The research reported in this paper was undertaken with teachers and other professionals from England and The Netherlands who were engaged in supporting pupils’ learning and working towards more inclusive practice.  It was part of a longitudinal research project which aimed to develop a process model to assist education professionals to identify professional development needs in order to improve the learning of their pupils, develop more inclusive learning and teaching strategies and to help them assess the impact of their professional learning.  A grounded theory approach to the gathering and analysis of data was used throughout the research process and a theoretical model, which had practical application, was developed progressively though this period.  This paper focuses on the findings of three projects undertaken in two schools and a learning centre, in England and the Netherlands, and their contribution to the development of the process model.

In recent years, increasing importance has been placed on teacher accountability often resulting in systems where teachers’ individual professional needs are subsumed and marginalised in the interests of improving institutional performance (Burns, 2005) and children’s learning needs are often ignored.  Identifying changes to practice as a result of professional development often relies on anecdotal evidence and there is a lack of understanding of what counts as evidence as teachers and professional development providers struggle to meet the requirement to evaluate the impact of professional development on children’s learning.  Additional pressure has been created by the move towards more inclusion in education requiring teachers to meet the learning needs of a far wider range of pupils and to develop appropriate strategies to address those needs effectively (Lloyd 2008).  In the results of two previous research projects (Keay & Lloyd, 2008a, 2008b), several issues relating to impact led us to consider the development of a process model, which focused on providing evidence of the impact of professional development on pupil learning.  The findings of these projects indicated that most professional development providers did not consider children as stakeholders and did not focus on the impact of their provision on teachers’ work.  While they acknowledged the importance of recognising the impact of development activities on children, they struggled with questions about what counts as evidence of impact and how it can be gathered. The findings also indicated that teachers and professional development providers were conscious of the need to develop more inclusive approaches to practice but were also finding this a difficult area to address.

Beginning the process of selecting teachers’ professional development with the child and the importance of identifying impact has been addressed in several models and raised as an issue in international literature reviews (Cordingley, et al, 2008; Timperley et al, 2007). The model we developed and used in this research differs from other models by identifying organisational support and an appropriate culture as the first consideration.  It also starts and ends with pupils’ learning and the identification of evidence of impact and stresses the importance of developing more inclusive approaches to learning and teaching.  

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