Ofsted’s sharpened focus on professional learning and expertise in its Schools Inspection Toolkit is a welcome and significant shift. It validates what the best available evidence has long shown: teacher expertise is the single biggest driver of student learning we can influence. For school leaders, this provides a crucial opportunity to move the conversation about teacher growth towards a more meaningful, sustained approach that helps every teacher recognise their strengths and become even more effective than they already are. But how? This is precisely the question the Great Teaching Toolkit is designed to address: providing schools and colleges with the tools and training to nurture an effective, sustainable culture of professional growth, grounded in the best available evidence.
Ofsted’s new framing aligns with a clear, evidence-based framework for professional learning—one that helps leaders build a powerful narrative about how their school intentionally develops the expertise of its staff.
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Redefine the destination: from fragmented CPD events to a coherent narrative
Ofsted’s move away from the term ‘CPD’ is more than just semantic. It signals a shift away from fragmented training days and courses towards a sustained journey of professional growth. The change is reminiscent of the previous evolution in Ofsted’s approach to assessment data; freed from compiling huge spreadsheets, leaders were instead able to articulate their approach and its impact.
Similarly, the new Schools Inspection Toolkit encourages leaders to rethink how they support teacher growth that really makes a difference to students’ learning. The goal is no longer to ‘do CPD’, but to cultivate genuine expertise in the areas that make most difference. This requires leaders to think strategically, prioritising long-term benefits over shiny quick fixes and building an intentional, coherent narrative about how their school develops its staff. The Great Teaching Toolkit provides the evidence-based structure and long-term pathways to build exactly this kind of narrative.
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Create the conditions: protect time and provide opportunity
High-quality professional learning that builds expertise requires dedicated time, but this cannot be simply added to an already packed workload. It’s too important for that. With teachers in England spending only around 1% of their working time on PD on average (30 minutes per week), leaders must be proactive. Ofsted is clear that leaders must “allocate appropriate time and other resources to a coherent programme of evidence-informed professional learning for all staff”. If an hour a week can be protected, it’s what teachers actually do in that time that matters, and this is where the GTT comes into its own, helping teachers use evidence-based practices to solve the real classroom challenges they face right now.
So, leaders must strategically cut away lower-value, time-sink tasks to make time for high-impact professional learning that incrementally builds the expertise required for adaptive decision-making in the classroom. Identifying what can be reduced or removed, therefore, is a crucial leadership task, and a key focus of the support for school leaders within the Great Teaching Toolkit. We all make time for the things we value, and professional learning that builds genuine expertise deserves more of it. It’s the single most powerful thing anyone in school could do to improve outcomes for learners.
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Design the vehicle: a complete programme for teacher growth
Ofsted now has a precise definition for professional learning that builds expertise. It refers to programmes that are “high-quality, evidence-informed, sustained and coherent” and that “draw on the best available evidence, including high-quality research”.
The Great Teaching Toolkit is designed to deliver this. Its foundation is the Model for Great Teaching, a credible, widely-used and evidence-based summary of the 17 elements that impact most on learning, built upon four key dimensions:
- Understanding the content and how it is learnt
- Creating a supportive environment for learning
- Managing the classroom to maximise opportunity to learn
- Activating students’ thinking through content, activities, and interactions
The Model for Great Teaching is the coherent, common language curriculum to build not just routine skills, but the deep, adaptive expertise that great teaching requires—an integrated balance of knowledge, practical skills, and professional judgement.
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Supercharge the journey: purposeful collaboration
Ofsted states that effective “professional learning includes purposeful collaboration between teachers on… the curriculum, teaching and assessment”. The key word here is ‘purposeful’. The GTT provides the structure and resources for teachers to set goals, explore and build expertise in curriculum, teaching and assessment. It focuses on reciprocal, collective expertise-building where teachers work together, supported by the GTT’s tailored techniques and courses, feedback tools, and shared language of great teaching. This approach helps establish the “strong culture of staff professionalism” that now features in Ofsted’s Inspection Toolkit.
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Feel confident: anchor professional learning and expertise to the best available evidence
For many schools, of course, so much of this is what they have always done. But for others, Ofsted’s renewed focus provides a useful steer to start a better conversation about how we help teachers grow. The challenge now is to anchor this work in a clear, consistent, and evidence-informed framework and support it with the right tools.
The Great Teaching Toolkit is designed to be that anchor. It provides schools with a shared language of great teaching, the evidence-based curriculum (a term that Ofsted now use in relation to professional learning), the collaborative structures, and the practical tools and learning resources needed to build a sustainable culture of improvement. The new Ofsted guidance calls for a more systematic approach to professional learning that build expertise; the Great Teaching Toolkit provides the complete, practical solution to deliver it.
I’ll be hosting a webinar on October 13th to discuss more on how you can navigate Ofsted’s Schools Inspection Toolkit.
