Evaluating impact

Do you worry whether your CPD programme is having long-term impact? Are you able to evaluate its impact?

These are some of the most common questions that drive school leaders to engage with the Teacher Development Trust Network. Nobody wants to waste teachers’ time and research tells us that well-designed professional development can make a significant positive impact on pupils.

Here are some of the ways that we support you to ensure that CPD has impact, and that you are able to measure and increase it.

Auditing your current evaluation approach

Our CPD audit has 10 elements which are focused specifically on needs analysis and evaluation. These include:

• The extent to which staff needs and feedback are taken into account
• The extent to which the school evaluates impact against pupil needs and strengths
• The quality of the methodology used to evaluate impact

Through SLT self-evaluation, anonymous surveys of all staff and structured interviews we help you identify how your current practice in evaluation compares to the leading edge. Our final report gives you concrete steps in how to improve, linked to resources, advice and tools available through our member-only portal.

Another element of our audit looks at your policies and procedures around professional development. We include an analysis of how well evaluation and impact are ‘baked into’ the way you work, offering advice on leading practices about how to improve working practices.

Resource, advice and tools

Our TDT Network portal is exclusively available to members and includes case studies of how other schools are redesigning their policies and procedures to improve evaluation and needs analysis.

Our tools include:

• A series of prompts and worksheets for staff to determine intended impact and appropriate assessment approaches
• Ideas for gathering staff needs and monitoring these
• Ideas for linking impact to school development plans