The Teaching and Learning Pathway

Encouraging Personal and Professional Development

Matt Mannas joined The Cam Academy Trust as CPD Coordinator in 2021. He has developed several teaching and learning courses and regularly delivers these to the Trust’s teaching staff.

With experience as a teacher at Comberton Village College and as a Specialist Leader in Education (SLE), Matt is helping to steer the Trust’s CPD offering, particularly for teaching and leadership staff, ensuring a consistent approach.

Here Matt explains further about the CPD offering across the Trust, specifically the Teaching and Learning Pathway.

 

What is the ‘Teaching and Learning Pathway’?

Lots of people focus on the ‘Professional Development’ part of CPD, but often forget about the ‘C’. For us at The Cam Academy Trust, we place an emphasis on the ‘Continuing’. This means that we are always thinking about what is next, and how we can support our teaching staff long term by providing them with different opportunities in different phases of their career.

The ‘Teaching and Learning Pathway’ is an appendix to the Trust’s CPD Policy and is designed for relatively early career teachers. It is a linear pathway and details what CPD is available to teachers in their first five years at The Cam Academy Trust. It does extend to five years plus, so teachers who could have been teaching for more than 10 years still have access to training opportunities.

How is the Pathway structured?

The first year of the pathway aligns with the Initial Teacher Training (ITT), where colleagues are new to teaching and have not yet gained their Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). Here teachers are given lots of provided support and guidance to develop the necessary knowledge and understanding of their subjects and related pedagogy. This equips them to effectively teach their subjects to students of all ages and abilities throughout their training journey.

In line with the Government’s Early Career Framework, years two and three of the pathway focus on helping teachers succeed at the start of their careers – providing CPD that helps develop their practice, knowledge, and working habits.

For year four, we have written the Enhanced Teaching and Learning (ETL) course. This is a four-day entitlement open to all teachers. The course takes place across different schools within the Trust, to give teachers a flavour of the wider operations, and is very context specific. For example, the course has been modified for Primary and Secondary settings.

Although it makes sense for this course to be completed in year four, it is flexible. So, if a teacher has been unable to access it in year four for any reason, or they are new to the Trust, they can still access it.

Is this available to all teachers?

Yes, the Teaching and Learning Pathway is available to all teachers across the Trust. Although each school will provide additional CPD opportunities, this is the Trust’s core offer.

 

What additions are you looking forward to implementing within the ‘Teaching and Learning Pathway’?

We have four secondary schools across the Trust, and what we are hoping to do in the future is to host a day of our ETL course at each of our schools.

 

Matt is passionate about producing courses that provide both practical and theoretical experience in the classroom – helping teachers to develop their own teaching style whilst ensuring that all teaching staff are delivering a high-quality learning experience across the Trust. He has also ensured that these training opportunities have been tailored to specific contexts across our family of schools, for easy implementation and delivery.

 

If you are interested in finding out more about CPD opportunities, including for support staff, please get in touch with Matt at: MMannas@combertonvc.org or visit The Cam Academy Trust website.

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