The course is for all vocational teachers from any subject as well as managers and teachers of English who are interested in developing  approaches to help make sure that the hard work put into  embedding English and maths has  a major impact on learners.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a very serious form of abuse that affects women and girls across the globe and within the United Kingdom. This course will equip you with the knowledge, skills and confidence to identify and seek help for women and girls that may have been a victim of FGM, or are at risk of undergoing FGM. This is an introductory course for all staff and volunteers working directly with children in schools.

Do you want to provide a high-quality mental health offer for your primary-aged pupils? Perhaps you’re doing bits and pieces of mental health but want to pull it together into a more cohesive product? This course will give you practical advice about building your whole school offer from policy to simple classroom strategies and techniques to support mental health.  

This course gives you 9 ‘Make it’ practical starting points in assembling successful assemblies. It complements Pooky’s ‘You Can: Give Great Assemblies’ course by focussing upon tried and tested content to support you in finding these valuable school-community gatherings less daunting for you as a leader. As we move through a global pandemic, the need for meaningful assemblies has never been greater. 

This course considers why and how we can work to improve our engagement with parents and carers.  We start by considering why our relationship with parents and carers matters and explore the importance of having clear aims and goals for our work with families.  During the course, we consider how to overcome common obstacles and explore a range of simple tried and tested strategies for boosting not only the quantity of engagements between school and home but boosting the quality also. This course has been developed by Dr Pooky Knightsmith and draws on her extensive work as a coach to school leaders.  Engagement with parents and carers is an area for improvement for many of the leaders she has coached, and the ideas that have worked well are distilled here.

This course is essential for anyone working or volunteering in a school. It will equip you with the skills to understand the risks posed by radicalisation and extremism, what to look out for in your context and how to respond to concerns. The course will also ensure that you understand the legal duties placed on professionals in relation to radicalisation and extremism and give you the confidence to respond appropriately to incidents in your setting.

This course is aimed at members of the senior leadership team interested in the impact of teaching assistants. The deployment of teaching assistants has very much changed over the past 30 years but can still vary greatly from school to school in terms of roles and responsibilities. We have however known for some time, that the impact on learning compared to cost has been very low. With the Education Endowment Foundation now producing guidance on how to maximise effectiveness, here we unpick the report for quick and easy reference. We take the summary of recommendations one by one and explore what these means in real terms.

Working with pupils during the school lunchtime can be one of the most challenging roles in school. With children having the most freedom and space during this unstructured time, behaviours can deteriorate, which can lead to a whole host of difficulties for staff. These films are therefore aimed at providing a basis for understanding how and why pupils behave in particular ways and how as adults, our behaviours are crucial to changing a culture.  

In this course, Matt Bromley turns his attention to ‘impact’. He explores ways of improving a school’s assessment practices and looks at how best to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum. He also examines the role that SLT can play in the curriculum design process. As well as being useful for individual CPD for school leaders, this course could form the basis of SLT or middle leadership discussions or training.

There are a whole series of issues that we can expect to see in our pupils in the coming months.  To help you spot the signs and take appropriate action, I’ve outlined a range of potential concerns, when to worry and suggested next steps.  

In this course, Matt Bromley explains the differences between the 2019 EIF and its predecessor, the Common Inspection Framework (CIF), and why the inspection regime has changed. Matt provides an overview of the 2019 framework and the schools inspection handbook and explains the methodology of inspection. He also dedicates a module to each of the four key judgments: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, and leadership and management. As well as being useful for individual CPD for school leaders, this course could form the basis of SLT discussions or whole-school training. This course has been developed by Matt Bromley who has over twenty years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a headteacher and a director of education. He is now a school improvement advisor, teacher-trainer and public speaker. He regularly speaks at national and international conferences, and he is a regular contributor to a number of education magazines including TES and SecEd. He is the author of a number of books on education including How to Learn and School & College Curriculum Design.

