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At the core of the PTI's Residential Courses, Summers Schools and Training Days is the need to encourage and support inspirational subject teaching, with a focus on subject departments and the individual teachers within them. The PTI supports teaching children of all abilities from all backgrounds in schools in all settings and enables them to have access to a challenging curriculum.
The conference consisted of lectures by eminent speakers, seminars with leading practitioners and group workshops. Speakers included Tim Oates, Group Director Of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment, and Chair of the expert panel within the Government's National Curriculum Review Advisory Committee, Dr Gavin Alexander, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Dr Duncan Anderson, Head of Department of War Studies, The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Jon Coles, Chief Executive, United Church Schools Trust, Dr Kate Pretty CBE, Principal, Homerton College, University of Cambridge and Andy Buck, Director for Teaching Schools, National College.
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On Wednesday 8th February the PTI's first residential seminar of its Schools' Leadership Programme took place, this is the first event in a series of events planned for 2012, the PTI's 10th anniversary year. HRH The Prince of Wales, founder and president of The Prince's Teaching Institute (PTI), and the Rt Hon Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, attended.
The Schools Leadership Programme was created last year, following the unanimous request of head teachers attending the 2011 head teachers' residential, to provide networks and inspiration for head teachers and to support whole-school subject-centred leadership. Its aim is not just to encourage high-level discussion and debate about how success is achieved and maintained in schools but also to start accumulating a solid mass of research-based evidence which will help others to develop effective leadership strategies.
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| Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, Mrs McCabe and HRH The Prince of Wales |
The event on 8 February allowed the Programme's founding group of 48 secondary school heads to discuss the rationale and progress of the Programme's projects. Jerry Collins, Principal of Pimlico Academy in London, and Delia Smith OBE, principal and founder of the Ark Academy in Brent, presented to The Prince of Wales and Mr Gove their own evidence of the importance of subject-centred leaderships in their own schools.
In the audience were two of the PTI's high-profile supporters Sir Tom Stoppard and Michael Wood, as well as representatives of NAHT, NCSL, ASCL, Future Leaders and Teach First. Sir Tom Stoppard and Michael Wood spoke at the first Education Summer School held in Dartington in 2002, and since then have spoken frequently to teachers under the auspices of the PTI.
Mrs Bernice McCabe, told delegates:
"A few of us here today will have memories of that first Summer School. We were confident in our message - that subject knowledge lies at the heart of all good education - and confident in our aim to inspire and invigorate teachers by reconnecting them with the passion for their subject that had first brought them into teaching. But we had little idea what the reaction would be, particularly as we were not exactly in line with the educational orthodoxies of the day.
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"From that modest beginning, the project has grown mightily. The number of teachers involved has risen from 80 in a year to 800. We are now working with over a quarter of all the state secondary schools in this country - by no means just the best selective schools in leafy suburbs but comprehensives in the most challenging areas as well. We reckon that with all the teachers who have gone away refreshed, invigorated, re-empowered by our courses, something like 300,000 schoolchildren have felt the benefit.
"It is chiefly the teachers themselves who are responsible for the successful growth of this enterprise. The PTI has never been a top-down organisation. Our courses are run by teachers for teachers and the strategy is determined by what the teachers themselves think is needed to enhance the quality of teaching in their schools. And here today you see live evidence of head teachers determining for themselves what works best in their schools, doing their own investigations, their own monitoring, assessment and evaluation."
The PTI believes that the most important responsibility for a school head is to focus on the quality of teaching in the school, and that good teaching is centred on teachers' knowledge of, and passion for, the specific subject they are teaching.
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http://www.princes-ti.org.uk/WWIS/
The PTI Headteacher's conference was also mentioned in the following video interview with Rt Hon Michael Gove. Link to the article and video reference are below: