Posted on: November 6th 2015
On Wednesday and Thursday last week, Norfolk House had the privilege of hosting Day 2 and 3 of Bellevue’s Emerging Leaders course. We hosted delegates from our 12 UK independent schools who have been identified for development on the programme, which has been designed and delivered by our own team of educational specialists within the group. The idea of the programme is that it is both a practical and academic approach to developing leaders within our schools. Although it is in its infancy, we hope to identify staff for development each year and for them to achieve accreditation for their ongoing professional learning as well as skills to move forward into leadership positions.
It’s a very exciting time for the group and especially for those involved; I led the programme on Wednesday which focused on Ensuring Quality through standards, systems and rigorous development and improvement, and the following day, one of my fellow heads, Bridget Saul delivered a day of training on data and its importance in all aspects of school improvement.
The quality of professional dialogue and participation from the delegates was excellent, despite some of the concepts and ideas being challenging and the days being full on; it was also fantastic professional development for me to research and develop a programme to present as part of the course.
The delegates are also expected to do academic learning tasks in between the days; this will not only improve their own pedagogy, but will impact on practice in all of the schools through sharing and disseminating ideas.
Bellevue place a huge importance on staff development, nurturing talent and growing capability; it is an excellent way to grow our leaders of the future, to ensure we retain excellent staff and to offer opportunities for cross fertilisation of excellent ideas and practice across our schools.
The benefits to our children’s learning in our schools, from dedicated professionals who themselves are ‘lifelong learners’ is immeasurable and that is the point of investing in all our ‘learners’ - whether they’re 5 or 45!
