How to save time, effort and energy on professional development in your school.
Last year, in late December I received an email from Jon, a Deputy Head Teacher & SENCo who was in a bit of a panic.
The staff training they had planned and booked for their inset days in January had fallen through and they were struggling to find anything else at such short notice.
Jon had seen one of my posts on Facebook about my Memory & Processing course and emailed me to enquire about it for the staff team.
He was hopeful that I would be picking up my emails at all over twixmas but was really keen to get something reorganised that meant he would not have to spend the rest of his winter break coming up with his own powerpoints.
And I did pick up the email.
I do tend to work a bit over the days between Christmas and new years, most of my family live a fair distance away and so it's usually just me, my husband and our children at home for Christmas. My office is just over the road from my house and I like to be able to get away from all of the quality streets and festive foods that expand my waistline 😆
Anyway, I answered his questions in the email about the memory course and even sent him and the Headteacher a little video looking around the course which you can see here.
I told Jon about the pricing for the course, which is per person, then I pointed out that it would work out cheaper for their school to enrol the whole staff team onto my training package instead.
That way they could do the memory course on inset day 1 and another one on day 2.
And the fact that the courses are all online, the staff could complete them at home if they wanted (and were allowed to by the school). This is really helpful for people who are overseas, away visiting loved ones or are unable to arrange childcare for the inset days.
So that’s what we did.
The school asked to sign up their whole staff team, over 50 of them!
I sent over an invoice and they sent their list of staff who I uploaded on the 2nd Jan in time for their inset days on the 4th and 5th.
On their inset day 1, Jon emailed me again to say thank you for setting it up so quickly and saving him a lot of hassle and panic. He told me it was nice to walk around his school and see everyone in their classroom watching the videos from the course and talking with their LSA and year group colleagues about the ideas and which students they could try the strategies and interventions with.
He also emailed again a couple of days into the term to update me on the impact the course had already had on the staff and students:
He was really thrilled at how effortless it was for him to access CPD for his staff and commented about the techniques his colleagues had been trying in their lessons “it has had the impact we wanted, thank you”.
I was really pleased to have been able to not only provide the CPD training to such a large number of staff who, in turn would be able to impact so positively on the learning of so many students, but to also help Jon in his desperate situation over the Christmas holidays.
So if you’ve found yourself in a situation where you didn’t have time to plan a training session, or the thing that you had planned has been cancelled or postponed, get in touch with me. It’s really simple and easy to get your staff enrolled onto individual courses or training packages.
Hi I'm Beth, a Highly Specialist Paediatric Speech & Language Therapist.
I help education and childcare staff identify Speech, Language & Communication needs in the children they work with and show them how to support those needs through my online CPD training & resources.