I'd probably add one final question for some teams: "What are we already doing well that we don't need to change?"

There's a tendency with CPD to assume every discussion needs to produce an action, when sometimes confirming that an existing approach is working is useful too.

The "what could we change tomorrow?" question is particularly useful because it stops the discussion becoming a wish list of new tools.

Sometimes the answer is actually to stop using something!

We tried something similar with questioning in English and found that asking staff to bring an actual example from a lesson made the discussion much more useful.

It stopped us drifting into a general conversation about "good questioning".

I came across a short CPD resource recently that I've found useful for getting departments to talk about classroom practice without turning the session into a presentation.

The basic idea is to take one familiar classroom routine and ask three questions:

What are we currently doing?
What do we want pupils to be doing instead?
What small change could we make tomorrow?

We've used it with a couple of teams and the simplicity seems to help. People tend to move quite quickly from talking about the theory to discussing what they'd actually change in a lesson.

Thought it was worth sharing in case anyone is looking for a straightforward structure for a department or phase meeting.

Tom

The distinction between measuring activity and measuring impact is probably where we need to focus.

I'll take that away for the KPI review rather than simply adding more indicators.

Attendance at CPD is easy to record but tells us almost nothing about whether it was worthwhile.

Perhaps we need to look at whether agreed development priorities are actually showing up in practice over time.

We can measure things like absence, retention and survey responses, but I'm not sure a Trust-level workload figure would tell us very much on its own.

For me, the more useful question is whether the information prompts a conversation with the school rather than whether it produces another green or red box on a dashboard.

As we review the Trust KPI framework, I've been thinking about whether we're focusing too heavily on measures that are easy to report rather than measures that are genuinely useful.

Attendance, behaviour, assessment outcomes and financial performance are obviously important, but they don't necessarily tell us everything about how effectively a school is operating.

A few areas I'm wondering about:

• Staff retention and stability
• Staff workload
• Pupil engagement
• Progress of disadvantaged pupils
• Impact of professional development
• Parental engagement

I'm not suggesting we add another twenty measures to the dashboard. Quite the opposite.

I'd like us to think about whether there are one or two measures that would give Trustees a better understanding of the health of our schools without creating another reporting burden.

Interested in views.

Simon

Every exception creates another conversation about whether it really is an exception.

We've sometimes spent more time explaining why a school is doing something differently than we would have spent agreeing a common approach in the first place.

I wonder whether we need to be clearer about which areas are genuinely Trust standards and which are simply Trust recommendations.

We need a consistent expectation around quality of provision, but the actual way that provision is organised will inevitably depend on the school's cohort, staffing and existing expertise.

I'd be concerned if "consistency" gradually became interpreted as everyone using the same resources or intervention model.