How professional development helps our students make the grade

How professional development helps our students make the grade Inderjit Dehal, Director of Professional Development, shares how Nord Anglia Education’s excellent professional development programme for staff helps our students achieve great academic results year after year.  

We want all Nord Anglia Education students to go out into the world and succeed — pushing boundaries and contributing to making the world a better place. While exam results are not the be all and end all, they are an important marker of student success and, in the 2017/18 school year, the results across our schools were amazing. Regardless of the language of instruction or the qualification, our results built on the success of the previous year.

A key contributing factor to the success of our students is the importance we place on supporting and challenging our people to constantly get better at what they do. This is achieved through the professional development we offer for all staff, not just our teachers but also those in support roles. Our approach to professional learning sets us apart from any other schools group because it is built on:

• Learning from each other

This means connecting our people so that they can learn socially and informally. We enable our staff to collaborate, share ideas, develop new knowledge and stretch the limits of their expertise. We do this online through Nord Anglia University, which offers an incredible range of courses and videos. It also happens through face-to-face learning in our range of leadership programmes, training events and conferences.

• Learning from the best

We have collaborations with world renowned partners who lead the field in their areas of expertise. The Juilliard School support our performing arts colleagues to be the best possible practitioners they can be, and MIT builds the expertise of our STEAM teachers. On top of this, teachers and staff join development events during the summer months each year at Juilliard and MIT.

• Learning to be the best

We constantly strive to extend our professional learning opportunities. We offer all of our people the opportunity to enrol in a master’s degree in International Education, which has been developed with King’s College London.

This offers a glimpse of why so many people join Nord Anglia Education, and why they cite the importance we place on their development as one of the key reasons for their decision. We firmly believe that these development offers, which are only available to the Nord Anglia Education network of schools, are a strong part of what enables our students to achieve such outstanding academic results.

Over the coming year, we will extend the range, depth and quality of our offer, and, in so doing, challenge our people to be even more ambitious in everything they do.