Staff Training & Development

At St William’s, we are a learning community. We believe it is just as important that our staff never stop learning, just like our pupils. We know that keeping up to date with current educational research and thinking is key to ensuring our pupils have the best possible educational experience.

We have a full and extensive continual, professional development program for our all staff. Keeping children safe is constantly a priority and all our staff complete regular refresher training on all aspects of safeguarding.

Click here for our staff CPD log for Autumn term 2024.

Click here for our staff CPD log for Spring term 2025.

IN HOUSE TRAINING

We have a number of highly skilled and experienced staff members who regularly lead training for others in aspects such as; Subject Pedagogical Knowledge or Subject Assessment. Teachers regularly get together to monitor teaching an learning and work collaboratively to share good practice. Recently, our English Team has led whole staff training on English pedagogical strategies so that all practitioners are well versed in this whole school improvement initiative.

All new members of our teaching team receive full ‘Read, Write, Inc’ training as part of our induction program. The delivery of phonics sessions is closely monitored by our English leader and we buy in to the full R.W.I. training package so that we can access support throughout the year. In addition to this, we have a Read, Write, Inc. refresher day every year, led by their training consultants. This quality assurance helps us ensure that our delivery of phonics is systematic, consistent and effective in supporting our early readers.

We regularly ask for the support of other services such as; behavior support and speech and language, to share their expertise so that we can best support our children and adapt lessons to suit the needs of all learners.  An example of this is ‘Colourful Semantics’ training and subsequent refresher training led by our Speech and Language therapist. Colourful Semantics is now being effectively delivered as a support strategy in school.

Welcoming visitors from other schools and visiting other schools to share best practice supports our outward facing culture. We work closely with both our geographical cluster of schools and our Bolton Catholic Schools Partnership on a range of projects to support school improvement.

EXTERNAL TRAINING

In addition to our work in school, we look to access the highest quality training for our staff. Our Early Years teams access Bolton Startwell. We tap into a variety of CPD providers including The National College, Early Excellence and Myatt and Co. We are part of the Bolton PTI Hub.  With one eye on the future of education, we host students from a number of providers as well as mentoring our own Early Career Teachers.

We are members of a number of professional organisations such as The Geographical Association and The D&T association. Our teachers are involved in teaching or subject leader partnerships with colleagues from local schools. We work closely with The Diocese of Salford and Bolton Local Education Authority.  The Headteacher is a Specialist Leader of Education for Maths and SEND.

For the academic year 2024-2025, the focus of our CPD in the Autumn term is on English. We have engaged in whole school training on teaching reading comprehension, led by Andy Taylor from Fisher Family Trust. We have also engaged in whole school reading training led by Maddy Barnes. Additionally, a number of our teachers have engaged in phase specific training led by our English consultant- Dawn Peterson; she is also leading whole school training for us in December 2024. This highly-focused CPD is aligned with our SDP 2024-2025, and our focus on raising attainment in writing.