From burnout to buy-in: Making professional development work for FE staff

Truro & Penwith College is a large further education provider in Cornwall, offering a wide curriculum, including A Levels, vocational courses, T Levels and apprenticeships. It serves over 5,000 learners from Cornwall and the surrounding areas, with campuses in Penzance, Truro and Bodmin.

Most Further Education (FE) staff can recite their to-do lists in their sleep - admin, assessments, lesson planning - but somewhere squeezed between it all sits ‘Professional Development’ (PD). PD can sometimes feel like another box to tick, but it can also be a reason to stay in the profession (DfE, 2020), a driver towards meaningful progression, and a reason to keep going.

All-staff training days and workshops can provide a consistent foundation of knowledge and understanding across an organisation, but they can also feel disjointed from individual challenges or areas in need of development.  A recent sector survey (Boodt et al., 2025) reported that 50% of practitioners found recent PD was not useful or were neutral in use. This is reflected historically, in a large-scale survey by the ETF (2018), which found over a third of respondents felt training didn’t meet their needs or ticked the box for organisational/external requirements.

However, PD can be designed to meet needs, foster agency, and encourage a sense of purpose, while also supporting improved outcomes for students. At Truro and Penwith College, after engaging with core pedagogical workshops, staff identify a specific inquiry focus from these areas and join an evidence cluster of peers exploring the same theme, allowing professional development to be collaborative, contextualised and directly relevant to practice.  We mindfully implement this, conscious of the fundamental principles of effective PD (Knowledge, Engagement, Execution, and Practice) outlined in EEF's effective professional development in 16-19 settings guidance.

Pedagogy focused workshops are implemented to ensure that there is a secure foundational knowledge built on evidence-based approaches to pedagogy. We build engagement by empowering lecturers to take ownership of their own goals. They decide what aspects of their own practice they then intend to focus on in the form of a research project – derived from the pedagogical areas covered in workshops. They then establish their own research question around their pedagogy of focus, planning when they will implement it and how they will know if it is having the desired impact on their teaching. Lecturers are provided with dedicated time to practice their pedagogy, with social support to refine their execution. Staff are provided with agency to shape their own professional learning and the opportunity to share good practice amongst peers.

Implemented in this way, PD doesn’t need to sit on the to-do list. It can be tailored to meet individual need and it can be the reason we feel able to keep going. As we plan next year’s PD calendars, let’s make sure professional development gives staff what they need most: time to build knowledge, connections to set meaningful goals, and trust to rehearse and practise.

1. How can our PD offer staff more agency and choice supported by pedagogical precision?
2. In what ways can PD foster connection and collaboration among colleagues?
3. Are we structuring PD to genuinely support wellbeing, not just organisational compliance?