It is often said that the greatest asset of any organisation of significant size is its staff. This and the fact that a striking proportion of a school’s expenditure is consumed by the salaries of its personnel may lead managers to conclude. They should exploit the potential of employees as far as possible with respect, for example, to their interests, abilities and experience.
Yet, support staff frequently go relatively undeveloped, sometimes as a result of talents being hidden and thus largely unknown to senior leaders or because CPD provision within the organisation concentrates primarily on teachers.
Attempts to present a single CPD programme for all support staff in a school are probably doomed to failure, unless they incorporate a substantial measure of differentiation.
In my own organisation, Monkseaton High, this was achieved some years ago via a centrally administered NVQ scheme that enabled staff to pursue courses they had selected at levels which were appropriate to them.
Where the focus lies on face-to-face training, the logistics of assembling everyone regularly are challenging. Many support staff are part-time; they work different hours and not all will be able to commit to attending a timetabled session each week or even each month.
Their diverse roles mean that there is little to unite them in terms of their training needs beyond obvious areas like health and safety, child protection, cyber-security and, perhaps, the use of any new, organisation-wide ICT system.
While the problem may be partially countered when CPD is organised in groups whose members discharge related roles, even this strategy scarcely helps meet the unique needs of individual staff. The team approach becomes especially difficult in small schools, where so many people fulfil a one-off function within the organisation.
Training for teachers may be extended to include mentors and classroom assistants as both are directly concerned with face-to-face learning but this still leaves sidelined those whose roles are outside these categories.
Differences in staff attitudes also need to be considered and sensitively handled. Some non-teachers are reluctant to move beyond what they instinctively feel is their comfort zone. Others enjoy new challenges. There are support staff who relish CPD opportunities, yet many prefer to be left to do the job for which they are paid.
The latter perspective can all too easily lead senior leadership to argue, “support staff don’t want CPD”. This attitude is dangerous, since as well as amounting to a sweeping generalisation that implies non-teachers constitute a homogeneous group, it legitimises any temptation there may be to offer no real CPD to support staff at all, except when it is absolutely necessary.
A potential solution
An alternative to the one-size-fits-all approach is to encourage staff to come forward with their own programmes for CPD, probably via internal appraisal/performance management arrangements. The ultimate benefits may be considerable. They can lead, for example, to the individual being able to tackle a greater variety of work, can fire them with enthusiasm for assuming other duties that may relate to their role but do not fall within their existing remit, or can enable them to operate more effectively within their familiar domains.
An initial challenge will be to widen staff attitudes to the nature of CPD. There is an unfortunate tendency in many sectors – not only education – to assume that CPD means going on courses, attending in-school events, or studying for qualifications.
This is too narrow a perspective – development opportunities can take more forms than these. Staff must appreciate, though, that any overall programme they construct with their appraiser/line manager must align with organisational objectives as well as afford a way of satisfying personal ambitions, and methods may be put in place to determine how far the individual has contributed to the former.
Clearly, CPD cannot be a pretext that allows individuals simply to indulge their own interests. Whatever balance is struck, it is important that CPD is genuinely negotiated between leaders and employees. If activities are imposed on the latter, they will feel no ownership and CPD will seem something organised for or done to support staff, rather than planned with them. In order to promote a spirit of reciprocity, help may be provided in the following areas:
- Funding: In the cases of some qualifications, it may be impossible for the school to commit to paying the full fee but a matching agreement, with each party paying half of what is required, may be workable.
- Time: There are many situations where support staff are given time away from their day-to-day work for CPD purposes. Very often, however, jobs that have accumulated in their absence await them on their return. Although this problem may be overcome through a cover arrangement, issues arise if the protagonist discharges a unique role within the school and no suitably skilled or experienced member of staff can – or is prepared to – stand in as a temporary substitute.
