The Athelstan Trust CPD offer 2021-2022 involves colleagues across all our five schools participating in a wide range of themed workshops with three opportunities to meet and collaborate across the academic year. In the interests of creating agency, colleagues choose a theme that is closest to their individual development needs.

The 20 themes (listed below) were created as a result of a survey in which we asked faculty areas and Senior Leadership Teams to suggest areas in which they felt would have maximum benefit on their practice and impact positively on student experience. More information about how this opportunity was launched can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U05ahdegUEw

  1. Motivating Students to Learn
  2. Fostering Independent Learning
  3. Building Relationships with Disengaged Students
  4. Wellbeing: Supporting Mental Health in the School Community
  5. Understanding Barriers and Identifying Effective Strategies for SEND Students
  6. Supporting ASD Students
  7. Gender Gap
  8. Diversity and Inclusion
  9. Behaviour Management
  10. Challenging High Attainers
  11. Adaptive Teaching in a Mixed Attainment Setting
  12. Metacognition and Self Regulation
  13. Cognitive Learning Theory: Retrieval Practice, Cognitive Load Theory, Interleaving etc.
  14. Impactful Feedback
  15. Post 16 Teaching
  16. Closing the Disadvantage Gap through Improving Vocabulary and Creating a Reading Culture
  17. Making Tutor Time Count
  18. Making Data Meaningful
  19. Impactful Leaders for Emerging Leaders (looking for new responsibility or new to post)
  20. Impactful Leadership for Middle Leaders

Each theme is led by one or two theme leaders, colleagues from across the five schools who expressed a particular interest / expertise in one of these areas and volunteered to take responsibility for planning and leading each session. In most cases, theme leaders are colleagues from different schools and subject areas, collaborating on the training they will be offering.

In order to ensure that the theme leaders are well supported to deliver a quality experience for all attendees, each theme has a senior colleague linked to their theme and able to provide both advice and guidance whilst being a layer of quality assurance. The Athelstan School Improvement Leads have led training on the structure of each session so that there is a standardised approach to the use of educational research and the development of the ‘TQ’ (Themed Question): an individually crafted and focused action research question that each colleague will work on and then present findings back to the group in the final session.