Constellations of Practice: How FE Educated Itself
As the DfE funded national Advanced Practitioners Programme (#APConnect) comes to an end after four years, I’ve been looking back at how different FE was, pre-pandemic. In 2018 it was still recognisably the sector I’d left just the year before, with tonnes of ‘drive-by’ CPD, HE patrons and fixed networks of ‘the usual suspects’, bravely flying the flag for professional learning. But ‘PD’ (professional development) was still very much in the hands of trainers and consultants.
Don’t get me wrong; we all need experts sometimes. Just not as often as we think we do. Over the four years of APConnect we have come to – humbly – realise exactly how much talent there is in our sector, in many cases unreleased and ready to flourish. Dedicated professionals ground down by what often seems like pointless change – Brené Brown’s ‘golden unicorns’! Two years in to #APConnect, when we saw how much people were learning from each other, it became helpful to reframe PD as a modicum of expert-led CPD plus ‘professional learning’ – what happens when FE educators start to educate each other.
My job in APConnect was to bring APs together in community, figure out what they were good at, make them believe it and release those beautiful voices into a sector which was already figuring out its own networks. The community – APConnect ‘Constellations’ – was celebratory, expansive, pro-social and anti-competitive. It made the most of the beautiful resources and interventions we’ve all built up over the years and brokered them out there for all to share. Using the metaphor of the Blue Satin Bowerbird, we gathered all the ‘blue shiny things’ of APs’ experience and made sure those stories got told. Those first moments when APs published their experiences – in these pages and elsewhere – are something I’ll always treasure and the community came together to cheer people on every time. We offered ‘CPD’ too – brokering sessions between real experts in the field from well-known names such as Joanne Miles and Professor Matt O’Leary, to the BAMEd Network and EqTraining. APs on ‘rival’ projects such as the magnificent CfEM (Centres for Excellence in Maths) became co-creators and APs encouraged one another to take up new opportunities and share what they’d learned, publicly. Experienced APs supported others – in their own organisations and beyond. Newer APs benefited by focusing on their own capacity for influence and culture change, through the APConnect Online digital learning programme. Pan-organisational working became the norm.
Covid lockdown accelerated the profile of APs as they led digital transformation within their workplace. We were able to research how the AP role was changing, with APs themselves as co-evaluators and we all learned a lot about how culture change works.
APConnect helped to build a professional learning architecture in FE which will still be there when the project is a fond memory and I’m so proud of that (and part of it). At our final national conference on 25th March this year, there was a symbolic moment when we handed over our stewardship of the architecture to APs themselves. It was emotional.
Organisations across all the contexts and sectors of FE who invested staff time in APConnect have released capacity within, which will continue to teach us all how best to improve a service we believe in deeply, and which is needed like never before. Funded projects don’t always know when it’s time to bow out, but we do. Happy memories of brilliantly impactful work and the sense of a job well done.
The Advanced Practitioners Programme (#APConnect) was funded by The Department for Education via the Education and Training Foundation 2018-22.
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