The Vision

The #SBCWay is our new approach to ensuring equity and excellence across all schools and settings. We are striving for sharper clarity, increased consistency, richer collaboration, supportive challenge and greater creativity in every aspect of our education service. We have recently moved to a cluster model, whereby the 9 clusters (secondary and feeder primaries) work together with a Cluster Lead HT. This new way of working led us to revisit our professional learning vision and strategy across the local authority.

We set out a new vision for Professional Learning, recognising that the right professional learning can lead to improvements across all areas of the service. Many of our schools had been successful in gaining the GTCS Professional Learning Award, so we had an ambition that all schools would work towards excellence in professional learning. The National Model for Professional Learning was at the heart of this vision and the development of our Professional Learning Evaluation Toolkit.

The Toolkit

The main evaluation questions are split into 5 sections with 3 core themes:

• identify (how is CLPL planned for in the school)
• implement (what approaches are used to enable CLPL)
• impact (how is the change in practice quantified).

We invited school leadership teams to use the toolkit to evaluate their professional learning. From the responses we have been able to identify pockets of good practice, which can be shared and areas where schools feel they could benefit from support in. Our well-established coaching culture is key to the approach we will take to our follow up visits which are now underway.

Professional Learning Operational Group (PLOG)

In line with this we formed a Professional Learning Operational Group (PLOG) which is our strategic forum for discussing opportunities, signposting, sharing and celebrating good practice. The group comprises of the secondary DHT with the PL remit for each of the 9 secondary schools along with a Primary representative from the cluster. We also have representatives from Wellbeing and Inclusion, ASN, Early Years, CLD and Educational Psychology. This newly established group agreed that the first priority should be for all members to have a shared understanding of what makes good professional learning. A few members of the group were taking part in the Leading of Professional Learning programme with Education Scotland and found the session on Transformative Professional Learning invaluable. Therefore, we asked Education Scotland to share this session with the PLOG group.

We are delighted to see clusters working together on a collegiate professional learning calendar, with shared PL sessions across all sectors. This is mainly in relation to the #SBCWay breakthrough curriculum materials which are being offered as pre-recorded inputs which clusters can pick up and use in CAT sessions. This allows the clusters to decide which themes are priority for them (they have to cover all aspects in a 2-year period). Through sharing ‘what makes PL transformative’ with the PLOG we are confident that coaching, collaboration and enquiry approaches will support clusters to embed the #SBCWay breakthrough curriculum.

Coaching

Our Coaching Framework underpins our Professional Learning strategy. We have been running the ‘Coaching for Success’ programme for around 15 years now, so have a vast number of trained coaches. We have recently trained trainers in each of the clusters, who are now delivering the programme to staff in their cluster, based on specific need. The Hawick cluster are prioritising training all of their leaders in Coaching for Success this session and will run the Introduction to Coaching for all staff at the February inset.