School leaders will often look to appoint members of staff whom they can “mould”. In these situations, quality assurance processes work like a metaphorical pasta machine: reshaping the existing teacher into someone who is just the right fit for the school.

But there is a flaw in this plan. In the kitchen, overworked dough contracts and will not rise properly. I believe the same is true for teachers: if leaders are too “hands on” in their approaches to quality assurance, they can damage the end product.

So, what’s the solution?

Over recent years, I have tried to improve teaching and learning at my school by reducing traditional quality assurance processes (such as book scrutiny and graded observations) in favour of increasing peer support and coaching. Essentially, I am asking senior leadership to “handle” things a bit less, while giving some of our best practitioners the opportunity to share their craft. And it seems to be working.

Where did I begin? In the past, as a teacher and leader of MFL, I had taken part in and led triads of coaching based loosely around the “Grow” model (goals, reality, options, way forward) and found real success with this method.

Teacher CPD

As I moved into senior leadership, with responsibility for teaching and learning and CPD, I wanted to find a way of building on this success and expanding the model to the whole school.

At the time, staff weren’t working very collaboratively. There was plenty of good practice, but teachers had a “bunker” mentality - insularity reigned supreme. This backdrop, coupled with coaching’s reputation as something a bit wishy-washy, meant that my first attempts to roll out the approach were not successful.

Then, in October 2016, I visited Rodillian Academy, where the deputy headteacher Andy Percival had recently introduced coaches called deputy directors in learning (DDLs). Not only was this a way to use peer coaching to rebalance trust and accountability, it also offered extra teaching and learning leadership possibilities, through the creation of specific coaching roles.

I spoke with the teachers in these roles at Rodillian, toured the school and slowly began to put together a plan to implement a similar approach at my own school, Lawn Manor Academy.

At the time, we were in the process of becoming part of the Royal Wootton Bassett Academy Trust, so the leadership team had a unique opportunity to rewrite policies and introduce new ideas.

The freedom to do this was essential for my coaching project. After all, this was going to be more than just a new logo on a display board; it was going to be a “root and branch” re-working of certain parts of the school.

Introducing our own DDLs would be a central part of the plan.

The first step was to form a teaching and learning focus group to trial various teaching strategies, all drawn from Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion, which would ultimately form the basis of the pedagogy that the DDLs would promote.

We trialled the strategies in about 12 classrooms, with the idea that those teachers would end up interviewing for the DDL positions, as they would already have the language and expertise to promote the style of teaching and learning that we were looking for.

When the trial came to an end, we employed five DDLs on a project basis in 2017 - giving them one hour per week off timetable and allocating each of them four teachers to coach.

After an initial coaching meeting to define each teacher’s selected development target, the DDLs would meet with their teachers once a term, and this process would be supported by activities such as co-planning, lesson visits and learning walks.

We rolled this approach out to half the teachers in the school and feedback was very positive. Largely, teachers liked it because their work with the DDLs was separate to the school’s quality assurance processes; the DDLs did not feed into these at all.

A year later, following our initial success, we attached some pecuniary advantage to the DDL role and all the existing DDLs opted to continue. We also made some important changes to the approach.

To start with, we more closely aligned our coaching processes with the incremental or instructional coaching model (as defined by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in the book Leverage Leadership), after I observed how successfully this model had been used at nearby Swindon Academy.

Instructional coaching is about isolating one element of teaching to hone and then practising this skill as you would repeat a sports drill. We have retained the focus on questioning implicit in the “grow” model, but are using the six steps to effective feedback advocated by the instructional model. We increased the number of DDL lesson visits per term to make this style of coaching possible.

In response to requests, we have also set aside two Monday meetings a term to allow staff to set up and review the “plan, practise, follow up, review” cycles that are taking place.

We trialled this new model last year with the DDLs, to check that what we are asking people to do is possible on a normal timetable. Having confirmed this, we rolled the approach out to all staff this year and hope that the gains we experienced in year one will be mirrored this year.

The scale of change that we have effected as we transitioned into an academy has been significant. However, the majority of the changes introduced, including the DDL coaching model, have been about harnessing existing talents, developing more effective systems and reducing the burden on teachers.

We have already begun the process of reducing our reliance on traditional quality assurance processes: we stopped grading lessons in 2015, and instead gave observations a developmental focus linked to a teacher-selected target.

Of course, we still need to make sure that standards are high. But we now recognise that quality assurance must be proportionate and effective, rather than stifling and mindless. Instructional coaching has begun to take the lead instead.

And with leadership “handling” things a bit less, we are already beginning to see our staff thrive.

Justin Delap is assistant headteacher at Lawn Manor Academy in Swindon. His school is a member of the education charity Challenge Partners, a collaborative school improvement network

This article originally appeared in the 15 February 2019 issue under the headline “Breaking the mould of CPD”