General  »   New ways to provide CPD

It seems to be getting more and more difficult to get people out of school for CPD, yet, if an organisation is responsible for helping create 21st Century citizens, it makes sense to ensure that teachers are given every opportunity to keep their own knowledge and skills bang up to date. So....how DO we ensure that we are providing people with appropriate CPD so that it fits in with teaching commitments and the issues of 'rarely cover'?

This is definitely an issue in the South West compounded by the geographical spread of the region.

I agree with Julie's suggestions but a significant number of teachers are not naturally taking to some of the new technologies that would be useful. I think we therefore have to look at ways of addressing those training needs alongside the Enterprise agenda - actually it is all part of raising enterprise skills amongst teachers isn't it?

I also agree about schools sharing with others on a more local basis - several ELPs in the South WEst are using variations on this theme to disseminate good practice - it will be interesting to see how these various strategies work out.

One other thought from recent experience. My secondary school has supported its feeder primaries to affiliate to the SSAT as a cluster. The primaries all wanted a special event to really make all their staff aware of the SSAT family of schools programme and to inspire their practice. To this end, all the primaries selected a common day as a staff only development day ensuring ALL staff, teachers, LSAs and Governors in some cases would attend a major event locally.
This has just taken place and almost 300 staff attended the event. The only shame was the focus wasn't actually on Enterprise! But it was on innovation and education for the 21st Century so I'm sure Enterprise would be a live agenda as a next step.

The real disadvsntage to this is that it took over 12 months to plan because all the governing bodies had to agree and set the non-pupil day in the first place before anything else could happen. But.... it was definitely worth the effort!

I really like this idea! It takes away all the complication of getting staff out of school if they take the students with them! It ticks so many boxes. It must have been a huge thing to organise but I bet it was worth it! Are you thinking of making it an annual event?

Yes, an excellent idea. I've seen it done before by a number of service providers where the students get on with the Challenge with business facilitators and the teachers are taken into another room. They are then asked to go back and identify enterprise skills in the students by going round the tables and watching and listening but not speaking!