This is a course for anyone new to Dyspraxia and wanting to find out more about it. It aims to give you the basics so that you can start to identify pupils who may be displaying tendencies and work with those pupils to support their needs. We’ll therefore give you advice and simple ideas you can put into practice straight away and approaches to adapt and trial. It may be that the pupil needs further support so we’ll talk about what other avenues you may want to pursue. Great for teachers new to the profession, support staff or anyone wanting to check their understanding and support pupils to have the best possible outcomes.

In this course, Matt Bromley turns his attention to the pastoral role that teachers fulfil in school. He shares his advice on being an effective form tutor and talks about what NQTs need to know about the SEND Code of Practice. He then walks you through the three waves of intervention and support that tend to work best for disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND. Matt also summarises your legal duties and tells you what you need to know about child protection. As well as being useful for individual CPD for new teachers, this course could form the basis of coaching and mentoring activity 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 is a course for anyone new to Speech, Language and Communication Needs and wanting to find out more about them. It aims to give you the basics so that you can start to identify pupils who may be displaying tendencies and work with those pupils to support their needs. We’ll therefore give you advice and simple ideas you can put into practice straight away and approaches to adapt and trial. It may be that the pupil needs further support so we’ll talk about what other avenues you may want to pursue. Great for teachers new to the profession, support staff or anyone wanting to check their understanding and support pupils to have the best possible outcomes.

The biggest jump from TA to HLTA for most is the introduction of ‘Professional Skills’, that is the expectations around planning, teaching and learning, monitoring and assessment. Whereas TA’s are very much directed by teachers, stepping up to working with and contributing to these areas can be daunting. Here we take this section of the professional standards for HLTA’s and look at which approaches, theories and structure can help guide you in making the best decisions when planning. This course is therefore aimed at TA’s aspiring to become HLTA’s, or HLTA’s wishing to develop their knowledge in this area.

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.

In this course, which is the first of three courses on the subject of securing a SLT position, Matt Bromley talks about finding the right role for you and about how to articulate your suitability for that role.  He also explores four qualities of effective school leaders and explains how you can set out your leadership vision. As well as being useful for individual CPD, this course could form the basis of in-school 121 coaching for prospective members of SLT. This course has been developed by Matt Bromley who has over twenty years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as headteacher, principal and MAT 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 Become a School Leader, How to Lead, and School & College Curriculum Design.

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.

This is a course for anyone new to Attachment Disorder and wanting to find out more about it. It aims to give you the basics so that you can start to identify pupils who may be displaying tendencies and work with those pupils to support their needs. We’ll therefore give you advice and simple ideas you can put into practice straight away and approaches to adapt and trial. It may be that the pupil needs further support so we’ll talk about what other avenues you may want to pursue. Great for teachers new to the profession, support staff or anyone wanting to check their understanding and support pupils to have the best possible outcomes.

In this course, Matt Bromley looks at teaching and learning. He shares some advice on how to make a success of teacher explanations and modelling and exhorts the importance of having high expectations of pupils if they are to succeed. He offers top tips on marking and feedback and looks at the particular challenges of teaching exam classes. As well as being useful for individual CPD for new teachers, this course could form the basis of coaching and mentoring activity in schools.

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, the second of four courses on the subject of How Students Learn, Matt Bromley explores the first of his three steps of teaching for long-term learning: stimulating students’ senses to gain the active attention of working memory.     In order to learn, students must accept the challenge of hard work and this requires a learning environment in which students feel comfortable with discomfort.  Then, students need to be clear about what they are expected to learn and why that is important.  One way to do this is to articulate clear learning outcomes and success criteria. Matt also shares his advice on how to use feedback to direct learning and inform planning.  He offers some practical tips on how to stimulate students’ senses in order to gain the active attention of their working memories, and how to ensure those working memories are not overloaded by making use of dual coding.  Finally, he shares some tips for helping students to develop transferability so that they can apply what they learn in one context to multiple other contexts, thus ensuring learning is not only long-term but also meaningful.   As well as being useful for individual CPD for teachers, this course could form the basis of whole-school INSET.   

A focus on autistic masking. What is it? How does it present? How can you identify it? Why is supporting a child to un-mask so vital to well-being and enabling access to education? The content of this course will provide the skills needed to make a child who masks feel safe, as well as considering how the whole school ethos can celebrate difference.

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.  

Maths is like Marmite, some love it, some shudder at the mere thought of it. However, teaching Maths doesn’t have to feel scary! This course is designed to support those who want to become confident when delivering all types of Maths lessons. We will explore efficient preparation before a lesson and how small changes can make BIG differences in your teaching and the children’s learning.  

In this course, Matt Bromley explores the second of his three steps of teaching for long-term learning: ensuring students think hard but efficiently about curriculum content in order to encode it into long-term memory.  Matt argues, in order to learn, students must accept the challenge of hard work and this means pitching lessons in students’ struggle zones so that it is hard but achievable.  Sometimes, in order to make students think, we must introduce desirable difficulties, artificial blocks and barriers that slow down students’ thinking, induce cognitive strain and therefore ensure information is actively processed.  One effective means of pitching learning is to teach to the top.  To help students focus on the curriculum content to be learned, we should make use of teacher explanations and modelling, as well as questioning and classroom discussion.  But we must also help them to avoid cognitive overload by providing a means of thinking efficiently and cheating the limitations of working memory capacity.     As well as being useful for individual CPD for teachers, this course could form the basis of whole-school INSET.   

In this course, Matt Bromley explores the importance of teachers and the quality of their teaching on student outcomes.  He shares some of the habits adopted by effective teachers, defines the complex process of ‘learning’, and explains the difference between ‘performance’ and ‘learning’.  He then sets out his three steps to long-term learning that can help teachers to plan and deliver effective lessons and help students to ensure that what they learn today, they can remember and apply tomorrow.      As well as being useful for individual CPD for teachers, this course could form the basis of whole-school INSET.