Short Courses

This 3-day course is suitable for subject or phase leaders who have completed two or more years of successful classroom teaching.  It will cover a range of leadership aspects to support you has a middle leader.

Day 2:  Ensuring a quality education for all

• What makes for a high quality inclusive, diverse and anti-racist curriculum?
• Developing skills in carrying out lesson visits
• Giving effective feedback
• Pupils’ attitude and behaviour – how to promote positive approaches to your area of responsibility
• Developing sjills in how to have a ‘difficult’ conversation

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This course is designed for senior leaders, clergy and teachers who wish to develop their understanding of the purpose and role collective worship plays in the life of church schools.

The course will address how to deliver engaging and innovative worship across the primary age range focusing particularly on the following areas:

• How to ensure collective worship is an expression of the school’s Christian vision
• The importance of effective partnership working between church and school
• How to plan effective collective worship across a week, term and year
• Developing the role of pupils in planning, leading and evaluating collective worship
• What high quality monitoring and evaluation of collective worship looks like

Reference will be made to the new Church of England statement of expectation and entitlement for collective worship.

• Kathryn Kane
• Tim Wright

This session will support new and experienced headteachers in exploring how to effectively manage the increasingly challenging parental complaints and how to address the challenges they present to management in primary schools.

Kindly note: we can also deliver this course to schools within the same local authority, where necessary tailoring content to reflect specific contextual needs and hosting it a venue convenient to your locality.

Terri Patterson is the Head of HR at the LDBS and a freelance HR trainer. She has extensive experience of working across all sectors in education.

• “Very timely as we have to rewrite our policy and have recently had some unusual complaints to deal with.”
• “Thanks for the professional delivery and for giving us lots of useful information to support us if and when handling complaints.”

This session will support new and nearly new (and even existing) maths subject leaders in understanding and developing their role, so as to improve the teaching and learning of maths in their school.

Course aims:

• to reflect upon research-based pedagogical approaches to the teaching & learning of mathematics
• to have a deep understanding of the maths curriculum from early years to year 6+
• to support your role in helping teachers plan maths so that children know more & remember more
• to consider what and how to monitor maths in your school
• to know how to audit maths, identify strengths and areas to develop
• to begin to write SMART action plans and consider how they can be fulfilled
• to help prepare for inspections

Please note this is a 2-part CPD session, the content of which is different each term. Participants should ideally attend every session to maximise the benefits.

• Session 1: Spring Term 24 January 2024 @ 1.30pm – 4.00pm
• Session 2: Summer Term 30 April 2024 @ 1.30pm – 4.00pm

Peter Warwick: A Primary Maths specialist with over 23 years’ teaching experience, Peter has worked across several London boroughs helping schools achieve outstanding inspection grades.

He was an advanced skills maths teacher and a local authority Teaching & Learning Consultant. He is an accredited Numicon & Inspire Consultant; has presented at national and international conferences, and is a published author.

Statutory requirement for education professionals meeting ‘robust 2-yearly training’ for those with a lead or designated professional role for safeguarding in schools. Having completed basic safeguarding training, this course equips professionals to perform their senior safeguarding function in schools.

• Latest legislation and procedures – reflecting the Education Acts and ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023
• Policy development
• Awareness of multi-agency working
• Information sharing
• The referral processes
• Thresholds or risk analysis within the context of children and young people
• Management of safeguarding with staff and within schools – including the response to sexual violence and sexual harassment
• Challenging topics are also explored from a management level

An opportunity for leaders to visit a recently graded outstanding school and to hear from leaders about their work. This is not a ’how to get to outstanding’ session, rather a helpful chat with senior leaders.

Each session has a limited number of space, maximum 20 delegates.

Presentation Magic is the second session of our Comms Package. During this unique one-day course, you will learn the secrets and strategies used by magicians to engage, persuade quickly and efficiently, and how these skills can transform your presentations; including:

• Effective ‘pitching’: how to convey key information engagingly and persuasively to ‘sell’ your school;
• Confidence: tips and tricks for overcoming nerves and projecting confidence and authority;
• Time management: preparing and presenting under time pressure;
• Building on strengths: identifying and maximising existing communication and presentation abilities;

Conducted in a safe judgment-free environment, the emphasis will be on having fun (and learning some magic!), to re-energise your approach to delivering effective presentations.

Note: This course forms part of our Comms Package and cannot be booked separately. To book your place on our Comms Package, please email grow@london.anglican.org with the header ‘Comms Package 2023‘.

Richard McDougall, Guy Hollingworth and David Owen are the lead trainers behind Presentation Magic. They bring a unique approach towards improving presentation and communication techniques; and have delivered their workshops to some of the largest companies in the world.

This popular termly session is facilitated by a lead maths consultant and provides an opportunity for subject leaders to explore latest research, develop high quality teaching & learning, and share best practice.

Course aims:

• To explore the latest research in mathematics and how this could be applied directly into schools
• To explore maths data and how it compares to individual settings.
• To be aware of current national updates and initiatives.
• To reflect and evaluate current good practice – e.g. moderate
• To provide opportunity for professional dialogue with maths leaders from other schools
• To support MSL with planning and cascading CPD within their own settings
• To reflect on previous terms MSL and discuss impact and next steps.

Each term there are tasks or discussions to help with planning ahead. For instance, in the summer term, advice and guidance on Black Mathematicians Month was given so that this could be planned for in October.

Heads Up for Brand is the first session of our Comms Package.

Great brands are true stories told well. We believe your school brand should be an authentic exciting story that inspires your students, staff, teachers and engages new parents. This immersive session explores how to strengthen your school story, values, personality and brand identity.

There will be interactive activities to look at the challenges and opportunities facing your own school. The session helps head teachers to create bonds with those on a similar journey, it will also highlight the importance of communicating a confident and consistent school brand.

This 2 1/2 hour session will be hosted and run by RAW Brothers, who have helped many education, not-for-profit and commercial organisations develop their brands and space. They are highly experienced and sympathetic to the challenges schools are facing at this time.

There will also be a free follow up session ‘One-to-One With Heads‘ for those attending this course. This is a repeated session from 23rd November 2023. 

Note: This course forms part of our Comms Package and cannot be booked separately. To book your place on our Comms Package, please email grow@london.anglican.org with the header ‘Comms Package 2023‘.

Raw Brothers have a proven track record spanning 20 years of providing creative consultancy services to companies and organisations, uniting organisational brand, people engagement and workplace strategy.

Effective Social Media is the third and final session of our Comms Package.

Social media, and how to use it effectively, is a topic that lots of schools discuss. There are real opportunities if it is used well, but there are also many understandable concerns about the risks that are also associated with “putting yourselves out there” into the world of social media.

This session will explore:

1. What is social media and what are the different ways of engaging with it?
2. How does a school develop a social media approach?
3. What does “good” look like?
4. How does a school put in place strategies to manage risk?
5. What happens if it goes wrong? The best ways to respond to issues.

Note: This course forms part of our Comms Package and cannot be booked separately. To book your place on our Comms Package, please email grow@london.anglican.org with the header ‘Comms Package 2023‘.

We will explore the requirements set out in the SIAMS Framework for supporting and developing the spirituality of pupils within church schools. We will share ideas on how to begin to develop high quality provision, both within collective worship and the wider curriculum, giving leaders the confidence and resources to go back and try in their own schools.

• Jayne Pavlou is an experienced SIAMS inspector and a Quality Assurance Inspector for the national SIAMS team. She also leads on SIAMS for the LDBS.
• Mary Hawes 

“Thank you so much for the ideas and clarification on many aspects. It was great to be able to share ideas.”