Cost-saving approach to CPD

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CPD Week info sheet - Building a framework for a learning culture.pdf

He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.
Anwar Sadat

We can’t escape reference to the economic downturn in the media at the moment. It’s too early to tell whether this will have an impact on schools, but it’s best to be prepared. This issue, we look at sustainable approaches to professional learning that could help your school improve the quality of its provision while focusing on value for money.

While some areas of life in the UK will escape the recession relatively unscathed, it’s likely that all of us, both professionally and privately, will need at least to focus on spending patterns if not make actual changes to our habits. Your school will have professional learning goals which may well require input from outside sources in order to raise levels of expertise and therefore standards. But in cautious times the wisdom of spending money on pricey consultancy is brought into question, especially when the type of expertise being sought can often be found within the school itself. The ideas for rethinking CPD provision outlined below should demonstrate that money can be saved by adopting creative approaches.

• Look online to see if there are any free resources which your school can use. Sites like www.teachers.tv carry a wide range of downloadable resources that are flexible enough for schools to put to use in their context.

• Establish discussion groups within your school (and/or between your school and others) as a form of internal consultancy. This can be an extremely effective way to solve problems – and the amount of contextual intelligence within your school can’t be matched by a consultant from outside.

• Think carefully about your school’s use of ICT. How, for example, can video conferencing, Skype or DVDs help as presentation tools? Are there ways in which you might be more resourceful with them?

• Consider whether you need to encourage shifts in thinking in order to create more sustainable approaches to professional learning. Some schools suffer from limiting beliefs about the ‘correct’ way in which to conduct this. Is this the case in yours?

• Think about which methods for generating professional learning get genuine results that can be evaluated. For want of better ideas, some schools repeatedly pursue strategies for professional learning which don’t lead to discernible outcomes. Be ruthless and cut the rot!

• Explore the possibility of doing action research within your school. This approach does tend to lead to actual change, devised specifically for the context in which your school operates, in the classroom. This is teacher-led development complete with in-house follow-up – you can’t get much more efficient than that.

• Adopt a systematic rather than scattergun approach to meeting your school’s CPD needs. This doesn’t mean piling information on top of what’s already there; it’s about a process of weeding to allow the most fruitful aspects to blossom. Narrow your focus, and results are more likely to appear.

Changes made as a result of budgetary considerations are not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, anything that allows schools to break through old conventions and adopt innovative approaches to professional learning are likely to be positive. There will always be some costs associated with CPD, but an exercise like this should help you focus on value for money. You may even find that old habits don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Find out more…
This information sheet should help you make a start on exploring capacity building for professional learning within your school.

This e-bulletin issue was first published in March 2009

About the author: Elizabeth Holmes qualified as a teacher at the Institute of Education, London and is the author of several books specialising in the areas of professional development and teacher well-being.