Helping Staff Develop in Schools

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.

Sara Bubb is an experienced London teacher who helps staff in schools develop. She does this in many ways: through leading professional development, assessing, developing schemes, researching, and writing.

With a national and international reputation in the induction of new teachers and professional development, Sara speaks at conferences and runs courses throughout the country and abroad (e.g. Norway, Taiwan) on topics such as helping staff develop, observation skills, induction, developing pedagogical skills, leading continuing professional development (CPD), subject leadership, monitoring teaching and implementing performance management. She has featured on and been a consultant for eight Teachers TV programmes. She trains a broad range of people, including inspectors, assessors, advisers, consultants, Fasttrack, TeachFirst and advanced skills teachers.

Sara assesses advanced skills, excellent, overseas trained and graduate teachers and higher level teaching assistants and was an external assessor for Threshold. She has inspected over 25 primary schools.

As a senior lecturer at the Institute of Education (0.2) she works on PGCE and Masters programmes and set up the employment-based routes (OTT and GTP) to QTS. She is lead director of the CfBT Education Trust-funded Sef2Si – From Self Evaluation To School Improvement: The Importance Of Professional Development – project. She co-directed the DfES-funded national research Project on the Effectiveness of the Induction Year, was deputy director of the TDA systematic review of induction research and has helped the Northern Ireland GTC revise their teacher competences.

On a 0.2 secondment to the DCSF London Challenge team, Sara is the consultant for Chartered London Teacher status – a scheme involving over 38,600 teachers. She is the London Gifted & Talented Early Years network leader, working with staff in reception and nursery classes to enhance their provision for all children, especially the most able.

She has written books and numerous articles on induction, professional development, workload, and performance management. She is the new teacher expert at the Times Educational Supplement, and writes articles, a weekly advice column and answers questions on its website.