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Ross Morrison McGill founded @TeacherToolkit in 2007 and is widely recognised as one of the leading influencers in education in the UK and across the world. In 2015, he was named among The Sunday Times/Debrett’s 500 Most Influential People in Britain for his impact on…
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Is CPD in your school or college still fit for purpose, or are you full up with professional learning?
There is an emerging shift from fragmented CPD to sustained professional learning that builds teacher expertise – exactly how CPD in schools and colleges should be organised!
Raising the profile of teacher-professional learning
Hallelujah!
Conducting a simple linguistic analysis, the phrase “professional learning” appears fifteen times across Ofsted’s new Schools Inspection Toolkit (page 19 is the first reference). This repositions teacher development (CPD) as ‘professional learning that ensures teachers develop the expertise needed to deliver the curriculum effectively.’
The phrase CPD does not appear.
Professional learning expectations
All schools and colleges should offer staff a high-quality, evidence-informed, sustained and coherent professional development programme. However, not all organisations have the capacity, either physically or financially. Nor is it sometimes the immediate priority,
From what I’ve already observed in many schools on my travels, as well as from my own school leadership experiences, this mentality supports an ongoing approach, a professional journal, and a mixed-methods approach to delivering and embedding strategies.
Put cynically, it’s not radical or new, but it is a big shift in inspection thinking, and we all know, ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ Is it the kick up the backside that the sector needs to promote professional development for all teachers?
- Back in 2016 – ten years ago – I started the document on this site, how schools could achieve a richer approach to sustainable professional development, in-house.
- I also advocated in 2017, that old-school CPD planning should protect at least one per cent of the overall budget for adult learning. This is a real challenge for many schools.
- An evaluation by Teacher Development Trust highlighted that this investment (in the school I was leading at the time) was at the top end of the bell curve when compared to other schools.
- The TDT suggested that this 1 per cent would be the optimum budget to set aside. Read a detailed cost-by-cost breakdown: The true costs of professional learning.
For many years, I’ve been supporting schools and colleges with the tools to deliver an adult learning strategy. One that promotes a mixed-retrieval method approach to development (See andragogy).
Example approaches to professional learning I have offered in-house, are shared below. Take a look over these examples, and you can start to understand how schools and colleges can make professional learning transparent for all staff, more strategic, and sustainable.
In this first image, you can view the CPD menu I shared with my own teaching staff in 2015.
This is what I currently offer schools and colleges in 2026. This professional learning approach includes multiple CPD exposure, teacher-resources and implementation plans – see below.
Why is professional learning replacing CPD?
We all know that impactful professional learning should make a difference to teacher workload and student outcomes. We should all move away from the outdated thinking that professional development is delivered like a drive-through at McDonald’s. You get an immediate fix, you feel great in the moment, but then quite sluggish afterwards, then regret taking part, knowing it wasn’t the impact you were looking for.
Instead, a mixed-method approach, over time, with professional discourse, learning, sharing, and regular retrieval, exposure to content that suits not just school/college priorities, but also departments, teams, and individuals’ needs.
This is not an easy feat. It’s certainly not a one-person job; it requires all school staff to be engaged in the process, with lots of internal systems to support success and, when needed, external agencies.
For the last three or four years, I’ve been sharing implementation plans with the schools and colleges I work with, so they can take the content from my research and resources and embed the ideas into a monthly professional learning programme. I’ve attached some examples below. Note, each of these implementation calendars includes many monthly resources behind the scenes to help bring the suggestions to life. It’s also important to remember that these are suggestions, and schools and colleges are encouraged to modify the plan and generate their own learning pathway.
Retrieval Practice: Professional Learning Implementation Plan
A whole school professional action plan to help implement cognitive science strategies across the academic year. To be used in individual classrooms, or as a professional learning programme, delivered in-house.
Coaching and Observation: Professional Learning Implementation Plan
This implementation plan below builds on my research and experiences shared in my book, Just Great Teaching. The resources provide schools and colleges with the tools they need to successfully implement coaching logistics across their institutions. It also factors in reliable observation methods and a new approach to teacher appraisal and performance management.
Adaptive Teaching and Modelling: Professional Learning Implementation Plan
This implementation guide is to help build adaptive teaching practice and modelling. More and more schools and colleges are discovering the power of visualisers in the classroom. Here is another month-by-month calendar that schools/colleges can use as part of their sustainable professional learning programme.
Artificial Intelligence: Professional Learning Implementation Plan
This map helps schools and colleges approach the use of artificial intelligence more strategically. It offers teachers a training program that they can use systematically to help interrogate the ethical use of AI, identify gaps, and opportunities.
Build your own professional learning programme
It is essential that all professional development leaders have a coherent professional learning programme accessible to all staff, supporting a culture of learning, collaboration, and sharing expertise. If I were still a professional development leader in a school, I would expect to be held accountable for any documents I published. This ensures that professional development is sustainable, a priority, and well invested in to help bring it all to life.
Approaching professional learning in this way avoids anything jazzy and one-off.
It is a provocation, but five times out of 10 when I lead a teacher training session, the headteacher is not in the room. I appreciate we’re all very busy people, but it sends a signal to the rest of the staff, that the training is not important to them. In some of the more productive, happier, and professional learning communities I have had the privilege of working with, where head teachers are present in the room, they have a clear sense of teaching and learning priorities, are very much a learner themselves, and the teaching staff tend to be a lot more open and receptive to lots of the material being shared.
There’s nothing worse than a head teacher saying ‘Hello’ at the start of the day, then disappearing!
Finally, it should go without saying, but all adult learning should be supported by as much evidence as possible. We are now in an era where we want to be an evidence–informed profession. Rigorous, academic research, to help provoke us to take action; to inspire us; to challenge our bias. Again, something I’ve advocated for at least a decade is that all schools have a ‘research-lead’ who digests the available research, summarises the findings into manageable chunks, and then ensures that key messages are threaded into your school or college’s professional learning programme.
The new inspection shift mirrors the direction of education policy and academic research. Government evaluations have long questioned the impact of performance-related pay. Instead, inspection now expects schools and colleges to protect time for professional growth, and articulate how staff expertise is nurtured, not just tracked.
This renewed focus aligns with decades of educational research and offers an opportunity to link teacher growth to the school curriculum, behaviour strategy, and workload strategy.
Given that teachers across England have one of the worst provisions for teacher professional learning, these changes shouldn’t come as a surprise and should be welcomed.
As ever, without the government providing anything else to help make this happen, statutory or not, funding and accountability pressures will determine how much learning schools and colleges can offer their staff.
Reflection questions
- Do you protect time for weekly staff development?
- Are you still offering ‘one-off’ CPD sessions with no follow-up?
- Can you demonstrate the impact of CPD?
- Is your current plans aligned with new expectations?
- Do you dedicate 1% of your overall school budget for staff learning?
- Have you written a staff development curriculum?
- How do you support new teachers differently?
- Can you link CPD to workload reduction?
If you need help implementing a sustainable professional learning programme that improves teacher retention and aligns with the needs of your staff and students, get in touch.
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