Aurora Development Day

We were delighted to welcome 200 Aurora Academies Trust colleagues to City Academy Whitehawk earlier this month. We pride ourselves on our shared commitment to deep and meaningful collaboration so opening our doors to school teams from across the trust was one of the biggest highlights of the term so far!

Based on the effective collaborative working opportunities we've designed in recent years with through our Professional Networks, we devised bespoke workshops for all staff groups. Our ambition was to ensure that every Aurora colleague experienced high quality professional development opportunities specific to their roles.

Based on the principle of collective teacher efficacy, we designed opportunities for our Quality of Education leaders and classroom teams to collaborate throughout the day, engaging in professional reading, training and discussion based on highly effective teaching and subject specific pedagogy. As a network of skilled teachers, we have a really firm understanding of 'the why' and 'the what' - it was exciting to come together for the day to contribute our views on the tools and strategies that define 'the how'. Capturing the expertise of our all of our school teams from EYFS to KS4 throughout the day was a privilege.

Under the leadership of our skilled Key Workers, Aurora's excellent pastoral teams came together to share their expertise in supporting the young people we're proud to work alongside. Our dedicated support staff teams engaged in a day of SEND training delivered by two highly skilled Aurora Heads with a wealth of SENDCo experience. The expert Aurora Attendance network came together, as did our Business and Administrative teams, undertaking shared work to move us closer to achieving our Trust goals.

Our parallel event, facilitated by Laylee Pocock, Director of School Improvement, at Glenleigh Park Primary Academy for a further 200 Aurora colleagues was equally engaging and productive. 94% of our colleagues across the two sites submitted glowing feedback for our Trust-wide day of bespoke professional development. In our feedback survey, we asked teams what they found most useful:
·      'Collaboration with other schools and subject specific teachers. Lots of meaningful and proactive conversations. It was great to have HLTAs involved in the teaching sessions. Very proud to be part of Aurora and I look forward to more development days in the future.'
·      'Collaboration and networking. Some time to share ideas to work towards a common goal. Inclusive of different roles.'
·      'Speaking to other pastoral teams! Also the supervision that we had was great.'
·      'Opportunities for colleagues to define the key components of high quality teaching and learning.'

We're thrilled with the feedback we've received from all staff groups across all seven of our schools and are excited to respond to our teams' requests for further training to build on this exciting work when we come back together in March!