Professional Learning
The Compass Partnership of Schools work closely together to drive the development of teaching, learning and outcomes across all eleven schools within our Trust. We offer a view of school improvement as deliberate and intentional knowledge building. We aim for every teacher in every classroom to be as good as they can be in what they teach (curriculum) and how they teach (pedagogy). We recognise the need to mobilise the best evidence from research to support teachers’ development. We have an offer of Continued Professional Development for all staff within the Trust which includes access to National Professional Qualifications and Masters’ accreditation funded through the apprenticeship levy. We also design and lead our own leadership pathway programmes alongside teaching assistant pathways and have also developed an enhanced Early Career Teacher Programme which we run alongside the Ambition Institute’s Induction programme. We are passionate about research and engage widely with current thinking and theory, to support us in ensuring we are always learning from evidence of what works.
We work closely with the Ambition Institute on research-led practice and professional development to support teachers and leaders throughout their career in the teaching profession. We have recently started working with the National College on their offer of professional development for our team.
As a Trust we focus on five ‘fundamentals’ (elements) to determine how we develop a shared understanding of school improvement: Curriculum and Assessment and Pedagogy, Continued Professional Learning and Development +capacity building, Leadership, Culture and Vision, Equalities, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Quality Assurance and Accountability including Being a Sustainable Learning Organisation. These fundamentals guide us in targeting, planning, delivering, and monitoring our bespoke school improvement offer.
Research indicates that the most successful MATs have shared expectations of the achievement of pupils at the end of each key stage, (subject specific exemplars) and this shared understanding is built on a coherently sequenced knowledge-based curriculum. There is a shared understanding on what constitutes great pedagogy and our teaching for learning framework outlines our methodology.
The starting point for our school improvement strategy is to understand the needs of every school in the trust – this means knowing our schools well and we facilitate this within our hub structure. Over time we have aligned our monitoring, evaluation, and planning systems across the trust. These documents and processes are the key starting points for prioritising and identifying the trust priorities for the following year and synthesising the strategic trust milestones with the annual school core priorities.
In our Trust we identify, nurture, and actively develop all members, at all levels, ensuring we are building capacity of current leaders. We know this work is critical to developing the quality of the curriculum, the strength and expertise in teaching and, in turn, will bring about the best outcomes for all children. We provide a core professional learning and development offer to all our schools which runs in tandem with our core support offer.
Compass is a Leading Practitioner Learning Centre and we have established capacity in our schools with lead practitioners. We have developed cross-trust teaching and planning teams and all head teachers or head of schools have an experienced executive leader. If a school decides to join the trust, they will have access to experience, knowledgeable and highly skilled leaders who have a track record of success.
In our school improvement capacity, we are supporting several schools across different regions and local authorities to not only help develop their teachers and leaders, but to also provide tailor-made improvement and intervention strategies to enhance performance and outcomes.
As part of our commitment to growing and developing teachers for Greenwich, and supporting schools beyond our immediate partnership, we are proud to have Halstow offering a School Direct pathway into teaching. We work closely with Goldsmith’s College, University of London, on research-led practice and professional development, to support leaders throughout their career in the teaching profession.