It is no secret that staff development is integral to a successful school.

Building the expertise of the staff body is one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways of delivering better outcomes for pupils.

It is also a statement of investment for staff - it demonstrates that you value them and that you are keen to nurture their progression.

Uncovering the truth 

When I recently took on responsibility for staff development in my section of the school, one of my first tasks was to get a clearer picture of individual staff members’ perspectives on what they wanted from our development programme and how it could help them.

Ideally, you would do this with a one-to-one conversation with every member of staff - but it simply wasn’t feasible.

Therefore, I decided that producing a survey was the most practical way of canvasing a snapshot of people’s thoughts and opinions regarding staff development.

This would allow me to do several useful things quickly:

• establish how staff felt about the current provision;
• discover their attitude towards career development;
• identify what they perceived to be their areas of strengths and weaknesses;
• discover what content that they would like to receive CPD on; and 
• find out about their previous experiences of staff development - both good and bad.

Designing the survey

There was a lot to learn, but sending out a long-winded, time-consuming questionnaire didn’t seem like the best option - it would have potentially been ignored. 

So, I decided to keep it simple. I limited the number of questions I asked and, where appropriate, used tick-box options to reduce the length of time required to answer.

In the end, the questions arose naturally and obviously from what I was trying to find out. I asked the following questions:

1. What are you currently doing, or have recently done, to develop your teaching practice?
2. To what extent do you think the personal development you are currently doing, or have recently done, is having an impact on your practice?
3. On a scale of 1-10:

• To what extent do you think the personal development you are currently doing, or have recently done, is having an impact on your practice?
• To what extent do you feel your career is currently being supported?
• To what extent do you feel your career is currently being developed?

4.    In what areas do you feel that CPD would be personally of most benefit?

5.    Have you had any past experiences of particularly successful CPD?

6.    What should staff development at our school look like?

What did we find out?

The survey received 45 responses, clearly showing that this was a subject staff cared about and were keen to share their views on.

From this, there was a lot to sift through. It could be tempting to try to cater to all responses and how each issue raised or positive point made could be dealt with.

However, this would be unmanageable and likely end up failing to drive real structural change.

As such, I decided to identify key themes and insights that provided a more representative overview of staff views. From this, the three key takeaways were:

1. There was concern that staff development can be too prescriptive.
2. The most popular requests for CPD were in the areas of support for learning (SfL), leadership training and how to challenge high-attaining pupils.
3. More opportunities to share ideas among staff.

With this established, it was possible to start thinking about how we could structure the two hours per week that our school sets aside for staff development to address these concerns. This is what we did:

1. Short courses

In response to the concern that CPD is overly prescriptive, we have moved to make sure we offer as much choice as possible in the provision.

One of the ways this was achieved was through the setting up of elective pathways: three-part short courses that will run over one-and-a-half terms. Staff can sign up for the ones that interest them.

The requests for more leadership and SfL training was considered when deciding the subject matter for the first elective pathways.

As these were the two most popular options, they were also timetabled at different times, so that people can choose both if they would like to.

These courses are also run and planned by in-house experts, so also have the added bonus of sharing expertise between staff.

2. Action research

With the elective pathways decided upon for now, there remained the question of more support for challenging high-attaining students.

Another part of my role is to lead the Teaching & Learning Group and I felt this group could have a part to play here.

The Teaching & Learning Group is open to all staff who are interested, and we meet twice every half term. This year we have 15 members of staff who have voluntarily signed up.

The group works on a range of action research projects each year and it seemed sensible for one of those projects to examine how we challenge our highest-attaining students.

Five members of the group opted to form part of this project and will share their findings with the wider staff body throughout the year, delivering support and training in the process.

3. Sharing ideas

To create more opportunities to share expertise an idea emerged following discussions with heads of department.

It was suggested that having a termly showcase event where each department will briefly present on a given theme would enable the skills and expertise we already have in the school to be shared quickly and easily.

We have not been able to do a showcase this term owing to lockdown restrictions and campus closures in Thailand. However, the provisional themes for Term 2 and Term 3 respectively are: “How have you embedded our Learner Profile into the curriculum?” and “How are you using technology within your department to improve pupil outcomes?”

Staff were also given an opportunity to offer CPD sessions on topics of their choosing. So far we have a video-editing masterclass and sessions on creating a thinking culture in the classroom lined up.

I’ve also set up a half-termly staff development bulletin, which is shared with staff and contains recommendations to listen, read and watch based on a given theme. This half term’s theme was “curriculum”, to help shape our thinking with an upcoming review of our KS3 provision.

Conclusion

Overall, the thoughts of the staff have gone a long way into shaping the staff development programme at Rugby School Thailand - and it won’t end there with plans for regular opportunities to reflect and feedback on the provision in the future.

After all, given that staff development is all about developing the expertise of staff, it is only right that they should have a say in what and how they learn.

Chris Lindop is head of staff development (prep school) at Rugby School Thailand