Support for Teaching School Alliances

A primary phase Teaching School Alliance in the Liverpool area contracted with us to support a joint development project to measure its effectiveness and indicate the strengths and remaining challenges of collaborative working. The seven primary schools were keen to explore the impact of their CPLD activity of improving the quality of teaching and joint strategies to help raise achievement, whilst the three nurseries / Sure Start Centres were exploring their CPLD to support the new EYFS Framework and revised inspection requirements.

The assessments conducted in the Spring of 2014 revealed a number of benefits arising from collaborative work and joint professional development activity [JPD], not least the trust and collaborative culture across the Alliance and the value of school leaders working together on focused improvement programmes.

The Alliance decided that each setting should initially aim to achieve the Bronze level of the award. The assessments revealed the strengths of each setting and the action points that each could consider to make significant improvements and work for higher levels of the award.

Feedback from leaders / managers of each setting confirmed the value of the process:

“It is very valuable to have the quality of your provision externally assessed and accredited…”

“The assessment recognised the effort that we have put into two significant CPD programmes over the past year and verified the impact that it has had on teaching.”

“The audit exercise captured just how much we actually do and what we needed to refine.”

“Thank you for ideas on developing our approach to learner independence…we will certainly take them up.”

“Having the CPD lead in school it was very helpful to me to audit what we do and it certainly identified some improvement points for us.”

“I’m pretty sure that we will now aim for Silver, but Gold is where we would like to be.”