Five ways to find time for effective CPD

Schools are full of hard-working professionals who are doing their best to improve the life of the children in their care. 

Highly innovative and creative people are forever coming up with new and interesting ways to improve learning and this can lead to a proliferation of activity with a thousand flowers blooming but none really thriving. 

The hardest thing to do is to recognise that an idea that you or a colleague have nurtured may be helping but that if it was stopped there would be time and space for an even better idea to take its place.

By drawing on the wealth of research around school improvement you can pick the strategies which are most likely to help most children most quickly. Staff at Farmor’s School in Gloucestershire have started using Professor John Hattie’s book, Visible Learning, as well as the Education Endowment Foundation and Sutton Trust Pupil Premium Toolkit in order to focus their CPD time on the “top-ranked” strategies which have shown to help pupil learning most quickly.