Reimagining CPD to keep more teachers in the profession

How can more flexible working conditions keep teachers in the profession? Ultan Bannon and Andy Homden wonder if one way forward might be found in how CPD sessions are scheduled.
The hunt is on

School systems and governments around the world are under intense pressure to recruit and retain more staff. In one well-publicised initiative announced in November 2024, the Department for Education in the UK urges schools to find ways of implementing more flexible working hours, suggesting that to do so would widen the pool from which they were recruiting, promote wellbeing and improve staff retention.

See – Gov. UK Department for Education  Flexible working in schools

The DfE recommends that schools should be looking seriously at job-sharing, flexi-hours, compressed hours, personal days and, yes, working from home.

The precious commodity of time

Greater flexibility for teachers generally means removing constraints on the way their time is allocated.

But time is the most valuable resource in any school and the distribution of time is not just about scheduling lessons. In any given day at school, teachers will be allocated time for duties, supervisions, time for meetings, for Professional Development and for Co-curricular Activities.

Any time spent away from school means less flexibility for good time tabling and for teachers being with the people who need their time most – their students.

Time for CPD

Let’s look at one of those time categories – the time given to professional development.

We all know it is essential. However, time for great face-to-face professional development is constrained and squeezed into the time slots when teachers are not required in the classroom.

And as those of us who design timetables and schedules know only too well, time slots that are constrained are almost by definition not flexible – which brings us back to the search for more flexible work practices to attract and retain more teachers.

Flexible work practices and asynchronous training

With a little bit more imagination could the organisation of CPD provide some of that flexibility which everyone agrees is important but tricky to organise?

For example, might using an on-demand Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver asynchronous training as part of a school’s CPD programme offer scope for loosening things up a little? And might the system, if properly set up, also provide better engagement compared with, say, twilight sessions when everyone has half an eye on the clock, hoping to avoid the evening rush hour or to catch the right train?

Perhaps building in some asynchronous sessions into the CPD and meetings mix, could make all the difference to part-time staff while bringing benefits to others by making training available when their time is less constrained. However, incorporating LMS-based training into a CPD programme won’t necessarily be straightforward.

Issues to resolve

We think there are four issues to resolve if asynchronous PD is to become effective:

1. Dealing with remote learning push-back

People will have to be sufficiently self-disciplined to log on and get down to work either in the evenings or at the weekend if asynchronous sessions are going to work. This suggests

  • There has to be a clear rationale for asking people to go online for aspects of their training and they have to know what else they are gaining – quite apart from the training itself
  • The material has to be of good quality and probably provided in bite-sized chunks
  • There has to be some form of challenge from and interaction with the platform to maintain engagement

2. Finding time and a place to record

If your trainers are in-house, they might be taken off timetable for a couple of hours to give them time to make their recordings. Having a bookable studio with a technician on hand would be a real advantage. Some kind of cost-benefit analysis would be prudent to assess whether this would be time well-spent – however, the upside in terms of flexibility and time saving could be significant.

3 and 4. Setting production standards and managing the platform

All CPD units should look good, sound good and carry the school’s brand. The platform needs to be well set up to make it easy for trainers to record and submit their material. Once recordings have been submitted, introductory titles and credits would preferably be added by a support technician, who might be in-house or out-sourced. Other content, course guidelines, online exercises and handouts are also submitted and loaded.

The CPD team will be responsible for planning and coordinating the year’s programme just as in a conventional approach, but more will have to done in advance of the programme going live and there will be different technical processes to understand.  However, once in place, it just becomes part of the system.

The advantages

What, then, are the pay offs of using an LMS to deliver aspects of your CPD? Here are five:

1. More flexible use of staff time during the school year

First and foremost, it adds flexibility to your training and perhaps also to your  meeting schedule. You don’t have to get large numbers of people together so often, which will mean fewer after school sessions and perhaps fewer interruptions to your teaching year when previously you have to take the students ‘off timetable’ to provide training days.

Once sessions are loaded on the system they might also be viewed at departmental meetings or during individual preparation time on site.

The advantages to part-time staff could be really significant.

Depending on how you approach things, it might even mean fewer on-site days for all staff, but with no loss of quality or content in your training: if everyone participated in 12 hours of asynchronous online training in the course of year, this might count as two onsite training days.

2. Onboarding

The beginning of a new school year is always demanding and breathless. Completing some aspects of onboarding for new staff asynchronously during the school vacation might make more time available for classroom preparation and lesson planning.

3. Making the most of your in-house expertise

Using asynchronous training through an LMS will make it easier to benefit from your in-house experts who can reach a wider audience without being taken away from their other responsibilities quite so often. This is, of course, of even greater potential value to school groups or training organisations which deliver the same courses to a number of different client schools.

4. More efficient use of visiting trainer time

Customised asynchronous training can also be uploaded and delivered by visiting trainers in exactly the same way as your in-house experts using the LMS. One or two online sessions before and after a visit could help reduce costs and enrich face-to-face sessions, enabling participants to hit the ground running and then follow up – far more effectively.

5. LMS quality assurance & learner analytics

An internal CPD learning system will generate full learner analytics for quality assurance, adding meaning and value to course certification.

Incremental wins

It is unlikely that a single solution will provide the kind of flexibility that schools should be looking for in staff working hours. However, making a start in one area will, we think, lead to other changes. The search for better ways of doing things becomes a state of mind, and after a year or so, we believe that the benefits of a number of smaller changes will add up to something well worth having.

Ultan Bannon is the Founder of LegalEd CPD, a leading provider of online in-service training for the legal profession in Europe and the UK.

 

 

Andy Homden is the CEO of Consilium Education. They are currently working on a collaborative project to adapt the LegalEd platform for use as a training platform in international schools.

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FEATURE IMAGE: by Avi Richards on Unsplash 

Support Images:  by Ave Calvar on Unsplash, Curated Lifestyle For Unsplash+, Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash, & Getty Images For Unsplash+