Dear colleagues,
"An educator's working environment is a child's learning environment."
That line, from Jagdeep Pabla at our People and Culture Conference last week, is one that I keep coming back to. It crystallised something a few of us were discussing again only yesterday: too often, PD gets delivered without anyone really getting under the hood of the culture and implementation conditions it's landing into. Without direct investment from leaders, even good PD doesn't stick. The conference showed exactly why that matters. Where leaders were genuinely invested in the work, not just sponsoring it but actively shaping and following through on it, the impact across schools and trusts was remarkable. Read ASCL Leadership and Workforce Specialist Kathryn Morgan's blog on how the workforce conversation has changed.
That's not a coincidence. Kraft and Papay's research is over a decade old now but it remains some of the most compelling evidence we have: tracking teachers over ten years, they found that those in more supportive professional environments improved 38% more than those in weaker ones. The training itself mattered less than what surrounded it, whether there was honest feedback, real collaboration, and room to get things wrong. Their research looked at teachers, but as our PD is focused on leaders, the implication runs deeper still. Leaders build the professional environment everyone else works in, so the conditions we help you create shape your whole staff, not just you, and ultimately, every child in front of them.
This is exactly the thinking behind how we design our PD programmes. Our programmes are built to give leaders real space to reflect on the culture they're actually building, not just the one they intend to build, and to work through the specific problems and challenges getting in the way of it. You'll see it in the Trust Leaders Executive Programme, built as a cohort that returns across a year so leaders can test an idea, come back, and refine it against what they've found. You'll see it too in the way Leadership Essentials returns as an annual fixture, giving us the chance to revisit what's relevant for you each year rather than repeat what mattered twelve months ago. And you'll see the same instinct even earlier, in New to Leading and Understanding Enrichment, where the starting point is making sure the foundational knowledge is solid before anyone's expected to lead the specialism at all. That's deliberate. It's how leaders move from knowing what a supportive environment should look like to actually building one, because that's the environment their pupils learn inside too.
It's a good note to end the year on. We delivered 149 events to 5,485 school and college leaders this year, with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 and 97% of you telling us you'd recommend ASCL events to a colleague. Numbers like that only mean something because of the conversations behind them, so thank you for the feedback, the honesty, and the trust you've placed in us this year, and for the effect it has on the young people you lead for.
We'll keep working over the summer on next year's programme, so do take a look back at our events schedule for what's coming up. There's a lot to look forward to.
Wishing you all a very happy summer holiday.
Best
wishes
