Could online training provide the most cost-effective and time-saving solution to staff training?
According to the recent ‘School Snapshot Survey’ report released by the DfE, “School leadership teams have been encouraged to prioritise the provision of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunities for teaching staff”.
Despite this claim, 91% of teachers surveyed for the report stated that there were still barriers to accessing effective CPD. 70% of teachers cited cost as the most common obstacle, while over half (51%) felt that insufficient time was a contributing factor.
Of course, CPD is just one part of the training story: there is also all the mandatory training, from induction and health & safety to GDPR and Prevent, which must also be kept up to date.
The cost of training doesn’t just begin and end with the course itself. The school also has to add the cost of supply cover if the training takes place during school hours. In addition, when trained staff leave a school, any knowledge learnt goes with them, leaving the school with the expense of paying to re-train another member of the team.
Add to that the challenge of finding time in an already packed school timetable and the requirement to evidence statutory compliance and the training task can soon become inefficient and time-consuming.
So, could online training provide the most cost-effective and time-saving solution?
Yorkshire based ed-tech company, TrainingToolz believes so, and so do their customers. Their bespoke platform for schools, TrainingSchoolz is a simple-to-use yet powerful platform developed specifically for the education sector. It has all the features schools need to create effective training courses, as well as policies and other information for sharing, along with the functionality to distribute, track and audit responses efficiently.
Kim Edwards, Senior Premises and Compliance Officer at Aspire Academies Trust and West Hertfordshire Teaching School Partnership, commented, “TrainingSchoolz makes training the school community easy to manage. Online dashboards allow me to see quickly the percentage of users who have completed the training”.
Darren Rose, a consultant and trainer working with schools and councils across the UK added “Safeguarding and e-safety are at the heart of schools’ compliance. I, too, for my small part, use this very powerful platform to provide data protection training and compliance reporting for schools (SLT, staff & governors). I would strongly recommend it as a platform for other content creators as well as for schools to create their own content”.
The TrainingSchoolz platform allows schools to compile their own training and policy library easily, adding video, audio and downloadable documents to their courses. In addition, TrainingSchoolz also provides a bank of ready-made policies and training courses. The assignments have been professionally written by experts in their field and are designed to save schools time and money over authoring their own training in common areas. Each assignment in this Training Library is fully editable, so schools can tailor it to their needs or use it as it comes.
For schools who would like to find out more about the platform, TrainingSchoolz offers a free sign up, where schools can create their own training courses or policies, or pick one from the fully editable library. And with the 10 training sessions included in the free package, schools can fully test out the system by inviting staff to complete an assignment and see the results.
To find out more, visit www.TrainingSchoolz.com
