Lead practitioner accreditation – whole school benefits

Benefits of a whole school programme
A whole school LP accreditation programme can bring many benefits to the LP individuals and the whole school. Including:

  • drives whole school improvement and develops a culture of teaching and learning
  • supports continued professional development and helps set development targets
  • builds the capacity for improvement and demonstrates success
  • helps aspirant National Teaching Schools to evidence impact
  • builds into or provides a structure for your school’s own professional development plan
  • builds into TEEP whole school training at level 2.

The SSAT Lead Practitioner accreditation provides schools with a tool to drive whole-school improvement through:

  • developing a culture of improving teaching and learning through ongoing CPD that is provided by practitioners, for practitioners
  • building the capacity for improvement and providing evidence of improvement that can be used to demonstrate success, both internally and externally
  • motivating and rewarding the best staff in order to retain the best and attract others of equal ability
  • connecting the school to local and national networks in order to continue improving. Whole-school improvement is dependent on the quality of the practitioners in the school and the capacity of the school to continually develop those practitioners.

Establishing a group of practitioners, all undertaking the accreditation process together, brings a number of advantages over an individual approach:

  • more cost-effective -when bringing in high quality support if needed the cost per person is substantially less
  • successful completion – the participants are much more strongly supported by their peers and far more likely to complete the programme and have an impact
  • more evidence of impact – because it is large scale, the outcomes are more immediate and measurable for self-evaluation
  • culture of collaborative learning – it creates a hot-house effect where colleagues gain in confidence to develop and try ideas through reinforcement
  • stronger focus on teaching and learning – it takes that year’s focus on teaching and learning, which all schools will have, and embeds it in a real process that will produce clear results, supporting other programmes in school to achieve the same end.