Balancing the plate-spinning act
School leaders need to perform remarkable feats of plate-spinning in order to meet the vast and varied responsibilities their role entails. Some of these duties are more formally set out in the (non-statutory) Headteachers’ Standards from the Department of Education, with Standard 6 covering their part in leading professional development.
Within this standard is the need to ensure that professional development opportunities ‘balance the priorities of whole-school improvement, team and individual needs’.[1] Considering the complexities and varieties of contexts that covers, how is it that school leaders – with increasingly limited financial, staffing and time resources – are able meet these different needs?
While gathering case studies for an international comparative project on professional learning networks, we came across one such school in England seeking to tackle this challenge head-on, with promising results. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with leaders responsible for professional development, teachers who had experience of the setting and documentary analysis from policies and plans.
Professional development in an all-through school
Greenfield is a successful local authority all-through school serving a community of over 1,500 pupils from Nursery to Key Stage 4 in the South of England. Originally a secondary school, the headteacher stepped up from the role of deputy just as the primary school was being opened.
School leaders and governors are invested in a vision to deliver a carefully planned ‘all-through’ setting for the community, building on knowledge of child development. A carefully sequenced and planned curriculum runs from EYFS to GCSE with a strong middle school offering. Leaders and teachers work across the traditional primary/secondary structure and their efforts were recently awarded with an Outstanding grade from the current challenging Ofsted framework.