Pastoral Leadership: Effective Pastoral Care and Support for Learners

About this module:

This module explores the role of pastoral leaders in developing and sustaining a positive culture and ethos for learning. This includes providing a safe and positive learning environment and supporting all learners, with different needs, to achieve their full potential.

Leaders must make decisions, informed by the available research and evidence, about the pastoral structures and systems most appropriate for their school. To be effective, care and support provision needs to be carefully planned so that these structures and systems can respond to the different challenges and demands that are made on them. With clarity about the aims of the pastoral care and support in your school, resources can be deployed effectively, to impact on both the personal development and academic achievement of all learners.

You’ll be invited to engage in a series of guided reflection activities, structured around the National Guidance for Pastoral Support in School by NAPCE, to review your school’s policies, structures and practices and to identify the next steps in developing highly effective pastoral care and support in your context.

The module is appropriate for anyone with a leadership or governance responsibility for pastoral care and support or aspiring to these roles.

Session One: What does effective pastoral care and support for learners look like? will explore:

• What pastoral care is and why pastoral leadership is important.
• The organisation of pastoral structures and systems.
• Outcomes from effective pastoral care and support.
• Effective pastoral roles.

Session Two: How to build effective pastoral structures and systems will explore:

• Evaluating and demonstrating the impact of pastoral care and support.
• The key ingredients for effective pastoral care and support.
• Planning for effective pastoral care and support.

• What pastoral care and support is and why pastoral leadership is important in schools.
• How to use the National Guidance for Pastoral Support to consider what is needed for support to be effective.
• How pastoral leaders develop pastoral structures and systems and the outcomes we want to achieve.
• How to deploy available resources to support the personal development and academic achievement of learners.
• How to build effective pastoral teams and provide the training and support they need.