Hi Kirsa
Do you do appraisals with your support staff? And do they discuss their development needs at their appraisal? Collecting that sort of information from staff is probably a really good starting point to find out what they would like to do which will make the training activities much more engaging and meaningful.
Kind regards

Jackie

In reply to Jacqueline:

I agree! We once held a session on Customer Service for all our support staff - management thought it was a great idea but staff absolutely hated it and felt they were being patronised as most of them had worked at the school for years.
We discuss personal development at appraisal and encourage individuals to completed CPD relevant to their role and career stage rather than try to find something to do on training days.

When you deal with support staff in a school (or higher ed) environment, you're dealing with a group with hugely varying needs, skills and development requirements. Inevitably you need to deal with sub-groups for anything to be meaningful. I'd try and steer your management team away from one-side-fits-all for support staff training.

In my school last year we ran safeguarding training in house, on a case study basis. This meant that the groups could be targeted to specific cases, and relevant situations used so that the training was really relevant to their jobs. It was really appreciated (as so much of our compliance training is on-line and rigid), and we're planning similar training this year around equal opportunities/diversity.

In my last organisation (higher ed, which as I say is quite similar) we ran an annual staff conference. For years support staff didn't really attend, because they felt it wasn't relevant to them. However we introduced a new stream to the conference schedule, which was targeted at support staff but actually quite relevant to many of the academic team too. Equally some of the sessions that might have looked on the surface not to be relevant to support staff, were attended by them. It definitely helped that people crossed to take part in the sessions that were best for them, and they had the choice. So much of that kind of day is about making everyone feel part of one organisation, so if you end up with people feeling more divided than before, it's done more damage than good.

Finally, grouping with other schools can be helpful so that you have more people in your sub-groups and can share costs. Even meeting up with a group of other school librarians and sharing the woes, ideas, projects and developments for a couple of hours will be more valuable for that group than a half-day of customer service training, I'm guessing.

In reply to Jacqueline:

Hi thanks for your reply. Yes we do and we do arrange training as necessary for job specific requirements driven from this but its obviously driven individually rather than whole teams but I am now doing this to identify if there is a common theme as well. Thank you.

In reply to Elaine Snell:

Thanks for your response. That's what we tend to do, but our SMT are very keen that we "find" meaningful training for them to do on development days which is proving difficult when we do it ad hoc on an individual basis. In truth our support staff prefer the opportunity to get on quietly with their work and catch up on things they don't normally have chance to address when teaching staff and students are in school.

In reply to Nina Waters:

Thank you Nina, I agree and that's something that we need to consider. We have done Federations days in the past where we have collaborated with a number of local schools and joined different groups of support staff together, it was very successful but a huge amount of work was involved so it isn't an annual feature.