Another PL day…yawn!

Have you ever been sat in training - professional learning, CPD, workshops (pick your label) - and thought, “I’m totally lost/bored/uninterested here”?

You know the scene: the slow drift of attention, doodles creeping across the page, the smell of terrible coffee in the corner. If you’re lucky, maybe a tray of stale pastries or those pointless individually wrapped biscuits. Hardly the environment where learning sticks.

Time for professional learning is scarce, and the pressures of work and life mean that when it does happen, it has to count. So why, then, do we choose to deliver it in ways that so often fall flat?

This isn’t about one course that slightly misses the mark. There is naturally always a risk this may happen – a slight misunderstanding. The problem is more systemic. Training fatigue. Too generic. Too many. Too often. A conveyor belt of initiatives - swinging wildly from desperation to “everyone else is doing it.” Professionals don’t need another idea dumped on the desk. They need clarity, relevance, and direction.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has been clear in its research: effective implementation is a process, not an event. One-off training days rarely shift culture. The most successful schools don’t rely on a single “big bang” launch. Instead, they take a more deliberate, sustained approach. Training is spaced over time. Ideas are revisited, refined, and embedded into daily routines. Coaching, reflection, and collaborative problem-solving sit alongside the larger moments.

Schools don’t need a quick fix or a glossy launch that fades after the first week. They need a compass. Professional learning that helps you hear the noise but not be drowned by it. More of a “drip, drip” than a downpour. The downpour is exciting. It helps build momentum and gets the conversation flowing, but it soon dries up. The drip-drip seeps into the culture of a school – deliberately, consistently, and with much greater long-term impact.

This approach also respects the complexity of teaching. Real professional learning doesn’t just deliver information; it creates the conditions for teachers to try new approaches, make mistakes safely, reflect, and adapt. As the EEF highlights, this is the difference between surface-level compliance and meaningful change in practice. Some variety – reading, coaching, professional conversations, workshops, whole-school masterclasses, reflection – all help foster this environment of change. 

Training that cuts through static and goes after what matters. It asks the right questions: What problem are you trying to solve? What does your unique context need? Where are the real gaps in practice?

Simple enough, isn’t it? You’re probably nodding along, recalling examples where you’ve ticked these boxes before. But here is the part that is nearly always overlooked: no matter how brilliant, no professional learning is complete if it ignores the impact of trauma. That’s the missing piece. This is they layer that is so soften missed. What does that training look like for the vulnerable or trauma experienced child in my class? Without understanding how trauma shapes behaviour and how recovery becomes possible, we are left supporting only the visible part of the iceberg (again). Navigate places trauma-processing at the heart of professional learning - not as an add-on, but as a foundation. Because without safety, predictability, and recovery, nothing else holds.

Professional learning should never feel like something done to people. It should feel like something done with them. That is what Navigate offers: clarity amidst the noise, direction for the journey, and the missing piece too many systems overlook.