ABOUT PTSA
About PTSA
Plymouth Teachers and School Alliance, or PTSA as we’re known to our friends, is an organisation committed to serving the schools, teachers and pupils of Plymouth.
Fully inclusive and non-subscription, we work with any educational setting in and around Plymouth and the South West.
Our motto is ‘From Seed to Harvest’ and we do that through PTSA’s Initial Teacher Training School Direct programme, bespoke school to school support and improvement work, and evidence informed continuous professional and leadership development.
Our Aims
- To help ensure all Plymouth’s children have every opportunity to receive the very best educational experience possible in a culture of aspiration, pride, independence, and expertise.
- To help support the central role Plymouth schools have in their communities.
- To facilitate meaningful collaboration across schools, alliances and MATs within the city, regionally and nationally.
- To attract and facilitate access to exceptional practitioners, leaders of education and academics.
- To provide evidence informed professional development at all stages of a career from trainees to CEOs – ‘From Seed to Harvest’
- To help ensure expertise is developed in response to citywide and national needs, using evidence to inform a purposeful, effective approach.
- To co-ordinate collaborative projects drawing together academic expertise, practitioner experience and ‘craft knowledge’ to promote and model a cultural shift in professional development.
- To work alongside the Regional Teaching School Council, neighboring Teaching School Alliances, Plymouth Local Authority, and the Regional School Commissioners office to ensure high-impact, sustainable school improvement.
- To recruit, train and retain the very best of the next generation of teachers and leaders.
A message from the director…
Thank you for wanting to find out more about the great work of the PTSA. I hope that you will find all the information you are looking for here, whether it is enquiring how to Get into Teaching in Plymouth or peruse our calendar of professional development opportunities. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss how to get yourself or your school involved with PTSA.
At PTSA we strive to support, challenge and develop our community of schools and teachers to be the best they can be. We value a practitioner-led, school led improvement system and have evidence of real impact when leaders and teachers come together to solve problems, seek out expertise, test research and share great practice.
If you would like to be kept up to date with all of PTSAs activities please follow us on social media and sign up to receive our monthly e-newsletter.
Ruth Woodhouse
Director
Our Vision & Values
PTSA was born in from a partnership between our two lead schools; High View Primary, and Prince Rock (Learning Academies Trust) and other schools across the city.
The PTSA is committed to serving the needs of the city’s schools and delivering in our three KPIs: school to school support, Initial Teacher Training and Continuous Professional and Leadership development (CPLD). We have a reputation of excellence; we deliver sustainable, high-impact school improvement, innovative, evidence-informed CPLD and we are committed to developing professional skills for all teachers and leaders.
In addition to our inclusive values, we also seek to promote collaboration and evidence-informed practice. These values underpin our work. Evidence of this can be seen in the 50 schools that contribute to our teaching school alliance, our ever evolving and research informed approach to CPLD and the wide-variety of collaborative partnerships and programmes that we offer.
We benefit from working alongside our partners in the Plymouth Learning Partnership, Plymouth Local Authority and our high education delivery partners, Plymouth Marjon University. We also collaborate within our regional and national network of teaching school colleagues, always looking to access expertise at a national level.