During the academic year of August 2022 to June 2023, The Education Scotland Professional Learning and Leadership Directorate (PLL) continued to deliver a suite of leadership professional learning programmes, evolving and adapting the content and offers to ensure that they best reflect the needs of the system. 

The directorate worked with the system to ensure that they listened to the current voice of practitioners, engaging with them in a variety of ways, including focus groups, evaluations and the completion of a listening exercise, focusing on the professional learning needs of headteachers. 

As a result, some programmes have evolved and changed to ensure that the professional learning offers remained relevant in an ever-evolving environment.  Some programmes were postponed due to delivery challenges or changes to programme funding. 

Formal evaluation of programmes and wider professional learning events took place,  and the results of these evaluations will be discussed below.  PLL also use a variety of supporting material in the delivery of programmes,  such as personal learning activities (PLAs) and participant blogs. Where appropriate and to further support the evidence of impact across the directorate, informal data can be drawn from these sources.

More than 1600 practitioners participated in the PLL programmes between August 2022 to June 2023. This included colleagues from education establishments, local authorities and national organisations. The programmes delivered within PLL were collated into four categories: Educator, Middle, School, and System.  Each category has a collection of programmes aimed at practitioners interested in leadership within that area. 

The Education Scotland Corporate Plan  identifies System Leadership  as a strategic priority, with the intended outcome that ‘ All educators are able to lead effectively in complex circumstances’  To measure this outcome, and the supporting aims, the following Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measured the:

• number and location of participants in professional learning programmes
• proportion of participants in professional learning programmes reporting increased awareness, understanding, knowledge and skills
• number of participants engaging in mentoring and coaching
• number of sign ups and unique visitors to the PLL website

The KPIs relating to increased awareness, understanding, knowledge and skills are asked within each PLL programme’s post-participant evaluation survey. Each PLL programme has their own individual post-participation evaluation survey, which gives scope for programme specific questions to be asked, meaning more in depth insight can be garnered in relation to programme impact.