The introduction of statutory health education in September 2020 is a watershed moment; but the hard work has only just begun.  Now we need to ensure we get it right!  This course will help you to fully engage with the process of developing and delivering a health education curriculum that meets the needs of your learners, staff and families.  Whilst it’s impossible to give you all the answers, this course will make sure that you’re asking the right people the right questions and give you some clear direction and starting points to help you get Health Education right in your school. The course has been developed and delivered by Dr Pooky Knightsmith who is an advisor to the PSHE Association and the Department for Education and who has been involved in the development and delivery of PSHE and Health Education in a wide range of schools and local authorities.  This course was inspired by a keynote presentation Pooky originally delivered to colleagues at a Headteacher Update conference which Pooky chaired.

During this course, Pooky summarises a simple, evidence-based approach to promoting resilience in the face of adversity.  You’ll learn about the evidence underpinning the approach and how the 4Ps of parents, peers, problem-solving and passion can be used as a framework for promoting resilience in the children in your care using a very simple action planning template which focuses on both risk and protective factors. This course has been developed by Dr Pooky Knightsmith, an internationally recognised mental health expert and author. The content is based on a paper commissioned by Health Education England and Young Minds as part of the ‘Addressing Adversity’ project.  Pooky has run workshops on the 4Ps approach across the UK and internationally and this simple, evidence based approach has provided a practical focus colleagues from across a wide range of settings.

In this course, Matt Bromley defines metacognition and self-regulation and explains what it looks like in the classroom.  He also walks you through six practical teaching strategies you could adopt in the classroom to help teach, model and promote your students’ metacognition and self-regulation skills. As well as being useful for individual CPD, this course could also form the basis of group discussions or training in-school, perhaps as part of a teacher learning community or lesson study project.

This is a playback of a past live webinar. During this webinar, Pooky explored some simple steps to take us a little closer to meeting the mental health needs of every member of our school or college community.

Wellbeing action plans are an evidence-based approach to promoting wellbeing.  They can be used by children or adults and give a clear, simple framework for staying well. This course gives you an overview of the different elements of a wellbeing action plan and some clear pointers for developing an effective plan.  The framework provided can help to clarify your thoughts and actions whether it’s your own wellbeing that you’re looking to promote or if you’re supporting a pupil or colleague.  The process of writing the plan is every bit as important as actually implementing it and this is especially true when it comes to planning ahead for the holidays with more vulnerable pupils. This course is suitable for anyone interested in developing a wellbeing action plan for themselves or in supporting a child or adult to write one. The course has been developed and delivered by Dr Pooky Knightsmith, a mental health expert who has supported hundreds of adults and children to develop wellbeing action plans through workshops and also through her book “The Mentally Health Schools Workbook” which has an entire chapter dedicated to supporting staff to develop wellbeing action plans.

In these two linked courses, Matt Bromley explores the vital role transition plays in pupils’ academic and pastoral progress in school. He explains why transition matters, shares five broad categories of school life - sometimes referred to as 'bridges' - in which the transition process can be improved and three features by which an effective transition can be measured. Matt also explains how to make best use of transition days and how to support the transition of disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND. He argues the importance of collaboration, saying that what is needed is long-term, genuine and sustainable collaboration between schools.  Matt sets out what effective collaboration might look like in practice.  He then turns his attention to the particulars of primary to secondary transition, transitions within KS3, and from KS3 to KS4, and secondary to post-16 transition. As well as being useful for individual CPD for primary and secondary school leaders, this course could form the basis of SLT discussions or whole-school training. The two courses in this mini series are: Plan an Effective Transition for Your Students and Make Transitions Work for Every Student (inclusion)

In this course, which is the third of three courses on the subject of behaviour management, Matt Bromley shares ten top tips for managing behaviour, shares three principles to guide your behaviour management approaches, and articulates the importance of developing a presence in the classroom to exude authority and control. As well as being useful for individual CPD for teachers, this course could form the basis of whole-school training or 121 coaching.

In this course, which is the second of three courses on the subject of effective differentiation, Matt Bromley explores the importance of lowering the threat level in our classrooms so that all pupils can accept the challenge of hard work and achieve.  He shares five strategies for engendering the growth mindset in our classrooms and explains the importance of high expectations.  He shares two practical strategies for identifying pupils’ ‘struggle zones’ so that work is pitched appropriately, and he analyses some of the most common methods of in-class differentiation. As well as being useful for individual CPD for teachers, this course could form the basis of in-school departmental training.