A head of department needs six solid articles on inclusion for a twilight training session next Tuesday, and the usual open-web trawl keeps surfacing blog posts of wildly uneven quality. This is the exact gap Teaching Times sets out to fill. Run by Imaginative Minds Ltd under the TeachingTimes Group, Teaching Times is a UK continuing professional development publisher that pulls articles, expert video interviews, magazine archives and classroom materials into one place aimed squarely at teachers and school leaders. The pitch is practical: give busy educators content that has been sorted and vetted so the planning time goes into the session, not the searching.
Nine topic areas for school priorities
The spine of the site is a set of nine education topic areas, and they are chosen with some thought rather than padded out for show. Climate Curriculum sits next to Digital Learning, Inclusion and Leadership, which maps neatly onto the pressures a school actually feels across a year. Within those areas you get two curated collections that do real work: the Knowledge Banks, which gather material around a theme, and the Classroom Resources, which lean toward the things a teacher can carry straight into a room. There is a video archive built around interviews with people who know their subject, and a magazine archive that gives the whole thing a sense of depth and continuity you do not always find on a resource hub.
Knowledge Banks and Classroom Resources
The genuinely useful part is the curation angle, because the article discovery and curation tools change how the material gets used. A leader assembling reading for a staff INSET can pull a coherent set instead of stitching together random links, and that saves the kind of afternoon most schools cannot spare. The training side is a substantial part of the offer too. Teaching Times runs whole-school improvement programmes and keeps a separate online training arm at teachingtimestraining.com, so the publisher and the professional development provider live under one roof. A bookshop and shop round it out for schools that still want printed materials on the shelf.
Curation tools for staff reading
That is the fair question, and the honest answer depends on what a school already pays for. If a department has budget tied up in scattered subscriptions and staff time lost to hunting for decent CPD reading, the consolidation here has a clear logic. The nine topic areas cover the ground most primaries and secondaries have to deal with, and the mix of written, video and archived material means different learners on the staff can approach the same theme in the format that suits them. A trainee mentor and a deputy head are looking for different things, and the breadth accommodates both.
Consolidation of scattered subscriptions
The place to temper expectations is on hard proof of impact. The site describes its collections and programmes clearly, but a school weighing a spend has no published case studies or outcome data to check the whole-school improvement training against. That is a conversation to have directly with the provider, and it is a normal thing to ask of any CPD supplier. The offer is credible on its face; the fit is something a leadership team has to test against its own development plan.
Case studies and outcome data
On reputation, there is not much external signal to lean on. A search for independent reviews of Teaching Times specifically turns up little that is genuinely about this organisation, with most results pointing to unrelated bodies that happen to share similar names. That absence is not a mark against the business, but it does mean the material has to speak for itself rather than ride on a wall of star ratings, and a cautious buyer should factor that in.
Contact details in Birmingham
By contrast, the contact details are easy to find. There is a full postal address at the Custard Factory in Birmingham, a landline, an email for enquiries and social links on Twitter and LinkedIn. A named building and a working phone number point to an established operation behind the content, useful to know when handing over a training budget to a provider not worked with before. Institutions that publish their address and pick up the phone tend to be easier to deal with when a subscription question comes up.
Browsing Knowledge Banks before commitment
For a CPD lead or a subject coordinator trying to cut down the time spent sourcing decent professional development material, Teaching Times is a strong option to weigh, especially if the nine topic areas overlap with a school's development priorities. The published collections give a fair sense of depth on their own: browsing the Knowledge Banks in a strong subject area shows fairly quickly whether the material matches what a department already needs, without waiting on any sales call to find out. What the site cannot answer from its own pages is how the whole-school improvement training has performed elsewhere, so that part still rests on a direct conversation with Teaching Times.
