Designing Personal Development on Purpose - From 'We Do Lots' to 'Here's Our Curriculum'
The Leadership LensShow Notes
Personal development is one of the judgements school leaders talk to me about more than any other — and often with the most uncertainty.
Not because schools aren’t doing good work.
Not because leaders don’t care deeply about children.
But because this judgement sits across everything.
Curriculum.
Safeguarding.
Character.
Enrichment.
Pastoral care.
And unless it has been deliberately designed, it can feel surprisingly difficult to explain — particularly in an inspection conversation.
In this episode, I break the whole thing down.
I take us back to the Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit and unpack what inspectors are actually evaluating when they make a personal development judgement — and then I walk you through how we’ve designed this in practice, and why we’ve made the choices we’ve made. Because once you stop seeing personal development as “extra things that sit outside of everything else” and start seeing it as a curriculum, everything becomes clearer — and far calmer to articulate.
In this episode, we explore:
- Why personal development is a stand-alone judgement, not incidental evidence
- What Ofsted means by a planned and coherent programme
- Why personal development must be taught, reinforced and sequenced
- How PSHE and RSHE form the taught backbone of personal development
- Why moral reasoning and understanding consequences need to be explicitly taught
- How safeguarding knowledge is revisited and deepened over time
- How character development can be planned, mapped and progressed - What meaningful assessment looks like without data or tests
- How protected characteristics and British values become curriculum, not compliance
- Why pastoral care is integral to personal development — not separate from it
- How leadership and careers education prepare pupils for life beyond school
This episode is about moving from “We do lots” to “Here’s our thinking.” Not to perform for inspection — but to design something coherent, intentional and defensible for pupils.
🎁 For premium members
Premium listeners receive practical resources that remove uncertainty and save time, including:
A full personal development curriculum map
Character progression statements from Early Years to Year 6
Half-termly mapping of safeguarding, protected characteristics and British values
Sequencing rationale explicitly linked to the Ofsted toolkit
Leadership language you can use confidently with staff, governors and inspectors
These resources aren’t about adding workload. They’re about helping you articulate what you already do — clearly and calmly.
✨ Explore the premium membership here:
👉 https://the-leadership-lens.mykajabi.com/premium-membership
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I Thought We Had Our Personal Development Offer Sorted… Then I Properly Looked at It
In last week’s episode, I explored why so many school development plans don’t quite do what we hope they will. We looked at the idea that we often focus too heavily on goals, rather than the day-to-day systems and habits that actually drive change in schools. We also reframed the starting point for planning away from “what do we want to achieve?” and towards “what are our persistent problems?” This week builds directly on that thinking. Because once you’ve identified your persistent problems, the next step is deciding what to do about them. That’s the moment where most plans either become genuinely powerful… or quietly fall apart. In this episode, I introduce the concept of premortems, a simple but incredibly powerful way of strengthening your school improvement plans before you implement them. Rather than waiting to evaluate something after it hasn’t worked, a premortem asks you to imagine that your plan has already failed, and then work backwards to understand why. It sounds uncomfortable, and it is, but that discomfort is exactly where the insight sits. In this episode, I explore: Why we tend to move too quickly from identifying problems to implementing solutions What a premortem is and where it comes from How premortems create space for honest, risk-aware thinking within leadership teams A step-by-step walkthrough of how to run a premortem effectively in your school A detailed school-based example focused on improving reading fluency in lower KS2 Three non-examples of premortems that look right on the surface but fail in practice — and what goes wrong in each case How to use premortems to strengthen your school development plan before it reaches the classroom 🧠 Key takeaway Identifying the right problem is only half the work. Designing the right response, and properly stress-testing that response before you implement it, is where school improvement either succeeds or quietly falls apart. Premortems help you do exactly that. 💡 Premium Membership If you want to take this straight into your own setting, this week’s premium resource is designed to do exactly that. As a premium member, you’ll receive: A full slide deck that walks you step-by-step through the premortem framework Clear guidance on how to structure and facilitate the session with your team A resource you can use immediately in SLT meetings or wider leadership discussions Premium membership also gives you access to the full back catalogue of 36 episodes, each with accompanying resources including: Training scripts Slide decks School development frameworks Practical tools you can use straight away Topics covered include safeguarding, behaviour, personal development, curriculum design, retrieval practice, alternative provision, and much more. 👉 You can join here: https://the-leadership-lens.mykajabi.com/premium-membership It’s £11 per month, and each week you’ll receive a resource linked directly to the episode, designed to support your work as a school leader in a practical, usable way.