City College Norwich is a large general community college of further and higher education, based in the city of Norwich, with approximately 20 000 learners.  The Hotel School is one of the largest teaching schools in the college.  It is a Centre of Vocational excellence (CoVE) for its work in Catering and Hospitality. 
This has funded substantial and ongoing up grades to the student learning environment to support on site study and practical operations.  It is equipped with state of the art interactive information technology equipment.
It has approximately 1200 learners studying a wide range of programmes, serving the local, national and international markets.  It employs approximately 30 teaching staff plus a number of support staff.  It offers a range of full and part time programmes in Hospitality, Ctering and Tourism at both FE and HE.
Staff were not taking ownership of their own staff development needs and not making the most of the provisions on offer.  With rapid changes in teaching and learning that are taking place, teaching staff need to be up to date with current practice and thinking.  Professional development profiling and timing of staff development are also issues.  The current system is seen as being inflexible and there are also issues to do with tension between corporate and individual staff development needs.
The action research process facilitated the monitoring of the process through use of workshops where participants reported with their ‘research’.  Each workshop was documented as notes were taken during the meeting either by a note taker or by the project leader.  Participants either emailed or wrote informal notes of their findings or were greatly encouraged in informal conversation ‘over coffee’.

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