Choosing staff training that changes what people do

Why it usually fails

It is too long, so it gets clicked through at speed near a deadline. It is generic, so the examples are about customers and invoices rather than pupils and parents. It is annual, so whatever it taught has faded by February. And it is assessed by a quiz that rewards recognising a phrase rather than noticing a situation.

None of that is the staff’s fault. A course designed to be endured produces people who endure it.

What to look for

• School examples, not office examples. If the scenarios involve clients and procurement, staff will file it as irrelevant and they will be right.
• Short modules that can be done in the gaps a school day has, rather than one long course nobody has an hour for.
• More than once a year. Spaced repetition is the difference between recall in November and recall in May.
• Per-person completion records, including for part-time staff, SNAs and anyone who joined mid-year.
• Content that is updated. A data-protection course that has not been revised since 2023 will not mention AI tools, which is now one of the likeliest ways a school leaks data.
• Relevance to the roles you have. An SNA, a caretaker and a deputy principal are exposed to different risks.

The test that matters

A completion rate measures attendance. The useful question is whether behaviour changed: are suspicious emails being reported, is the DSAR getting forwarded the same day, has anyone asked whether a new tool is allowed.

Those are the signals that training landed. If a school sees none of them after a full cycle, the course was a compliance exercise and the money would be better spent on a shorter one people remember.