Helping Staff Develop in Schools

Sara Bubb, Peter Earley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446242957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Great staff make great schools, and by choosing your staff carefully and helping them to develop, you will make a significant impact on the lives of the young people in your care. The school workforce isn?t only teachers these days, and good staff development must take into account everybody working in the setting.

As a practical guide to developing your staff, this book offers an inspirational and exciting view of the transformative power of highly motivated personnel. It summarizes the most recent research that sets staff development in context, and then provides examples of good practice and successful ideas from a range of schools, colleges and local authorities. The authors address practical considerations, as well as management and leadership implications, to help devise strategies for developing the school workforce in order to become more learning-centred and student focused.

Topics covered include:

- why staff development matters

- leading staff development

- being strategic

- finding time for staff development

- identifying needs and planning for impact

- evaluating the impact of staff development

With an emphasis on practical and research-based perspectives, this book offers tried and tested strategies for successful and rewarding staff development that, most importantly, can contribute to improving student outcomes.

This book is particularly relevant to those responsible for leading and managing staff development in schools, colleges and at local authority level. It is also useful for anyone working towards higher degrees in Education Leadership and Management, Mentoring-Coaching and the new qualifications for leaders of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and the Masters in Teaching and Learning (MTL).

Sara Bubb is involved in many aspects of staff development, leads the national Advanced Skills Teachers (AST) network, and lectures and researches at the Institute of Education, University of London. Peter Earley is Professor of Educational Leadership & Management at the London Centre for Leadership in Learning, Institute of Education, University of London.

1

Why staff development matters

---

This chapter covers:

• What is staff development?
• Staff development makes a crucial difference

---

What is staff development?

Staff development matters. But what exactly do we mean by that? Here are some definitions:

Continuing professional development (CPD) consists of reflective activity designed to improve an individual’s attributes, knowledge, understanding and skills. It supports individual needs and improves professional practice. (www.tda.gov.uk/cpd)

Continuing professional development: ongoing training and education throughout a career to improve the skills and knowledge used to perform a job or succession of jobs. (www.bnet.com/cpd BNET Business Dictionary, 2009)

CPD is a combination of approaches, ideas and techniques that will help you manage your own learning and growth. The focus of CPD is firmly on results – the benefits that professional development can bring you in the real world. (www.cipd.co.uk/cpd)

We don’t favour the use of the terms ‘CPD’ or ‘continuing professional development’ in this book because we think that many colleagues in the school and college community may feel excluded by the term ‘professional’. That’s a term usually associated with teachers. We feel strongly that the development of the whole workforce is vital, not just the teachers who in many schools make up less than half of the total staff. So, except when citing others, we try not to use the term.

Even if the word ‘professional’ were omitted we would still consider the above definitions fairly narrow. For us, staff development is:

an ongoing process encompassing all formal and informal learning experiences that enable all staff in schools, individually and with others, to think about what they are doing, enhance their knowledge and skills and improve ways of working so that pupil learning and well-being are enhanced as a result. It should achieve a balance between individual, group, school and national needs; encourage a commitment to professional and personal growth; and increase resilience, self-confidence, job satisfaction and enthusiasm for working with children and colleagues. (Bubb and Earley, 2007, p. 4)

Or, put more simply, staff development is about adult learning, ultimately for the purpose of enhancing the quality of education of children and young people. That’s why it’s so important.

Let’s unpack what we mean.

