Case Study:
Charlestown Community Primary School

For Allison Collis, headteacher at Charlestown Community Primary School, creating a culture of learning among staff is a high priority.

Seeking a CPD source that could support this need, she entrusted The National College – and more specifically, our School Membership package – and the results have been overwhelmingly positive ever since.

The school are now excited at the prospect of utilising our award-winning remote CPD platform in the recently commenced 2021/22 academic year.

A diverse portfolio of training

A starting point for Mrs Collis was training itself, with her discovering the vast range of course opportunities available.

Mrs Collis said: “It was the diversity of the course opportunities which attracted me in the first place.

“I’ve used it very much with teaching assistants, office and caretaking staff – but teaching assistants, in particular, have really embraced it.”

Empowering teaching assistants

A real area of benefit has been the capability for teaching assistants to develop, and there’s been a swell of positivity when it comes to reviewing the impact that each individual piece of training has had.

“There was a webinar on unconscious bias, which I thought was really powerful – so all the teaching assistants did that, and then we had a discussion around it afterwards,” she revealed.

“Because we had some inset days as twilight, I said that I wanted them to choose two programmes which fitted with their role; two which were linked to their appraisal; and one of any interest that they had within their role.

“They’ve really loved the freedom of being able to direct their own professional learning – and the fact that it can be different to the person working in the classroom next to them.

“Certainly the feedback is that they’ve felt really empowered: that their learning is taking a personal journey for them and was exactly what they needed in terms of supporting them.”

“It’s having a massive impact in school”

Having that readily available source of expert-led CPD has proved to be invaluable for Charlestown – a view echoed by the whole staff roll.

Mrs Collis explained: “It fits everyone and, for example, I was looking at Rosenshine's principles over the holidays: so I can just go on, search it and there’s something on it – so it is brilliant in that sense.

“It has been fantastic, and creating that learning culture has been something which I’ve been working on from the start. People have really jumped at the chance.

“We have a wellbeing committee, where we have representatives from each team, and every single one of them has said that they’re loving the opportunities for personal development and the training which is available on The National College.

“It’s having a massive impact in school.”