When I first joined my current school, part of what appealed was the commitment to research-based pedagogy and a vision for continuing professional learning and development (CPLD).

There were weekly staff meeting CPLD sessions, professional learning communities, bitesize CPLD drop-ins, a year-long leadership course and senior leadership team “deep shadowing” - whereby staff interested in senior leadership could “shadow” one particular member of SLT, meet them to discuss their role and development and join the SLT for key meetings.

However, despite all this, in time we came to feel we weren’t meeting the needs of all staff - chiefly because what was on offer was too prescriptive and so while some sessions were of benefit to certain staff, others felt left out.

As an SLT, we set about changing this by deciding we would confine most SLT-led CPLD sessions to just Induction and Inset days, and use the time this freed up from the CPLD timetable to let staff pick from a menu of courses to tailor their CPLD.

A menu of options

In fact, this is exactly how we offered it up: as a “menu” of options for staff to choose from.

This includes a shorter series of “starters” that involve something small and bitesize, like reading, watching, listening to education research and reflecting on it, and also “soup”, which consists of a small action research-based project focused on a practical area of pedagogy.

This experience is then shared with the rest of our teaching team at a termly “teachmeet” style CPLD session.

The largest part of this offering, though, is the “main course”.

This is effectively 10 hours or more of CPLD aimed at a particular area of development: a national professional qualification, an examiner course, our staff training programme, a middle leaders’ course and so on. Staff choose what type of “main course” is most interesting and relevant for them, and work on this across the year.

The “dessert” is a one-off external course, whether online or in person. We are lucky to be part of a few schools’ networks with regular webinars, conferences and CPLD sessions, so there is plenty to choose from.

Staff can also access ongoing training through other online platforms that we subscribe to or apply for funding for external courses.

The impact

To ensure we understood how this was being received by staff, we linked outcomes from the session to our responsive appraisal process with staff recording what they were learning and how they were incorporating it into their teaching.

That way, at each appraisal check-in, staff and leaders could discuss professional learning and how staff were developing to help us assess the new approach we had instigated.

This meant line managers had to be consistent in how they were explaining the new approach to CPLD. So, to do this, we as an SLT created a master CPLD portfolio with our extra “SLT instructions and questions”, which we could then model with the staff we managed.

They in turn could then do so with their staff, ensuring a uniform approach to monitoring CPLD impact across the school.

Budgeting for CPD

Another issue we had to think about was budgeting. Additional staff freedom and CPLD requests are difficult to budget for with precision.

To address this, we decided all requests for significant funding needed to be made in term one, so we could make decisions to ensure our CPLD pot was distributed fairly for the year. CPLD applications are made via a Google Form to our teaching and learning leaders, who manage that budget with SLT oversight.

A final challenge was that, for some of our language teachers, the challenge of documenting their own development in English created extra workload and pressure - something perhaps unique to an international school.

This one was an easy fix though - we let our our language teachers record in the language they are teaching, as their line manager is able to access this easily.

Time will tell how successful the programme is in impacting pupil outcomes, but we have already seen much higher engagement and enthusiasm from staff in their own professional development.

Stephanie Fedorowicz is deputy principal at St. Joseph’s Institution International, Malaysia