The professional learning and leadership (PLL) team at Education Scotland provides leadership professional learning support to educators at all levels of the system and strategic support for ensuring high quality professional learning for educators across Scotland. This involves a wide range of offers and support which vary from year to year depending on the needs of the system. It’s therefore important to us that we take the time regularly review how we can adapt and improve what we do.

It's equally important however for us to regularly take stock of the strengths of our offer and the impact it is having. To support us with this, we gather some of our evaluative information into an ‘impact report’. We find this useful as a team, but we also recognise the importance of our participants and stakeholders in achieving all of the impact our offers have. As such, we thought it would be helpful to share the PLL 2022 to 2023 impact report with you.

As you’ll see from the report, there was a lot for us to celebrate in 2022/23! We had over 1600 participants engaging across our programmes and it was fantastic to see that 100% of those who completed the evaluation form for the Educator Leadership Programme stated that they are likely to implement their learning in practice. You can view the enquiry posters participants created through this programme.

The Building Racial Literacy programme had two successful cohorts in 2022/23 with over 200 participants completing the programme. The following quote from a participant on cohort 3 of the programme is particularly powerful:

"This professional learning has changed my mindset completely, making me aware of my own attitudes, behaviours and ignorance, and the importance of tackling tricky issues in brave and safe spaces"

Our middle leadership programmes continued to involve large numbers of participants in 2022/23 with extremely positive evaluations for both Aspiring to Middle Leadership and Middle Leaders Leading Change. A long-term follow-up was also completed with previous cohorts of Aspiring to Middle Leadership with 70% reporting that they felt more empowered to influence changes to the culture of own establishment. This long-term evaluation also highlighted that some past participants were now much more mindful of their own wellbeing as a result of the learning.

The Into Headship programme continued to support aspiring headteachers in 2022/23 with 218 participants completing cohort 7. 79% of participants who completed the evaluation form agreed or strongly agreed that there had been an increase in their skills to lead strategic change. This is articulated by the following quote from one of the participants:

"Having moved into a Head Teacher role very recently, the reading around what education means, the moral values within the role and work on my strategic change analysis is supporting me as I begin to lead a school community"

Our Excellence in Headship programme continued to offer a wide range of leadership professional learning opportunities to headteachers and we prototyped a new systems leadership offer in in 2022/23. We were also responsible for managing the post-COVID-19 education workforce support package which was well received by participants who accessed this support.

As you’ll see from the full report, this post is only scratching the surface of the many highlights from our work in 2022/23. We would like to thank all those who took part in, and supported, our work in 2022/23 and those who continue to do so.

We continually adapt our programmes based on feedback from participants and other sources. We are currently undergoing a review of our offers to ensure we continue to deliver on our key functions and reflect the needs of the education system. We are aiming to communicate our revised professional learning and leadership offers for next session by the end of May 2024.

If you would like to be kept up to date with the latest news relating to the work of the Education Scotland Professional Learning and Leadership team, please complete the Professional Learning and Leadership Community form (office.com).