1. Staff development is an ongoing process
   The process is what is important: development is something that is within the person all the time, not something done to or provided for them.
2. It encompasses all formal and informal learning experiences
   We develop in many ways: through the planned and formal activities as well as the learning through experience, to say nothing of the thoughts that occur while watching a film or which pop into your head in the shower.
3. It enables all staff in schools, individually and with others, to think about what they are doing
   Thinking about what you’re doing is crucial. As Socrates said,
   I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
4. It enhances knowledge and skills
   You’ve got plenty of knowledge and skills and now you’re going to get yet more. We’re not into deficit models.
5. It improves ways of working so that pupil learning and well-being is enhanced
   The goal of all development should be that ultimately things are better for the children and young people.
6. It achieves a balance between individual, group, school and national needs
   We need to develop and help others to so that the benefits are multiplied.
7. It encourages a commitment to growth
   As Benjamin Britten said, ‘Learning is like rowing against the tide. Once you stop doing it, you drift back’.
8. It increases resilience, self-confidence and job satisfaction
   Working with children and young people can be tough, especially on the emotions, so we need to look after and develop our resilience, confidence – and enjoyment of our work.
9. It gives staff renewed enthusiasm for working with children and with colleagues

Staff development makes a crucial difference

In this book we draw upon recent research projects we have been involved in to illustrate key points about the effective leadership and management of staff development. Our recent research for the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) examined the relationship between staff development outcomes and school performance (Bubb et al., 2009). Did staff development make any difference to how pupils performed? Yes, it did.

Staff development makes a crucial difference. It ultimately leads to school improvement whether couched in terms of better teaching and learning, or student and staff welfare and well-being. People development is more effective in enhancing the performance of organisations, including schools and colleges, than any other factor. We believe that it:

• helps everyone be more effective in their jobs, so pupils learn and behave better and achieve higher standards
• improves recruitment because:

– a school or college that is focused on staff development will be looking to find people with the right skills

– word gets around about the places where you are looked after, and where you are not

• contributes to a positive ethos where people feel valued and highly motivated
• makes for a learning-centred community – the pupils are learning and so are the staff
• is a responsibility and an entitlement
• improves staff retention because staff feel fulfilled and successful
• saves money – the costs of recruiting and inducting staff are high.

Organisations which give serious attention to the development of their staff will reap rewards: effective staff development enhances students’ learning and wellbeing because the adults improve their ways of working. Staff development should also add something to the organisation’s overall capacity to improve; and it should be able to build upon the collective learning of its people. As a result of the training and development opportunities made available staff will benefit in many ways. For example, perhaps they will have:

• thought more deeply about what they are doing
• enhanced their knowledge
• developed skills
• improved ways of working
• shown a greater commitment to professional and personal growth
• become more resilient
• gained greater self-confidence
• increased job satisfaction
• shown more enthusiasm for working with children
• shown more enthusiasm for working with colleagues
• increased a colleague’s learning
• enhanced a colleague’s well-being
• enhanced student and pupil well-being
• increased student and pupil learning; and
• increased other staffs’ learning in order to improve things for their students and pupils.

All this as a result of effective development of the organisation’s workforce? We believe so!

Ideas about the central importance of staff development to the success of any organisation are not new. For example, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) see people as the prime resource of the organisation, claiming that managers get better results (in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction, profitability and employee retention) by managing and developing people better. In education, the James Report, published as long ago as 1972, (DES, 1972) stressed that each school should regard the continued training of its teachers – we would now say ‘workforce’ – as an essential part of its task for which all members of staff share responsibility. This government report ensured that the further professional development of staff became a national issue and it still is today for the simple reason that people development is crucial for school improvement. The staff is the most important resource of the organisation, but particularly in people-based organisations like schools and colleges.

As the bulk of a school or college’s budget is spent on paying staff it is also crucially important to get the most out of your people to improve pupil well-being and learning. The professional and personal growth of all staff is a key component of developing children’s and young people’s learning. The ongoing development of staff is crucial in helping to address the organisation’s priorities identified to bring about improvement, enhance the quality of the learning experience, and generally make things better for pupils. In The Logical chain Ofsted (2006) found that ‘schools which had designed their CPD effectively and integrated it with their improvement plans found that teaching and learning improved and standards rose’ (p2). Overall, staff development was found to be most effective in the schools where the senior managers fully understood the connections between each link in the chain (what we prefer to call the staff development cycle) and recognised its potential for raising standards and enhancing well-being and t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Why staff Development Matters
• Part A Leading Staff Development
• Part B Making Staff Development Count
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index