Browse help docs
Running teacher CPD in the academy
The academy tracks what staff have actually learned rather than what they attended. Completing a course asks for a reflection, and the hours only count once somebody other than the teacher has confirmed them.
For Teachers and school leadership · reviewed 2 September 2026
The 2 points where someone must decide
Everything else can be worked on in any order. These cannot move without a person.
- CompletionIn progress → Completed
- VerificationClaimed → Verified
Build the catalogue against school priorities
/management/academy
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Teacher academy · courses
Added by leadership, tied to a priority
Concept-based inquiry in the PYP
IB · 12 CPD hours · Inquiry practice
Assessment for learning
In-house · 6 CPD hours · Feedback quality
Safeguarding refresher 2025
Superseded by the 2026 course
Archiving stops new enrolments without deleting the record of who already did it.
Only leadership adds courses. A course carries a title, a provider and the CPD hours it is nominally worth, and is tagged with the competencies it should develop.
Competencies are the school's own list, and each names the school priority it serves. That is what lets leadership ask whether the CPD the staff actually did matches what the school said mattered this year — which is a different question from how many hours were logged.
- Nominal CPD hours may be left unset. That is not the same as a course worth nothing.
- Competencies carry the priority they serve, so PD can be read against the school plan.
- Archive a course to retire it. Deleting it would take the completion history with it.
A teacher enrols and works through it
/teacher/academy
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Courses I am on
One record per person per course
Concept-based inquiry in the PYP
Started 12 Sept
Assessment for learning
Enrolled 2 Oct
Digital safeguarding
Stopped after session two
Retaking a course updates the record you already have rather than making a second one.
A teacher enrols themselves. The record moves through enrolled, in progress, completed or abandoned, and a teacher may only move their own — there is no route that would let one member of staff advance another's.
Abandoned is a real option rather than an embarrassment. A course somebody started and stopped is more useful to leadership than a record that stays open forever, because the second one is indistinguishable from a course nobody got round to.
Complete it — with something to show
/teacher/academy
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Marking a course complete
A reflection is required, not requested
Concept-based inquiry in the PYP
Reflection written · certificate attached
Assessment for learning
No reflection yet — completion refused
A completion with neither reflection nor evidence is a tick, and a tick is not professional development.
Marking a course complete asks for a short reflection in the teacher's own words — what they took from it. Without one the completion is refused outright rather than saved with a gap, which is the single decision that makes this module worth having.
Evidence is optional and separate: a certificate, a photo, a link. It answers a different question from the reflection — one shows it happened, the other shows what changed.
Gate · Completion
In progress → Completed
The server rejects a completion with no reflection, so the requirement holds however the request is made. A course ticked off with nothing written is a record that somebody attended, and attendance was never the thing worth tracking.
Claim the hours actually spent
/teacher/academy
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
My CPD hours
Claimed hours need not match the course
Concept-based inquiry in the PYP
Nominally 12 · claimed 15
Assessment for learning
Nominally 6 · claimed 6
Hours claimed
21
Hours verified
15
Leave the claim blank and the course's nominal hours are used. A school that has set no nominal hours gets no silent zero.
Hours are claimed per completion and need not equal the course's nominal figure — a two-day course somebody genuinely spent three days on is allowed to say so. Leaving the claim empty falls back to the nominal hours.
Where the school never set nominal hours, nothing is invented. An unclaimed, unset figure reads as absent rather than as zero, because zero is a claim about the course and absent is a statement about the record.
Leadership verifies the claim
/management/academy
Mrs. Johnson
Teacher
Staff CPD · leadership view
Verification is somebody else's signature
A. Iyer · Concept-based inquiry
15 hours claimed · reflection and certificate
S. Khan · Assessment for learning
6 hours claimed · reflection only
Enrolments
64
Completed
38
Verified
24
Verified is always a smaller number than completed, and the gap is the work.
Leadership sees the whole staff picture — how many enrolments, how many completions, and how many of those completions have been verified. Verification is a leadership act by design: a teacher marking their own CPD verified would make the record worthless to an inspector and to the school.
The gap between completed and verified is not a failure state. It is the queue, and it is meant to be visible.
Gate · Verification
Claimed → Verified
Only leadership can verify, and the verification records who did it and when. Self-verification is not restricted by hiding a control — the role is simply not permitted to set the field, so it fails whoever sends the request.
Who can approve what
Designations are assigned in IB roles and are separate from the account role somebody signs in with.
| Designation | Sees | Approves |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership and admin | Every enrolment, completion and claim across the staff | Adding courses and competencies, and verifying hours |
| Teacher | The catalogue and their own record | Enrolling themselves, completing with a reflection, and claiming hours |
If something looks empty
A course will not mark as complete
There is no reflection on it. Completion asks for one in the teacher's own words and the server refuses the change without it — the button is not the thing enforcing this.
A teacher cannot add a course to the catalogue
Only leadership and admin can. Teachers enrol on courses rather than create them, which is what keeps the catalogue a school decision.
Verified hours read as nothing rather than zero
Nothing has been verified yet. An absent figure and a zero mean different things here, so the software declines to show a number it has not been given.
Hours do not match the course
That is allowed. A claim need not equal the nominal hours, and a blank claim falls back to them — check the claim before assuming the catalogue is wrong.
An old course still appears for staff
It has not been archived. Archiving retires a course from new enrolments while keeping the record of everyone who already completed it.
Still stuck?
Bring the unit you are working on. Thirty minutes with someone who has taught the programme.