As a leader, you understand the importance of continuing professional development for your staff. Encouraging multiple members of your team to take a National Professional Qualification (NPQ) has many benefits for your school or trust.
It can be challenging to build a strong foundational knowledge of key concepts across your school or trust. Taking NPQs together helps amplify the effect of professional development in a lasting way.
There is no limit to the number of teachers and leaders any school, trust or education setting can have completing an NPQ at the same time.
Here are four benefits:
1. Create a shared knowledge, understanding and language
When multiple staff do NPQs, they develop a shared knowledge base and a common language that allows them to collaborate and work together much more effectively. You can use NPQs to create shared understanding of key domains that will help with strategic school improvement.
By combining the breadth of knowledge offered by leadership NPQs with the depth provided by specialist NPQs, you build expertise at an organisational level, not just at an individual level.
One great thing about the NPQs is that they are designed to be contextualised and made relevant to your own school. This is much easier to do when you have people learning together because they are discussing learning and implementation with people who already understand the context.
2. Make implementation more effective
There are lots of good ideas in education, but their success hinges on how effectively they are implemented.
When leaders at all levels share an understanding of what effective implementation looks like, it becomes a powerful catalyst across your school or trust. NPQs embed this understanding for everyone, ensuring that your staff know what to do, are motivated and bought in, and have the time to implement and refine approaches. Without this, even the most well-thought out and evidence-informed approach can fail.
Effective implementation – the planning, the activities and the evaluation – is collaborative. It relies on the people who enable change being the right people in the right positions with the right knowledge, expertise, the time and resources to do it. Collaboration is smoother and more impactful when it's based on a foundation of shared knowledge and understanding where everyone knows their role in making implementation successful.
"Leadership and specialist NPQs together are a powerful combination. They have the biggest impact when you use them strategically."
3. Build a talent pipeline
Investing in talent is crucial for schools. NPQs for multiple staff helps create a talent pipeline, building up institutional knowledge to ensure that future leaders are ready to step up when needed.
Succession planning helps maintain stability and continuity. By developing a pool of future leaders with shared knowledge and understanding from NPQs, you position your school or trust to handle staffing transitions smoothly. This approach strengthens your current leadership and ensures the sustainability of your organisation in the long term.
Giving lots of staff the chance to do an NPQ also means people can take up new opportunities or progress without leaving the school. With recruitment and retention being a challenge in the sector at the moment, this is a powerful position to be in.
4. Continue the golden thread
NPQs form part of the golden thread of professional development for teachers and school leaders. The idea of the golden thread is that knowledge is connected all the way from Initial Teacher Training, through Early Career Training and across the NPQs.
If you have trainee or early career teachers in your school or trust, the shared knowledge, understanding and language is also being embedded at classroom teacher level early on – albeit at a foundational level.
This means that when leaders in your school are implementing ideas it is much easier because everyone is grounded in the same body of knowledge and understanding. They don’t have to do the first part of the knowledge building because it is already held and shared across the staff.
Practical examples of learning together
Creating a team that understands effective implementation, building effective school culture and the mechanisms of effective professional development alongside specialist expertise enables improvement at a whole school level.
Encouraging multiple leaders at similar levels to study the same NPQ can amplify the benefits of professional development.
For example, having all curriculum leaders, or phase leaders in a primary school, doing the NPQ for Leading Teaching allows them to share their learning and collaborate on effective implementation in their individual area of responsibility. This helps contextualise the learning more effectively, making it relevant to your school's specific needs.
You could also have leaders at different levels study various NPQs. For example, a senior leadership team might include:
- Staff new to senior leadership who are thinking for the first time about how to lead across the school studying the NPQ for Senior Leadership.
- An experienced deputy head preparing for headship with the NPQ for Headship.
- A senior leader doing the NPQ for Special Educational Needs Coordinators thinking hard about how the school's offer can be made more inclusive.
- Having identified literacy as an area to develop, an assistant head for teaching and learning doing the NPQ for Leading Literacy and feeding the specialist learning in to develop literacy across the school.
Leadership and specialist NPQs together are a powerful combination. They have the biggest impact when you use them strategically.
Explore the range of NPQs available for your team and encourage them to register today.
