About

At Inspiring Futures through Learning, we are driven by our pursuit of excellence every day. We have high expectations of learning, behaviour and respect for every member of our community. We create independent, articulate thinkers and learners who have confidence in, not only their individual ambitions, but also those of the Academy and The Trust as a whole. We have collaboration at the heart of everything we do and our vision is to nurture exciting, innovative, outstanding Academies who embrace change and provide a world-class education for all it serves. 

Within IFtL we strongly value the importance of high-quality professional development for all members of the family staff and providing opportunities for staff to achieve their desired potential. To this end, we fully invest and prioritise a wide variety of CPD opportunities for our staff in Education and Professional Services teams. We believe that all staff, including those within schools, the Core IFTL Team and the Teaching School, should have access to our high-quality professional development offer to support the development of their knowledge, skills and understanding. It is essential that we all commit to the investment we have made in developing our own growth and hence, our philosophy is incorporated and embedded within each school.

These are the core values of our trust, upon which we have linked directly to our trust wide CPD approach:

 - Fun: We value and believe in the importance of CPD being enjoyable, interactive and bespoke to the needs of our IFtL family members
- Unique - We are innovative, creative and unique in the breadth and variety of our CPD offer
- Together - We value the importance of learning together and building communities to provide networks to share expertise and support one another
- Unafraid – We are confident to test and learn new and innovative approaches to CPD in order to provide the best experiences and opportunities
- Responsible – We are all responsible for our own learning and development and for using the opportunities available to us
- Energetic – We are positive and dynamic in our approach to Professional Development
- Strong - We recognise and value the importance of talent management and identifying opportunities for growth to contribute to succession planning 

Our CPD strategy is designed to develop and grow everyone’s knowledge, skills and understanding to achieve their full potential and enable them to fulfil their role to the highest standard possible.

- CPD is designed to inspire, motivate, deepen and challenge thinking, promote self-reflection and provide exemplary models
- Continuing Professional Development of high quality will be accessible ‘twenty-four-seven’ through this web-based platform to fit in people’s personal schedules and be available when they choose to access it
- Learning for all through a variety of approaches, bespoke pathways and personalised professional development
- Universal, consistent opportunities for all in the IFTL family
- Blended learning allows the benefits of face-face training, including community building and collaboration, with flexible, web-based enhancements to support personalised, flexible development 
- Training, support and guidance always available which enables opportunities for self-directed learning
- Face-to-face CPD and School-to-School support enriched by targeted, signposted and supportive resources in this platform including playlists
- Models of exemplary practice stored in this platform to provide demonstration during face-to-face CPD in order to share expectations and possibilities
- Celebrating exemplary practice and expertise within and across our IFTL family, to share with one another; setting high expectations and inspiring others to achieve excellence
- Maximising effective and efficient use of time to reduce travel time and increase flexibility 
- Provide high quality and effective ‘bite-size’ CPD for immediate learning and longer-term projects 
- Quality Assured, accurate information available to reduce confusion and mixed messages available both online and in disseminated training
- Enhancing and enriching collaborative learning opportunities
- Enhance own school CPD with high quality resources to inspire, motive and train the school community
- Provide CPD to support meeting whole-school improvement priorities and performance management targets