- Personal support: Ideally, each individual should be assigned a more senior member of staff whom they can consult. They may, for example, form a sounding board for the employee’s thoughts, help them construct sense from their experiences, give advice on possible courses of action or engineer opportunities for their ideas to be tested or put into practice. Any on-going dialogue also allows the individual’s progress to be monitored while the programme is taking place. In addition, such conversations may offer insights/evidence that ultimately inform a final review of what has been achieved.
- Facilities/resources: This covers areas that may range from ordinary in-school services, like access to the computer network, printing, photocopying, scanning, and use of a staff library, to support that has to be acquired specially for the individual, e.g. extra books, a subscription to a certain website, or software for which there is normally no demand in the organisation.
The above are not only essential to rendering the work involved practicable, but they may also provide the beneficiary with a greater incentive to exploit the opportunity and demonstrate that the school takes support staff CPD seriously.
It would seem sensible also for senior leaders to exploit their links with other schools and consult their counterparts elsewhere so as to ascertain how the CPD challenge is addressed there. After all, any school that is comparable is bound to be faced with the kinds of issues which pertain to the training of support staff in their own organisation.
An overarching model
It is unwise to consider support staff CPD without noting the role of appraisal/performance management, and a virtuous circle should be established in order to emphasise their interaction.
This is summarised diagrammatically below (see figure 1). In terms of the inherent steps, there are four stages:
Step one: With reference to the employee’s current job description/person specification for the post, use the school’s appraisal system to:
- Assess the individual’s existing skills.
- Identify their training needs.
- Agree a personal CPD agenda.
Step two: Implement the individual’s CPD programme. It may include, for example:
- In-house work-shadowing and observation, mentoring and sharing good practice.
- Projects.
- Job rotation.
- Talks from visiting speakers.
- Exploiting relevant information sources, such as blogs, videos and podcasts.
- Trips to other schools.
- Conversations with equivalent staff elsewhere, perhaps via network meetings.
- External courses.
- The pursuit of further qualifications.
Step three: Monitor and record the individual’s progress as the CPD programme is enacted.
Step four: Return to step one.
Figure 1: Ideal relationship between staff appraisal and CPD (inspired by Monkseaton High School’s Performance Management Cycle model).
Final thoughts
It is clearly impossible to offer a single programme of CPD that will benefit all non-teachers equally. The genericism of this approach renders the content no more than moderately relevant at best to the peculiar concerns of individual members of staff. The alternatives are far from straightforward, however.
Nevertheless, there is much to be said for non-teachers, in concert with their line managers, developing their own programmes, featuring unique ventures backed up by suitable provision of funding, time, personal support, and facilities/resources.
It is appropriate to consider the differences between wants and needs, and for schools to clarify their own position. Putting aside the obvious contrast that, in organisational terms, the former reflect the personal inclinations of the individual and the latter amount to what is necessary for the wider good of the school, another key distinction may be made.
There are many cases when requests for support will reflect wants in the sense that the work intended could go ahead with minimal assistance from the school, but the person would prefer not to invest their own time and money.
In other instances, there will be a need for input from the school and the activity in question cannot proceed without it. Knowing that a self-motivated and highly autonomous individual is likely to find a way of meeting a proposed target irrespective of the school’s contribution, senior leaders may – especially in times of severe financial pressures – prioritise staff with needs (rather than mere wants) and who lack the required funds personally, with the result that the independent employee receives nothing.
Obviously, where either party invests a substantial commitment and has certain expectations of the other, appropriate systems of checks and balances are vital simply to provide fairness and accountability. In particular, whenever support of any kind is made available to an employee, they must understand that a “contract” arrangement is effectively being put in place and managers anticipate that they will deliver in meeting their obligations.
In short, a commitment from the school demands that this is matched by one from the individual so as to ensure that the agreed activity is completed and the promised outcome/s realised.
- Andrew K Shenton worked in a variety of roles as a member of support staff for 18 years at Monkseaton High School. He is now retired. To read his previous articles for SecEd go to www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/dr-andrew-k-shenton