It can be tricky to think of positive things introduced in education in recent years (current Education Secretary, anyone?) but the ‘golden thread’ of teacher development from the Core Content Framework for initial teacher education to the Early Career Framework to the new suite of NPQs is a positive we should grab with both hands.
In previous years, NPQs have focused on middle leadership, senior leadership and headship with nothing for those who want to focus on being great classroom teachers. Perhaps unhelpfully, the generic nature of the middle leadership course meant it could be difficult to draw out the relevance to your day-to-day work. These NPQs often included unwieldy projects and felt like an overwhelming commitment for those with a full timetable and busy life.
Refreshingly, the new NPQs offer a suite of qualifications which allow you to specialise in an area that appeals to your career aspirations. Whether you’re interested in Leading Teacher Development, Leading Teaching, Leading Literacy or Leading Behaviour and Culture, there’s something to suit. If you want to aim for Senior Leadership or Headship, those are there, too. The new NPQs are based on the best available research and evidence, draw on experts to write and deliver content and are deliberately designed to be studied ‘little and often’ meaning that you can fit studying around your busy workload. Better still, they include collaboration with colleagues from a range of disciplines and backgrounds who have a similar goal: to develop and improve their own practice so that they can improve the experience and outcomes of our students.
If you think this sounds like an advert, you’re probably right. I recently completed the NPQ in Leading Teacher Development (though I don’t know whether I’ve passed the assessment yet – if I go quiet in January, you’ll know why). Having been a teacher for over twenty years, the NPQ really was an opportunity to focus on my professional development and do something that aligned exactly with my current role.
The new NPQs were originally designed for those who have been teaching for about five years to bridge the gap between being a novice teacher and moving up the career ladder. While they are really useful as training for what you want to go on to do in the future, I found it invaluable to be doing a job where I could apply what I was learning straightaway.
The course really is ‘little and often’ – the time commitment averages at about an hour a week. Most of the time that’s fine but we all have those pinch points in the term where even one extra thing feels overwhelming. Tempting though it was to leave chunks of self-study to the holidays, I did stick to an hour a week because the learning is designed to build incrementally. One of the really interesting things was the way the course is structured and taught in the same way as good teaching, with adherence to the principles of cognitive science. Over each six-week block, you have alternating weeks of self-study and working with a buddy. I was really fortunate that my buddy was someone who was similarly committed and who works in a similar way. We had some genuinely developmental conversations and, because we have the same role in our schools, were able to act as a sounding board for each other, sharing ideas and good practice. I was dreading having to work 1:1 with someone I didn’t know at the start but this turned out to be the highlight of my NPQ experience.
The final part of the NPQ is a written assessment which asks you to respond to a scenario, drawing on the NPQ Framework and the content of the course. It’s weirdly satisfying to be able to apply what you’ve learnt over the course of a year and even better to be able to apply it all to the job you do every day and feel that it’s helping you to do it better.
So, to NPQ or not to NPQ? Do it: this is the opportunity for professional development that we should use to our advantage.
Jo Sheldon, Professional Tutor
Heathfield Teach Share Blog 