Why your CPD plan might not improve teaching

Across the country, CPD leads have a plan. They know their school improvement priorities. They have carefully sequenced the year’s sessions, prepared slides and selected evidence-informed approaches they hope teachers will adopt.

And yet, despite all that work, much of this professional development will make little difference.

This is not because their planning or the content of the sessions is poor. It is because we still tend to focus on what teachers need to learn rather than how teachers learn.

The Teacher Development Trust’s 2025 report on the CPD landscape exposed the scale of the problem. Around 40 per cent of teachers and leaders said their CPD had not clearly improved their ability to perform their role. Only 25 per cent felt it adequately considered pupils’ needs, while just 10 per cent believed it met the diverse needs of staff.

That represents an enormous amount of time, money and goodwill being invested without reliably and sustainably improving teaching.

So, as they begin to deliver this term’s sessions, CPD leads need to ask themselves: have we planned a programme of content, or have we designed a process through which teachers might actually learn?

Teaching teachers is a discipline

Last year, the Teacher Development Trust proposed a name for the discipline of teaching teachers and understanding how teachers learn effectively: ”didagogy”.

Didagogy is useful because learning as a teacher is not simply an exercise in acquiring knowledge.

New ideas must interact with what teachers already know and do, what they believe good teaching looks like, the professional histories that have shaped those beliefs, the pupils in front of them and the conditions in which they work.

A teacher may understand the research behind a particular practice perfectly well and still not use it. They may already possess another technique that achieves the same purpose. They may believe the proposed approach conflicts with the kind of teacher they want to be. Or their timetable, curriculum, classroom routines or pupils may make implementation much more complicated than it appeared during an Inset presentation.

Professional learning sits at the intersection of teachers’ practices, identities and working conditions. If CPD ignores any of these, even excellent content can fail to land.

So, what might a more didagogically informed approach look like this September?

Diagnose the problem with teachers

School priorities matter. Leaders have access to patterns across attendance, outcomes, behaviour, curriculum and teaching that individual teachers may not see.

But leaders’ broad view is not the same as teachers’ detailed knowledge of their classes.

Too often, a school-level priority is translated immediately into a standardised solution: questioning needs to improve, so everyone will use this questioning technique; pupils need greater independence, so every department will introduce the same routine.

Teachers are invited to help implement the solution, but rarely to diagnose the problem.

Before telling staff what to change, create opportunities for them to explore how the priority manifests itself in their classrooms. Where does the problem occur? For which pupils? What are teachers already doing? When does it work, and when does it not?

Co-constructing the problem does not mean abandoning strategic direction or allowing everyone to pursue unrelated interests. It means combining leaders’ breadth of knowledge with teachers’ depth of contextual understanding.

Without this stage, relevance is largely assumed. With it, teachers can see how a shared school priority connects to the pupils they actually teach.

Develop judgement, not just routines

Teaching is not simply a collection of visible techniques. It involves constant decision making: noticing what is happening, interpreting it and selecting an appropriate response.

Yet CPD frequently concentrates on the final action. Teachers are shown a strategy, practise its component parts and are then expected to reproduce it in the classroom.

At best, this can secure consistent implementation. At worst, it creates compliance without understanding. It divorces the technique from the classroom cues that should prompt a teacher to use it at the right time and for the right reason.

CPD should therefore help teachers examine the thinking beneath an action. What is the teacher trying to achieve? What have they noticed about pupils’ understanding? Why might this technique be appropriate here? Under what circumstances might a different response be needed?

This is particularly important when watching video, discussing models or sharing examples.

Rather than asking only, “What did the teacher do?”, we might ask: “What did the teacher notice? What decision did they make? How did that decision respond to what was happening?”

The goal is not unlimited individual variation. Shared approaches can be hugely valuable. But teachers need to understand the purpose of a practice if they are to use it responsively and, over time, increasingly automatically rather than mechanically.

Take professional identity seriously

Teachers do not encounter CPD as blank slates. They bring experience, expertise and deeply held beliefs about pupils, learning and their own role.

Sometimes resistance reflects misunderstanding or lack of confidence. But sometimes a new approach jars with a teacher’s professional identity.

One teacher, during a session on increasing pupil participation, declared that they would leave the school before using cold calling. To them, it felt oppressive and was bound up with their own experiences of school.

It would have been easy to label this response as resistance. Instead, discussion revealed that the teacher used an “all hands up” approach that served much the same purpose. Over time, as their thinking developed, they chose to experiment with cold calling, too.

That change was possible because their concerns, and the professional origins of those concerns, were explored rather than overridden.

This does not mean every belief must remain unchallenged. Professional learning should challenge thinking. But lasting change is more likely when teachers can examine how a new idea relates to what they value, rather than being required to perform agreement.

Make space for enquiry

CPD sessions often end with an invitation to “have a go”, followed by a warning that leaders will be visiting lessons in a few weeks.

This assumes successful implementation has already been defined and the teacher’s task is simply to reproduce it. Genuine enquiry begins differently: with uncertainty, professional judgement and permission to learn from what happens when an idea meets the reality of the classroom.

Creating the conditions for that kind of enquiry is a substantial challenge in its own right.

All of this is not to say that the CPD plan needs to be ripped up. Priorities, evidence and careful sequencing still matter. But a plan should not become a script that is delivered to teachers.

This term, CPD leads should make space for teachers to help diagnose problems, connect new knowledge with existing expertise, examine the decisions underlying classroom practice and learn from what happens when new ideas are tested in their classrooms.

The question for September is not simply whether the CPD has been planned; it is whether teachers’ learning processes have been planned for.

Adam Kohlbeck is director of teacher quality at Chiltern Learning Trust

Sam Gibbs is director of professional learning at Greater Manchester Education Trust