Are you…
We have opened up access to a Diagnostic Review tool that will help.
Across our work with schools nationwide, we meet leaders investing in their professional development. Some are doing brilliant work and want to evidence it, to show what gold or silver-standard CPD looks like in their context. Others sense that something in their CPD offer isn’t quite landing, but can’t yet pinpoint why.
Either way, professional learning is complex and fast moving. You might have real strengths you’re not fully capitalising on, or blind spots you can’t quite see. Even highly experienced CPD leads can find it hard to step back and understand what staff are truly experiencing. That’s where the CPD Self-Audit comes in.
Professional learning is now explicitly part of Ofsted’s evaluation of leadership. This isn’t about ticking a box. It’s about leaders having a clear strategy for how they’re building staff expertise with intention, and an externally awarded grading that shows that you take this seriously. This tool helps you build that clarity quickly.
The CPD Self-Audit is a 20-question temperature check that gives you a structured, point-in-time snapshot of your professional development provision. It gathers anonymous feedback from all staff in your school – from senior leaders and teachers right through to support and site staff – a perfect 20 minute reflective activity for a staff meeting or INSET day.
You all answer the same questions about seven key areas: culture, focus, needs analysis, internal support, expert knowledge, processes, and how you use research and evidence. You get three sets of comparable data (one from leaders, one from staff and one combined rating) so you can see where perceptions align and where they diverge.
You’ll receive a rating (emerging, bronze, silver, or gold) for each domain, to help give you clear insight into what’s working, what needs attention, and where to focus first. It’s self-facilitated, requires no external input, and gives you the clarity you need to make confident decisions about your next steps.
Your CPD landscape. Across seven key areas – culture, focus, needs analysis, internal support, expert knowledge, processes, and research engagement – you’ll see exactly where you stand and will get a rating to validate it. You’ll know your genuine strengths and you’ll know where to focus next.
This is more important than ever. Ofsted now has a stand-alone section assessing your school’s professional learning and expertise. But more than that, understanding your CPD deeply means you can invest your resources wisely. You can spot hidden pockets of strength and build on them strategically. You can avoid misdirected effort. You can move with confidence, not guesswork. And if you’re doing excellent work, you’ll have external validation to prove it.
You’ll also see the perception gap between what leaders think is working and what staff are actually experiencing. One of the biggest challenges in CPD leadership is that these two things often diverge. These perception gaps can be subtle but significant, and they can quietly undermine even the most carefully planned CPD strategy.
By comparing leadership assumptions with teacher realities, you’ll identify:
Understanding these differences is essential for making confident decisions about what to do next.
Once you’ve purchased the Self-Audit, you’ll receive access to the online tool, alongside bespoke guidance on how to make the best use of it. Your leadership team completes it. Your staff completes it. The tool collates the results, and delivers an instant report, with a clear snapshot of where you stand and what to focus on next.
The Self-Audit works on its own. But many leaders use it as a starting point before deeper work, either with our coaching support or our full Diagnostic Review, which also gives access to expert analysis of your results, and bespoke guidance on what to do next.
Professional learning is now explicitly part of Ofsted’s evaluation of leadership. This isn’t about ticking a box. It’s about leaders having a clear strategy for how they’re building staff expertise with intention, and an externally awarded grading that shows that you take this seriously. This tool helps you build that clarity quickly.
Your CPD Self-Audit rating (emerging, bronze, silver, or gold) shows you exactly where you stand. What you do next depends on where you want to go.
If you’re silver or gold and want to build on your strengths, our CPD Leadership Hub gives you access to evidence-based resources and reflection tools across all seven domains. You can also explore our module library – each module digs deeper into one area and gives you practical frameworks and case studies to strengthen what’s already working.
If you’ve identified culture or internal support and challenge as areas to develop, our Instructional Coaching programme helps you embed partnership-based coaching that transforms how staff learn from each other. Coaching works when it’s genuinely collaborative; when coach and teacher work as equals. We help you get that right from the beginning, support you through implementation, and measure what actually matters: whether teachers are growing and whether your culture is shifting.
If you want comprehensive support – deeper analysis of your results, expert interpretation, bespoke guidance on your specific context, and ongoing coaching, the Building Expert Schools Programme (our full Diagnostic Review) is designed for that. It’s where schools commit to transforming their CPD approach over time.
Built on Experience
We’re focused on one thing: helping school leaders understand their CPD deeply and invest wisely in what actually works.
We believe in partnership. We believe in evidence. We believe in the humility to keep learning and adapt. We’ve worked with schools and we understand the complexity and the constraints. We’re not external consultants parachuting in with a template. We’re partners who know what it takes to actually change practice.
When leaders do this work well, when they build genuine trust and create the conditions for vulnerable, collaborative learning, schools transform. That’s what drives us.
Join us to explore how leaders can tap into the power of great CPD and create cultures of professional growth that inspire joy and agency.
A one-day collaborative conference bringing together anyone interested in making staff development in education count.