This blog is the first instalment in a five-part series written by Matthew Anglesea, Assistant Principal at Durham Sixth Form Centre. It explores their evolving journey with the Great Teaching Toolkit (GTT), from initial implementation to their current practices and reflections. Matthew spoke to us previously in April 2025 about how they successfully implemented the GTT here.
Durham 6th Form are one of the lead schools using the GTT, and have recently been awarded the status of Great Teaching Centre. As part of this community, Durham Sixth Form Centre now stands as both a beacon and an exemplar — sharing practice, leading by example, and helping to shape a global movement for sustained, evidence-informed professional learning.
Reset, Rebuild and Recover After the Pandemic
This marks the start of a five-part blog series, published with the Great Teaching Toolkit (GTT), exploring our four-year journey to further develop teaching and learning. We have worked to create the conditions for every teacher to make measurable improvements, drawing on the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review and embedding the Great Teaching Toolkit platform at a whole-school level. This first post sets the context; the next four follow the EEF mechanisms of effective professional development: Building Knowledge, Motivating Teachers, Developing Teaching Techniques and Embedding Practice.
The start of the 2022 academic year felt like a fresh chapter, an opportunity not just to recover from the pandemic but to rethink how we could further improve teaching and learning. As schools returned to a full year of uninterrupted learning, our goal was clear: reset, rebuild and recover. At Durham Sixth Form Centre, a diverse community of over 1,800 students and one of the region’s broadest post-16 providers, we sought to build on strong foundations. Already rated Outstanding by Ofsted, we had a consistent track record of outcomes above national averages, underpinned by teachers with deep subject expertise and experience as examiners. Our culture of growth mindset and continuous improvement was firmly embedded, yet we recognised the opportunity to further strengthen our practice through a deeper engagement with evidence-informed teaching.
Using Research to Strengthen Practice
The post-pandemic period provided the space to reinvigorate colleagues, reconnecting professional expertise with the latest research on how learning happens. As Kate Jones highlighted in a whole-school session on retrieval practice, true evidence-informed teaching lies at the intersection of context, experience and research. It was the research element that offered us the greatest scope to refine and enhance what we already did well. The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review (June 2020) became central to this process, guiding the development of our Teaching, Learning and Assessment Policy, launched in September 2022 and supported by early trials of the GTT platform.
Alongside this, the Education Endowment Foundation published its Effective Professional Development guidance report (October 2021), which gave us clarity not just on what teachers should focus on to improve (through the GTT Evidence Review and our Teaching, Learning and Assessment Policy) but also how professional development should be designed and delivered. Viviane Robinson’s research into student-centred leadership reinforced the importance of school leaders playing an active role in professional development, showing this has one of the largest impacts on student outcomes (effect size 0.84). This conviction that leaders must actively shape and model professional learning has underpinned our approach ever since.
A Four-Year Professional Learning Plan
By September 2025, we will reach the fourth year of our professional development plan. Its focus has been to deepen understanding of our Teaching, Learning and Assessment Policy, explore the research that underpins it and clarify why it matters. Equally, we have worked to build a shared view of how the policy translates into classroom practice, recognising that implementation looks different across subjects. For instance, how History reviews prior learning at the start of a lesson will differ from Maths. Along this journey we have also expanded our use of the GTT platform, moving from small pilot groups to a point where every teacher now has a subscription and engages with it as part of their development.
Living the Policy in Practice
Our professional development programme, Living the Policy, launched in September 2022. Each cycle focused on one aspect of the Teaching, Learning and Assessment Policy, such as questioning, beginning with a whole-school ignition session to build knowledge, followed by departmental time to translate ideas into subject practice and set improvement targets. Developmental learning walks then provided feedback on progress. Over the first two years we embedded a sequence of ignition sessions, including retrieval and consolidation, to cover all six areas of the policy.
In Year 3, teachers specialised in one area of the Teaching, Learning and Assessment Policy, spending the full academic year honing their practice. Our use of the Great Teaching Toolkit platform also developed during this phase, with all staff completing student perception surveys and, as part of their pathway group, an online course linked to their chosen focus. These groups met across the year to refine practice in greater depth. Building on our learning at the summer Teaching and Learning Conference, where we heard from Dr Stuart Kime and Sarah Cottinghatt, we will double down on developing further our understanding of the what, why and how of the Teaching, Learning and Assessment Policy, with particular emphasis on activating hard thinking and adaptive expertise.
A key part of the Living the Policy programme has been building a shared understanding and language of what effective teaching looks like, why it matters and how it can be enacted consistently across classrooms.
If you would like to discuss any aspect of this work further, please contact Matthew Anglesea, Assistant Principal, Durham Sixth Form Centre at matthew.anglesea@durhamsixthformcentre.org.uk.
