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Highly innovative schools give teachers confidence and encouragement to spread great ideas beyond their own classrooms so more pupils benefit. Without this encouragement, many teachers may be too modest to share these successes, a new General Teaching Council (GTC) report finds.

Teachers may not even realise that what they are doing is particularly innovative or successful - they just see it as part of ordinary teaching. However, the report also found that teachers saw innovation as the very point of the job, as it produced interesting lessons which helped pupils learn and increased job satisfaction.

The overwhelming requirement for new ideas to flourish is strong leadership. Particularly innovative schools tended to have formal structures in place for teachers to innovate.

As new ideas always bring an element of risk, teachers need to feel they have the encouragement to innovate and the support to manage the risk. In addition, they need opportunities to talk and to share practice.

Really innovative schools involved pupils in developing, testing, evaluating and sharing ideas. In this sense, bringing in new ideas is almost a ‘co-production' between staff and pupils.

• The report, Teachers as Innovative Professionals, was co-commissioned with the Innovation Unit and written by the Office of Public Management. See the research pages of the GTC website to find out more: www.gtce.org.uk/research

Source: GTC Magazine 'Teaching' issue 16, Autumn 2008
www.gtce.org.uk/shared/contentlibs/gtc/141488/200280/teaching_mag_autumn08.pdf

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