From CPD to Collective Growth: Leading Professional Learning at Scale

_{^{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:

1. Trust – A culture of psychological safety where staff can discuss what isn’t working and seek feedback without fear of judgement.
2. Focus – Collaboration directed towards clearly defined priorities, grounded in classroom realities and informed by data, observation, and pupil voice.
3. Structures – Dedicated and protected time for staff to work together meaningfully, embedded within the professional development calendar rather than added on.
4. 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 are all designed to 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 acknowledged that success lies not in offering more initiatives but in editing well, that is to say: 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 made reference before to initiative fatigue and unacknowledged 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:

1. Collaboration is a right, not a privilege. All staff, not just teachers, should have opportunities to learn and grow together.
2. Change requires deep engagement. Leaders need to focus less on adopting pre-packaged initiatives and more on co-constructing solutions that reflect local context and culture.
3. 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, that is to say: 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 not an add-on but the infrastructure of improvement. It shapes how schools think, plan, and act together.
• Leadership matters most when it models learning. The most effective leaders participate in professional learning rather than delegate it.
• Trust is the foundation. Without psychological safety, collaboration risks becoming performative rather than developmental.
• Coherence beats complexity. Fewer, well-designed initiatives executed collaboratively are more effective than multiple disconnected programmes.
• Professional growth is a moral as well as strategic priority. Investing in staff development strengthens culture, improves retention, and ultimately benefits pupils.

For school and trust leaders, the practical challenge is to design systems that make collaboration the default mode of working. That means timetabling it, resourcing it, and protecting it from competing pressures. It also means aligning professional learning with the school’s improvement priorities and ensuring that leaders at every level model openness and reflection. This is hard, and there will be a myriad blockades in the way, but is the only path toward sustainable improvement. 

From shifting to sifting priorities 

The move from individual CPD to collective professional growth represents a shift in mindset. As several webinar speakers highlighted, the challenge for leaders is no longer simply 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 not only enhancing classroom practice; they are cultivating professional communities capable of sustained improvement. In a landscape dominated by conversations about retention, recruitment, and workload, such cultures should not be perceived as optional.

---

“The principal’s job is not to be the instructional leader, but to ensure that everyone else is.”

— Michael Fullan

---

• Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• X
• Mail