These are my notes and reflections from an early morning webinar hosted by the Chartered College of Teaching on Leading Professional Learning at Scale. It was one of those sessions where coffee had to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the insights more than repaid the early start.
Professional learning remains one of the most powerful levers for improving teaching quality and pupil outcomes. Yet, as host Dr Lisa-Maria Müller of the Chartered College reminded us, too often professional development focuses on the individual teacher in isolation, overlooking the cultural and structural conditions required for professional development to take root.
The challenge, then, is not only to provide high-quality professional learning opportunities but to ensure that schools and trusts create the environments in which this learning can be implemented, refined, and sustained.
Why collaboration matters
In her introduction, Müller argued that effective professional learning must be collective as well as individual. Teachers need agency to direct their own growth, particularly in the mid and later stages of their careers. But this autonomy must be supported by a culture that enables experimentation, dialogue, and shared reflection. This chimes with my own reflections about teacher agency, which I wrote about here.
Her example of school-based journal clubs, adapted from healthcare, illustrates how collaborative structures can make evidence-informed practice part of everyday professional discourse. By creating space for colleagues to appraise research, question its relevance, and consider its application in context, schools can bridge the gap between external input and classroom implementation.
The underlying message was clear: professional learning is most impactful when it is both owned by teachers and anchored in a supportive professional culture.
The four conditions for effective collaboration
Concettina Johnson from the Teacher Development Trust provided an evidence-informed framework for understanding how collaboration drives improvement. Her analysis connected directly with what many leaders recognise in their own settings: professional learning flourishes when culture, clarity, structure, and leadership align.
Drawing on recent and long-standing research, Johnson identified four essential conditions:
- Trust – A culture of psychological safety where staff can discuss what isn’t working and seek feedback without fear of judgement.
- Focus – Collaboration directed towards clearly defined priorities, grounded in classroom realities and informed by data, observation, and pupil voice.
- Structures – Dedicated and protected time for staff to work together meaningfully, embedded within the professional development calendar rather than added on.
- Leadership – Leaders who model learning, articulate a clear purpose, and separate professional growth from performance management.
Johnson emphasised that these conditions are interdependent: remove one, and the others weaken. For leaders, the message is practical: effective collaboration requires deliberate design. It cannot be left to goodwill or informal exchange alone.
Translating collaboration into organisational practice
Gary Lewis, CEO of the Lighthouse Schools Partnership, provided a perspective on what collaboration looks like at scale. Leading a trust of 34 schools, Lewis described how his organisation had sought to move from fragmented practice to a coherent professional learning system.
Three aspects stood out:
- A shared pedagogical language – Using frameworks such as Rosenshine’s Principles and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, the trust created a consistent vocabulary that underpins local autonomy while maintaining strategic alignment.
- Intentional development pathways – Leadership programmes, mentoring, and cross-school moderation ensure that professional growth continues across career stages, not just for early career teachers.
- A culture of purposeful collaboration – The trust prioritises time for teachers and leaders to observe, plan, and reflect together. Lewis noted that success lies not in offering more initiatives but in editing well: focusing on fewer, higher-impact activities and sustaining them over time.
For many schools and trusts, the insight about “editing rather than adding” will resonate strongly. I’ve written previously about initiative fatigue and hidden trade-offs, which you can read about here. Scaling professional learning is not about increasing the amount; it is about increasing coherence.
Collaboration as a professional right
Tracy Goodyear, Director of Teacher Development at the Mercian Trust, reframed collaboration as a professional entitlement. Her argument was rooted in both equity and sustainability: access to high-quality professional learning should not depend on the school or trust one happens to work in.
Goodyear drew on her experience establishing the Trust CPD Leaders Forum, a national network of over 170 trusts. She highlighted three key provocations:
- Collaboration is a right, not a privilege – All staff, not just teachers, should have opportunities to learn and grow together.
- Change requires deep engagement – Leaders should focus less on adopting ready-made initiatives and more on co-constructing solutions that reflect local context and culture.
- CPD must be collective to be sustainable – Schools that treat professional learning as a shared responsibility are better placed to navigate change and retain staff.
Goodyear also introduced the idea of contextual wisdom—the capacity to apply knowledge thoughtfully within one’s own setting. This, she argued, is the true marker of professional maturity and organisational strength.
Common themes and implications for leaders
Across all four contributions, several consistent themes emerged:
- Collaboration is the infrastructure of improvement.
- Leadership matters most when it models learning.
- Trust is the foundation.
- Coherence beats complexity.
- Professional growth is both a moral and strategic priority.
For school and trust leaders, the practical challenge is designing systems that make collaboration the default. That means timetabling it, resourcing it, and protecting it from competing pressures. It also means aligning professional learning with improvement priorities and modelling openness and reflection. This is difficult work, with obstacles at every turn, but it remains the only path to sustainable improvement.
From shifting to sifting priorities
The move from individual CPD to collective professional growth represents a shift in mindset. The challenge for leaders is no longer to do more, but to do better: to sift competing priorities and focus on the collaborative practices that genuinely strengthen teaching and learning.
Leaders who invest in trust, clarity, and coherence are cultivating professional communities capable of sustained improvement. In a landscape shaped by retention, recruitment, and workload pressures, such cultures should not be regarded as optional.
“The principal’s job is not to be the instructional leader, but to ensure that everyone else is.”
— Michael Fullan
Photo by Visual Tag Mx
