Search for articles by topic
CPD, credit crunch and the Curriculum for Excellence
By Margaret Alcorn, National CPD Coordinator
How is your school CPD budget this year? As healthy as last year? Or has the credit crunch already had an impact?
As we build Curriculum for Excellence - the most significant transformational change for years - the wise authorities know that this is not a time to cut back spending on teacher development.
However, some school learning teams have chosen to allocate limited funds differently so as to have maximum impact on what matters most - pupil learning.
The CPD Team evidence suggests that money spent providing opportunities for teachers to learn with others over an extended period is much more likely to influence and shape practice than one-off events or going out of school to develop alone.
There is no international expert who knows more about our pupils than our colleagues, so any opportunity that can be created for teachers to observe each other, to talk to each other about learning, to share what worked and what didn't offers excellent CPD opportunities. Traditionally such opportunities have been confined to subject or topic based teams, but we have seen that observing colleagues in different sectors or disciplines can also offer powerful learning experiences.
This is not a cheap option but it does offer the possibility of rich learning within the school community. And without that, and the increased teacher confidence and competence it will bring, it is difficult to see how we will achieve the ambition of a Curriculum for Excellence.