Duston Eldean Primary — A staff CPD journal built around an index, training write-ups, and actions and review

The brief

Duston Eldean Primary wanted a single journal for staff to use across the year for continuing professional development — somewhere to write up training, keep notes and resources together, and, crucially, turn each session into actions and a later review rather than notes that are never looked at again. The book needed to carry the school's identity and its "Together We Grow" line, and to feel like a professional notebook a member of staff would want to keep on their desk.

What we designed

• Working with the school, we built an A4 journal that opens with a contents page and then repeats a structured training spread through the rest of the book.

• A bold geometric cover — a grid of Bauhaus-style tiles in orange, green, pink, purple, navy and yellow — with a navy panel reading CPD Journal, Duston Eldean Primary, a name box, and the school strapline "Together We Grow." It deliberately looks like a staff journal rather than a pupil exercise book.

• An Index page at the front — a full lined contents page so staff can number and list their entries and find a particular session again later.

• A Notes and Resources page — a two-column, Cornell-style layout with a wide Notes column and a narrower Resources column alongside, for capturing reading, links and follow-up materials next to the notes they relate to.

• A repeating Training spread that runs through the book: a "Training:" page with a header box for the session title and lined space to write it up, facing a page that carries a large notes area at the top, an "Actions:" band in the middle, and a "Review:" band at the bottom — so every session moves from notes, to what the member of staff will do, to how it went when they came back to it.

The finished book

A4 copies were printed using an alcohol-free process with water-based varnish and vegetable-based inks, carbon balanced from print through to delivery.