Bridging theory and practice: ensuring professional development improves outcomes at your trust
Professional development has a range of benefits for school trusts, from embedding inclusive practice to staff retention and growing your trust’s future.
Importantly, effective professional development also improves student outcomes – that is, it has a real impact in the classroom. But how can school and trust leaders build a professional development offer that has classroom impact?
In 2025, we surveyed trusts across England and had in-depth conversations with six trust leaders to find out what talent development looks like in their trusts. Here's what we learnt about curating a professional development offer that has impact.
The impact of development on student outcomes
A report from the Education Policy Institute found that “high-quality CPD for teachers has a significant effect on pupils’ learning outcomes”.
They even found it to have more of an impact on student outcomes than longer school days or performance-related pay increases.
Professional development was also found to be the most cost-effective way to improve student outcomes: methods that were more effective at improving outcomes, like one-to-one tutoring, were also significantly more expensive.
This makes professional development an incredibly valuable tool for school trusts – but it must be implemented effectively to have a meaningful impact.
What makes learning impactful?
Our report focused on two types of professional development: teacher training, such as initial teacher training (ITT), for new teachers, and continued professional development (CPD) for in-post teachers.
When we asked trusts what they look for in professional development, high quality training content was the most common response for both CPD and teacher training.
But what does high-quality training look like?
Bridging theory and practice
Effective professional development bridges theory and the reality of everyday teaching practice.
Professional learning that focuses on the abstract rarely has an impact on classroom outcomes – effective and high-quality professional development should be both informed by evidence and linked to real life in the classroom.
Learning that’s relevant to classroom practice has a clear application for teachers, making it easier for their learning to directly improve teaching practices and therefore student outcomes.
We do this at Tes Institute by designing our courses based on the following principles:
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Learning objectives should be purposeful, coherent and linked to teacher development stages
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Learning content should be well-structured, accessible and grounded in evidence about how people learn
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Programmes support the development of adaptive expertise and professional judgement – knowing what works, why it works and how to apply it
How trusts can get there
We found several ways that trusts can provide professional learning that bridges the gap between theory and classroom practice.
Use real teaching scenarios
Anchoring professional development in real teaching scenarios and using real-world classroom examples provides context and means teachers understand the application of their learning.
Similarly, a focus on improving subject knowledge and classroom instruction embeds learning in a teacher’s daily reality, providing a direct application in the classroom and making it more effective.
For teacher training specifically, placements in different schools are particularly beneficial in enabling trainees to apply their learning in different settings. This shows them different ways of applying knowledge, providing a strong practical basis for theoretical learning.
Peer observation and discussion
Another way to increase the impact of professional development is with peer observation and discussion. This is another way you can give learning a practical basis, rather than merely teaching in abstract.
Learning does not always have to be a training course or module. It might look like learning from colleagues’ success, such as:
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Case studies
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Walkthroughs
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Informal peer learning and discussion
Evaluate impact
Essentially, the impact of professional development needs to be measured – you need to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and even an impactful learning offer might become less so as needs change over time.
Trusts often assess the quality of a learning offer by asking teachers for feedback. This might measure teacher satisfaction and can go some way to assessing the quality of a learning offer, but this does not measure its impact.
Instead of focusing on the immediate aftermath of learning (as a staff survey does), looking at changes to teaching practice and student outcomes enables you to understand the direct impact that professional development has had.
This is what allows you to celebrate successes, make changes where needed, and make your professional development offer as impactful as possible.
What trusts should avoid
We also identified less impactful types of professional development. These included:
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Training content that heavily relies on theory but has no practical element or practical follow-up
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Generic training content that has no link to what’s happening in your own trust or individual school
We found that it’s also key to communicate the evidence base for your trust’s learning offer, as well as its expected impact.
If teachers don’t feel their professional development is informed by evidence, this can affect the practical application of the training, reducing its impact.
A report for ambitious trusts
Our ‘Grow your own’ report is a tool to help trusts improve outcomes and stabilise their future through teacher talent development. It shares best practice for professional development with practical, real-world insights from trust leaders.
Read the report to explore our findings in depth and learn how talent development can help you create a learning environment where everyone thrives.