Professional learning

Collaboration has become the latest buzzword – with the Education Select Committee having recently published a report on it and even recommending funding should be made available to support it.

So with national leaders and policy-makers all encouraging collaboration, schools are increasingly seeking out networks to benefit from what Professor Andy Hargreaves would call “professional capital” – in other words, the collective knowledge base of our teaching profession.

Yet there remains an issue in primary schools that while the expertise of the profession is very much within our schools, we are, as a profession, much more reticent about self-proclamation.

Usually, this is simply because with a limited capacity to be able to visit other classrooms, let alone other schools, teachers and leaders often mistakenly assume that others are also displaying the same innovative practice, or applying the same research-informed strategies.