• Latest news
  • RSS feeds
• Find recent news
• Ofsted News
• Media Centre

Press release: Continuous professional development is most effective when senior managers fully understand its potential for raising standards

Schools which integrate CPD into a coherent cycle of planning improve the quality of teaching and raise standards

The logical chain: continuing professional development in effective schools, published today by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), says continuing professional development (CPD) is most effective in schools where senior managers fully understand its potential for raising standards and are committed to using it as a key driver for school improvement.

The teachers and support staff in these schools enjoyed high quality CPD, which had been well chosen to meet their schools’ and their own needs. Schools which had designed their CPD programmes effectively and integrated them with their improvement plans found that teaching and learning improved and standards rose. Such schools used a wide range of CPD activities, including coaching and mentoring. They did not simply view CPD as training; the best schools identified the impact that such opportunities had on raising standards.

The report describes CPD arrangements as a logical chain which entails identifying school and staff needs, planning to meet them, providing varied and relevant activities, involving support staff alongside teachers, monitoring progress and evaluating the impact of professional development.

In less effective schools although senior managers identified their schools’ needs systematically and accurately, the identification of the needs of individual teachers was not always rigorous which resulted in weak planning for professional development. Few schools evaluated the impact of CPD on teaching and learning successfully, largely because they failed to identify, at the planning stage, its intended outcomes and suitable evaluation methods. In addition, some headteachers did not know how to assess the cost effectiveness of their CPD policy.

Ofsted’s Divisional Manager for Curriculum and Dissemination, Jane Joyner, said:

“Continuing professional development is most effective in schools which understand and realise its potential for raising standards. In the less effective schools in terms of CPD, the needs of individual teachers require better identification and the impact of CPD arrangements should be evaluated.”

Inspectors found that the attitude of secondary schools to using support staff in the classroom varied. At one end of the scale, support staff played a full part in supporting pupils’ learning; at the other, some staff were opposed to the very idea of using support staff in the classroom.

Inspectors found arrangements for CPD in the subjects they were inspecting to be inadequate in about one third of the primary schools. This does not mean that the schools’ arrangements for CPD overall were unsatisfactory but that there had been little or no recent professional development in the individual subject being inspected.

The report recommends that to improve the professional development of teachers and support staff, the TDA should work with schools to:

• enhance managers’ skills in evaluating the impact of their CPD arrangements

• devise easy-to-use practical tools to enable schools to assess the value for money and cost effectiveness of their CPD

• encourage more subject-specific training and development in primary schools

• disseminate effective methods for identifying the individual needs of staff and provide models of individual training plans for schools to adopt or adapt

• make more effective use of coaching and mentoring.

Notes For Editors

1. The logical chain: continuing professional development in schools report is available on the Ofsted website www.ofsted.gov.uk today. The CPD survey was conducted in 29 schools (14 primary, 13 secondary and 2 special schools) between the summer of 2005 and the spring of 2006. Evidence from these schools was supplemented by surveys of subjects in more than 130 schools. On these visits, inspectors considered the effectiveness of CPD in the subjects they were inspecting.

2. Ofsted is a non-ministerial government department established under the Education (Schools) Act 1992 to take responsibility for the inspection of all schools in England. Its role also includes the inspection of further education, local authority children’s services, teacher training institutions and some independent schools. During 2001, Ofsted became responsible for inspecting all 16–19 education and for the regulation of early years childcare, including childminders.

Share this

Google Plus One