Building a Culture of Professional Learning

Reflections from an HMC workshop

I opened a workshop I gave at HMC this June with a question I didn’t really expect anyone to answer out loud: when did you last genuinely learn something as a professional? Not attend something, learn something.

The room went quiet in the way rooms do when a question lands somewhere real. Most of us can rattle off a list of INSET days, twilight sessions, and conferences we’ve sat through this year. Far fewer of us can point to a moment when our practice actually changed because of one. That gap – between CPD we attend and CPD that changes us – was the whole workshop, really. Everything else was an attempt to explain why the gap exists and what to do about it.

I have always been a voracious learner; I kept having piano and flute lessons far beyond my initial university studies, and in my early thirties I took up singing. I had eight years of singing lessons, challenging myself with amateur operas and concerts, including Verdi Requiem solos! I love being taught and guided, and lessons were my best CPD. This obsession with my own learning has fuelled by interest in the learning of colleagues, and it was a joy to be able to talk with school leaders about their work leading CPD in their schools.

What the research actually says

There’s a reasonably settled evidence base on what makes professional learning effective, and it’s worth stating plainly because so much CPD ignores it. Five features come up again and again:

• Content focus — rooted in subject matter and how students learn it, not generic skill-building.
• Active learning — observing, giving feedback, analysing work, rather than passively listening to lectures.
• Coherence — consistent with school priorities, teacher beliefs, and student needs.
• Sustained duration — ongoing across the year; the evidence points to 20 or more hours for real impact.
• Collective participation — teachers learning together in communities, not in isolation.

I asked the room a follow-up: which of these five is most consistently missing from CPD in your own school? Almost everyone reached for the same two; duration and collective participation. We are, on the whole, still designing professional learning as a series of one-off events for individuals, when the evidence has been telling us for years that it needs to be sustained and social.

The 2025 landscape — and the perception gap

I shared some of the recent data from the Teacher Development Trust’s 2025 survey of over a thousand teachers and leaders in England, and it’s sobering. A little over half of teachers spent three or more days on formal CPD last year; nearly one in five spent less than a day, or none at all. Almost 40% say their CPD hasn’t improved their ability to do their job. Time, unsurprisingly, is what teachers say matters most when choosing CPD; and yet only around a fifth had engaged in coaching, the format with by far the highest reported impact.

What struck the room hardest, though, was what I’ve started calling the perception gap: the consistent difference between what senior leaders believe is happening and what teachers report actually experiencing. Roughly a third of leaders believe teachers’ CPD needs are effectively identified; only about half that proportion of teachers agree. Leaders report giving adequate time for CPD at roughly double the rate teachers report receiving it. The same pattern holds for whether staff can express their needs, and whether CPD feels applicable to their actual role.

The TDT’s own conclusion is blunt, and I think it’s right: this isn’t a motivation problem. It’s an absence of coherent structures, clear communication, and sustained leadership focus. Leaders aren’t lying when they report high confidence in their CPD provision; they’re simply not close enough to the experience of it to see the gap.

There’s also a retention story hiding in the data that leaders should sit with. Around a third of respondents said they’re likely to leave the profession within three years, and CPD that addresses workload and wellbeing – not more of it, but better-designed and better-timed – was the single factor most strongly associated with people saying they’d stay.

What’s actually innovating

None of this means the answer is do more CPD. The workshop spent time on what’s genuinely working, and a handful of approaches kept surfacing: instructional coaching, built on sustained observation-and-feedback cycles rather than one-off lesson drop-ins; micro-credentials and Chartered Teacher status, which offer focused, accredited, self-directed routes to development; professional learning networks that cross school boundaries and treat a school’s most expert teachers as an underused resource for others; and AI-assisted feedback platforms, which genuinely extend access to feedback but raise a real question about whether they can substitute for – or only ever supplement – the relational core of learning from another person. Though colleagues were less familiar with AI-assisted feedback, there was some interest in such platforms.

I asked people to name one innovation they’d tried, one they were curious about, and one they were sceptical of. The scepticism was almost always about implementation, not the idea itself; which tells you something about where the real work lies.

Eight principles

Rather than leave the room with a diagnosis and no direction, we worked through eight principles for leading and designing professional learning, each paired with a concrete audit question:

1. Start with why, not what — diagnose real need before designing provision, with teacher agency from the first conversation. Audit your last three years of CPD: how much was actually determined by what teachers said they needed?
2. Design for duration and depth — protect time structurally rather than relying on isolated events. Map your provision against the 20-hour threshold.
3. Build structures for collective participation — deploy your expert teachers as a resource for colleagues, not a hidden asset. Name three teachers whose expertise is invisible beyond their own classroom.
4. Evaluate impact, not satisfaction — ask the evaluation question before you design the CPD, not after. What evidence do you actually have that your last major investment changed practice?
5. Connect the three layers — school priorities, team needs, and individual goals need to talk to each other in both directions.
6. Rethink performance review — developmental should beat evaluative; high performers can pass appraisal while their growth quietly stalls.
7. Give teachers real agency — nominal agency is choosing between three pre-approved options; real agency is a genuine conversation about where someone wants to go.
8. Name the workload problem — build learning time in, don’t add it on top, given how strongly it’s tied to retention.

What this looks like in practice

I finished by describing how we’re trying to live these principles at Sir William Perkins’s School; professional dialogue built into the CPD year, staff identifying their own learning needs through our PDR process, planning informed by triangulating staff, student, and parent data, and a genuine mix of networks, conferences, coaching, and informal routes like lunch-and-learns and learning walks. None of it is finished or perfect. But the five-question self-audit I closed with is one I keep coming back to myself:

Are your school’s development priorities genuinely informed by what teachers need to learn, or entirely by what leadership thinks matters? Does your appraisal process feel like a development conversation or an accountability exercise — and does that match what you intend? Do individual teachers have real agency over at least part of their professional learning? Is learning structured with protected time, or is it whatever fits around everything else? And can you draw a visible, honest line from an individual teacher’s development goal to a school priority, and back again?

If the honest answer to more than one of those is ‘not really,’ that’s not a failure; it’s just where most of us start. The point of the workshop wasn’t to arrive at a finished model of CPD. It was to give leaders a sharper set of questions to ask about the one they already have. And to be curious about something that could really make the difference for colleagues, and ultimately for the students they all teach and work with.