Case Study
Built Around Them:
How The Charles Dickens School Tailored Its PD Platform
The Charles Dickens School, Kent
Contents
- A Platform Shaped Around Them A clear vision needed tools that worked on the school’s own terms
- Focus and Structure Moving from open-ended development to a shared, school-wide focus
- Coaching as a Skill Linking coaching, research and classroom practice through the bespoke Pathway
- Accountability Without Surveillance Consistency, completion-led QA and keeping the process developmental rather than performative
Introduction
At The Charles Dickens School in Kent, professional development is built around a clear belief: teacher learning should be developmental, purposeful and closely connected to classroom practice. For Deputy Headteacher Kristy Harrison and her colleagues, that meant creating a CPD model that went beyond one-off training sessions or generic improvement priorities, one that would support meaningful reflection, sharper coaching conversations and a consistent focus on teaching and learning across the school.
When IRIS Connect was first introduced to the school in 2021 through the Teach First programme, Kristy could see its potential immediately. But introducing a platform was never going to be enough on its own. The real question was how to make it work in a way that reflected the school’s own approach to professional development, rather than asking staff to adapt their thinking to fit a ready-made solution.
Over time, working closely with IRIS Connect, the school developed a bespoke coaching Pathway built around their own priorities, language and CPD model. The result is a structure that links research, reflection and coaching into one coherent process, shaped entirely around the way The Charles Dickens School works.
Creating a More Developmental Approach to PD
From the beginning, Kristy was clear that the platform needed to reflect the direction the school was already heading, not define it. The school was partway through its improvement journey and what leaders needed was a way to make their developmental approach to teaching and learning tangible in day-to-day practice.
“We were moving towards a more developmental approach at the time, and we wanted to make sure that’s the approach we had with our CPD.”
What mattered most was not simply introducing a platform, but using it to create better professional learning habits: thoughtful reflection, focused feedback and consistent follow-through. At SLT level, the decision was made that IRIS Connect would be the tool to represent and support that professional development. The challenge then became making it work in a way that was genuinely theirs.
Moving From Broad Development to Focused Improvement
One of the key lessons for the school was that effective professional development needs enough structure to create consistency. Initially, staff had a very open choice about what to focus on in their teaching. While this gave autonomy, it also made it harder to maintain a shared school-wide focus and more difficult to connect individual development to broader CPD priorities.
The bespoke Pathway helped solve that problem. By tailoring the coaching process to the school’s own priorities, language and CPD model, The Charles Dickens School was able to narrow the focus in a way that strengthened professional learning rather than limiting it. Instead of asking staff to interpret broad themes individually, the school identified specific WalkThrus aligned to each term’s teaching and learning priority, giving everyone a common language and a concrete, shared focus for their development.
“Narrowing it down has made for a much better whole-school focus.”
That shift gave the school a much clearer line of sight between professional development, coaching conversations and what was happening in classrooms.
Linking Coaching, Research and Classroom Practice
A major strength of the approach is that coaching does not sit separately from CPD, and the bespoke Pathway was built deliberately around structures that already existed in the school rather than imported from elsewhere. Each Pathway is linked to a whole-school teaching and learning priority, supported by research reading and reinforced through CPD sessions.
Central to making that work was investing in coaching as a distinct skill. The Charles Dickens School put all middle leaders through an external six-week instructional coaching programme, recognising that effective coaching is not simply an extension of mentoring or line management.
“A lot of us had been mentors before and a lot of us knew how to give advice and talk a lot, but we didn’t necessarily all have the skills needed to be an instructional coach.”
The coaching prompts embedded in the Pathway were developed directly from that training, ensuring the process reflected how The Charles Dickens School had chosen to approach coaching, in its own language and on its own terms. Rather than defaulting to advice-giving, coaches were better able to support teachers in identifying strengths, reflecting on practice and setting meaningful next steps. Staff were not working through a generic process; they were engaging in a coaching model designed around the way their school wanted professional development to work.
Building Consistency Without Creating Compliance
One of the challenges schools often face with professional development is how to maintain consistency without making the process feel performative or overly monitored. At The Charles Dickens School, the bespoke Pathway has helped strike that balance. There is a clear structure, clear expectations and clear milestones, but the emphasis remains developmental.
“We don’t QA what people are writing within their Pathways. We QA the completion.”
Staff are supported and held accountable, but the process remains focused on growth rather than judgment. The school also gathers staff feedback regularly and uses that to refine the process further, helping teachers feel part of the development of the model rather than simply subject to it.
A Model Shaped Around the School
Perhaps the most important message from The Charles Dickens School’s experience is that effective professional development works best when a platform is shaped around the school, not the other way round. The bespoke Pathway allowed the school to align coaching with its own improvement priorities, shared language and CPD structure, making the process more coherent for leaders and more meaningful for teachers.
Kristy’s advice to other schools reflects that directly: make the Pathway work for your school setting and your whole-school teaching and learning priorities, embed it in your development plans, and protect the time for it. Because when a platform is built around how a school works, rather than the other way round, professional development stops feeling like something done to teachers and starts feeling like something built for them.
Curious to explore how your CPD approach could be mapped onto a bespoke IRIS Connect Pathway?