CPD – Continuing Professional Development is so often seen as an entitlement for teachers and quite rightly. But what about other classroom based staff? In our MAT we have many, many talented, highly qualified teaching assistants that want to add value to the work of the class teacher. All too often CPD for our non-teacher colleagues lacks vision, is poorly resourced and rarely focuses on pedagogy and learning attitudes and behaviours. Get CPD for teaching assistants right from the start and the children and staff will reap the rewards both now and in their futures. Just imagine; teaching assistants who are confident ‘professional’s who seek new and worthwhile methods of learning, who take sensible shortcuts in order to gather crucial evidence develop their practice and who know the needs and skills of the individual children in their classes and can plot their next steps because they genuinely care and want to see them succeed. Dylan Williams quote summarises this with great clarity and decorum and is one we use frequently in my current Trust to outline our CPD culture: “Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.”

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