Philippa's Autumn Blog
The Olympics gave us a glorious close to a very unglorious summer but I guess the cultural and sporting triumphs will long be remembered as rather special. New academic years are always exciting too, and the sunshine cheers us along even if it would have been nice to have more of it during the break. But with new years come new challenges and 2012-13 promises lots of them.
Some challenges arise from extraordinary announcements from the end of last year and over the summer about QTS and GCSEs, to name but two. The latest revelations about pegging GCSE results to predictions based on key stage 2 results beggars belief. Economic and social conditions put pressure on families coping - or not coping - with ever scarcer resources and increasing child poverty. More constructively, we face the constant challenge of continuing improvement and lifelong learning - and we can all sign up to that. So I make no apology for the strong focus on professional development and learning in this newsletter.
The new Ofsted Framework represents a challenge to be sure, but the inclusion of 16 different references to continuing professional development within it contains, for once, the seeds of a virtuous circle. The research about leadership contributions to student success is absolutely clear; a combination of investigating and supporting the learning needs and activities of colleagues to secure depth in professional learning and modelling effective work based professional learning is twice as effective as anything else leaders do (click here for our summary or here for an FE specific version). So school and college leaders can start the new year confident that, properly structured, investing time and attention in CPD can directly affect learner achievement, improve the quality of teaching and learning and help prepare you for success against the new college and school inspection frameworks.
As our SKEIN evaluation service and our Sauce for the Goose and Performance Review workshops show, approaching the learning of your staff as if they were your class can make a real difference. So exploring the hopes and anxieties of learners at the start of the year could provide a great springboard for phase, departmental or staff room discussions about what everyone hopes and expects to contribute to professional learning over the next three terms.
Philippa Cordingley - Chief Executive