Dean of the Faculty of Humanities

I returned to Wales in 1986 to work at what was then the West Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education. Since then I have been actively engaged in promoting the continuing professional development of teachers through professional activities and academic engagement. This began locally with my involvement in the training and continuing education of teachers and headteachers, then extended nationally (within Wales and England) through requests for consultancy in the field of school leadership and through work for government departments, and now has an international remit through my position as Editor of the Journal of In-service Education and as one of the founding members of the International Professional Development Association (IPDA).

At the heart of my work has been the premiss that ‘teachers are learners'. Those responsible for the management and leadership of schools must also be learners and they have a responsibility to support the professional development of staff in their schools. In the process of developing programmes and structures for what used to be known as ‘INSET', then ‘Staff Development' and is now ‘Continuing Professional Development' or ‘Professional Learning', I have worked closely with teachers, headteachers, Directors of Education and Local Education Authority Advisers, officers at the Welsh Assembly Government and General Teaching Council for Wales, members of independent and commercial organisations within the educational community and colleagues in Higher Education who have an academic and professional interest and involvement in the field of Professional Learning.

I was membership secretary of the International Professional Development Association (IPDA) for 9 years and chair of IPDA in 2003. I set up a Welsh branch of IPDA (IPDA Cymru) in 1995 and the annual IPDA Cymru conference has enabled practitioners and those in local and national government to be kept informed of current research into CPD and for researchers to hear the voices of those working in schools and other educational organisations.

IPDA has extended its remit to promote research, publications and conferences on aspects of CPD including leadership, mentoring and coaching, the impact of professional development and the management of CPD. Over the past decade I have been part of the organising team setting up the IPDA international conferences and workshops and have led and made presentations at many of these. My papers and presentations have included ‘supply teachers: the bedrock for CPD in Wales' (2002); CPD: opportunity or life sentence (Chair's address, 2003); and ‘A Professional Development Framework for Teachers in Wales' (2005). I am a member of IPDA's Research Committee and through this have made regular presentations of papers and taken part in symposia at research conferences including the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) conferences in Dublin, 2005 (‘Professional Development: the UK research agenda') and Ghent, 2007 (‘Induction: professional development models for newly qualified teachers and their mentors').

Further information on the International Professional Development Association (IPDA) is available from the website www.ipda.org.uk .

As Senior Editor of The Journal of In-service Education I have been instrumental in promoting comparative research into CPD through the publication of a refereed international academic journal and the organisation of dissemination conferences, most recently in Tromso, 2004 (at which I presented papers entitled ‘Continuing professional development: a voluntary or compulsory activity?' and ‘The role and training of mentors in the UK' ) and Copenhagen, 2007 (at which I led workshops on ‘Professional Development for middle leaders' and ‘Writing for an academic journal'). The Journal has expanded in recent years, transferring to Triangle Journals in 1992 and the multi-national Taylor and Francis organisation in 2006.

Between 2005 and 2007, the Journal received over 200 articles from contributors in 32 countries. It has published 83 of these articles, disseminating knowledge, research findings and views on practice from countries such as New Zealand, Sweden, China, Greece, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, India and the USA. In 2006 we published the first ‘regional' special edition which contained research articles on the policy and practice of professional development in Australia.

I have represented the Journal at a number of international research conferences, for example as part of ‘Round Table' sessions in San Francisco (1999) and New Orleans (2000), and through the presentation of papers such as 'Politics, professionalism and pragmatics: teacher professional development and learning - perspectives from Wales and Scotland' and ‘professional learning: the role of an academic journal' at the Australian Association for Research in Education conference in Sydney (2005).

Further information on the Journal of In-service Education is available from the website: www.tandf.co.uk.

I am a member of the board of the Consortium for Educational Leadership and Training in Wales (CELT). Members of the Consortium are the Universities of Cardiff, Bangor and Glamorgan and the advisory services of Cynnal (Gwynedd) and ESIS (formerly mid-Glamorgan). which holds the Welsh Assembly Government's contract for the management and organisation of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) in Wales.

Future plans are to research and advise on: the emergence of the Chartered Teacher scheme in Wales; the extension of coherent provision of CPD through the partnerships of HEIs, LEAs and schools; and the provision of meaningful professional development opportunities for supply teachers in Wales.

I receive many invitations to address conferences on topics aligned to the leadership and organisation of CPD in Wales. Amongst these have been presentations at headteacher conferences in Cardiff, 2005 (‘A whole-school approach to leadership: developing the skills of middle-level leaders'); the Wales Education Exhibition, 2006 (‘Developing middle-level leaders in Wales'); keynote speeches at national conferences for the NPQH award, 2006 (‘Preparing for headship: the professional development of prospective headteachers in Wales') and at the first national conference for Teaching Assistants, 2007 (‘Teaching Assistants in Wales: present and future'); academic presentations such as the conference on ‘Learning to teach in post-devolution UK' run by TLRP/Cardiff University, 2007 (paper entitled: ‘The emergence of the Professional Development Framework for Teachers in Wales: potential impact on teachers in the early years of their careers') and on current developments in CPD in Wales for ESCalate conferences in Cardiff and Belfast, 2007 (‘CPD in Education: the national agenda' - ‘A professional development framework for teachers in Wales').

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