English Teachers' Leadership Collective
Calling all English Leads, HODs and Key stage leads. In Autumn, 2025, English teacher CPD is going to launch a group for teachers who want to radically and rapidly improve their practice. The job shouldn't have to be so hard, and you shouldn't be so unsupported. The current model of teaching professional development just does not work well. The likelihood is, you're being supervised by someone who doesn't understand your job, the constraints you face, or the solutions to them. But other English teachers do.
The dream is to gather 100 English teachers in positions of leadership, who seriously want to transform the quality of their provision. You need someone who can help resource you and support you. There's no need for you to feel isolated in your role. English teacher CPD.uk is designed to step into this gap and transform your leadership, your provision, and the lives of your young people.
English teacher CPD. UK exists for you. To equip you. To improve your quality of life. To share the amazing things you know with others. I'm the founder Ruth, and here's my rationale. I think schools are run by a lot of well intended people, but not necessarily highly skilled people. Which is sort of an awful thing to say, but I do think it. I think the training I've received throughout my career has been useless, or worse than, and the only real way I learned to survive at all in the job was through training myself. Which was, and still can be, a bumpy ride. I don't claim any significant prowess, but where I differ from others is that my desire to fix problems burns fiercer than theirs. It just does.
Perhaps this is because of what I see in the job every year:
1) Teachers struggling and burning out, not making it through the school year. I was the only one of my English PGCSE cohort that didn't quit at some point. Every year I have seen people have to start some kind of anti depressent or anti stress med to cope with the work.
2) Pupils who have been taught pretty pathetically because they have had cover for several weeks or months, or their actual teacher has absolutely no oversight or support.
3) Teachers promoted into positions of leadership that they are not equipped for. I've known staff literally push others out of the room because they couldn't control their stress levels. I've known SLT come to a meeting and say "I just got shouted at, and so now I have to shout at you". I've known HODs who deny all responsibility for having a curriculum in place for their staff to teach. I've known how frustrating and sad it can be, to want to teach well, but be trapped by pathetic schemes of work. I've known the head of a learning trust, not even bother to get back to me after I had a meeting with her about staff being physically hit by pupils.
All these things just seem so unnecessary to me. They just shouldn't have to exist. It's a no from me. If any of that resonated with you, then when it launches, join the collective. The beauty of it, is that it's going to be your thing not a school thing. No one has to know how you're suddenly so good at your job. You don't have to beg for help from a line manager who is untrained. You can be equipped, and hopefully, by taking the training out of the context of each individual school, we can start to work together.
There are over 4000 secondary schools in the UK, so there must be between 25-40 thousand English teachers, ish. It seems totally possible to me to get 100 of them trained to a superior standard, for a more reasonable cost than what's on offer atm. Currently, good training seems to cost anywhere from 300 to 800 quid for just a few days training. Most of the free training out there seems like a painful waste of time. Fancy going over cold-call again, for the 8th year in a row anybody? Nope.
Let's do this differently. Are you in?
Ruth.