I’ve loved every minute of it: Nicola Owen on her experience of the NPQEYL programme
Why did you decide to do an NPQ?
‘I hadn’t done any training since my [national vocational qualifications] NVQ, and I felt the need for something solid. I was doing a leadership job that I didn’t feel I had a qualification for. I wasn’t in a position to go back to university, with having young children and financially needing to work full time, so I started looking around and the NIoT’s NPQs popped up.
I’m self-funded; being in an international school that doesn’t have the budget, I didn’t want to ask for the money, just the time off to be able to complete the course. I wanted to do it to build my experience and confidence.
I applied, and I’m so glad I did. I’ve loved every minute of it.’
How did you find the programme?
‘I enjoyed the mix of online and face-to-face delivery, even though it wasn’t an easy commute to London from Milan. I’m entitled to paid days for [continuing professional development] CPD every year so that made it possible.
People on the NPQ were in a very different setting to me, but that made it such a good learning experience. Whatever school you’re in you will have similar problems so the content was really relevant, even despite not having Ofsted here.’
How did you balance it with your workload?
‘I found fitting the NPQ around my in-school workload a lot easier than I thought it would be. When I initially read that you study for a couple hours a week, I assumed I’d have to put in more effort than that, but I didn’t. I paced myself so I was ahead at some stages depending on what was going on in school, then had to rush to do others. On the whole it was really manageable.’
What impact did the NPQEL have?
‘I've got lots of the [Education Endowment Foundation] EEF stuff up on my office wall now. I loved that side of it and did quite a lot of further reading, and I still consult it. I use some of the links in my staff training. One of my colleagues is moving back to the UK and was looking at doing a senior practitioner qualification and I said don’t do that, do the NPQEYL, and she’s just started on the new cohort.
Our setting has certainly seen the benefit. We’re implementing change in a more positive way now. One of the things that I wanted to look at was communication and language in the nursery, especially being a fully immersed in English school in a non-English speaking environment. It really made me sort of step back and think about what we were offering and how we were doing it.
As a result of the NPQ, I no longer have imposter syndrome, because I was doing the job anyway and I feel like now I can actually say I'm qualified for this job. I just feel so much more confident in what I'm doing.
As soon as I finished my NPQEYL in April, I started looking at other NPQs because I was so keen to do another one. I liked the look of the [special educational needs coordinator] SENCO one, but really I’d like to do NPQEYL all over again because I enjoyed it so much. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed learning: short CPD courses aren’t the same.’