What Are You Doing to Improve Teacher Quality?

Academies, free schools, fancy ICT – education’s not short of ‘magic bullets’ that are designed to increase the performance of schools.

But study after study has come up with the rather more prosaic (and obvious) conclusion that the most important factor in improving pupil progress is great teachers.

So what are you as a governing body doing to make sure you’ve got the very best teachers?

Interestingly this often falls to the Staff committee in a secondary, or Resourcing in a primary. Both are some of the less glamorous committees – but as it turns out crucial to the development of your school.

The first step should be to understand where you’re at with the results of lesson observations, performance management and results. Are these getting better or worse? How are your senior leaders confident in their judgements?

Then you come on to how to improve teacher quality. Training is always a good option (but make sure you’re evaluating its success), as are more informal forms of CPD, and competency proceedings shouldn’t be ruled out either.

By and large though your strategic role will simply be raising the issue, understanding the status quo, and supporting and challenging senior leaders on the methods they propose to make improvements.

It’s almost enough to get you excited about performance management!