And this, in turn, can only help to improve the lives and outcomes of the children they teach.

Angela Ransby is CEO of Raedwald Trust, a multi-academy trust in Suffolk, and Lauren Meadows is a director at education consultancy Greenfields Education

This article originally appeared in the 22 May 2020 issue under the headline “We don’t have to judge teachers on pupils’ results”