Leading Together

Develop your entire senior leadership team and create lasting change

Unlike other programmes, Leading Together works with your entire senior leadership team, collectively growing their ability to deliver sustainable improvements across your whole school. Together we’ll focus on your school’s specific goals and build plans for long term success.

Intensive support tailored to your school’s needs

Over two years your senior leadership team will work closely alongside one of our Achievement Partners – experienced coaches and school leaders that we match with your school. The Achievement Partner will support, guide and coach your senior leadership team to understand the challenges your school faces, create a robust plan that tackles them in the long term and implement that plan across your whole school.

Free of charge with access to £10,000 for further support

Our programme is fully funded and provides expert training and support. You’ll also be able to use a pot of money to bring in more support and training where it’s needed. For example, training on a specific priority or freeing up capacity to collaborate with other schools.

Teachers in your school can also earn a National Professional Qualification (NPQ) by joining our middle, senior or headship programmes.

Accelerate your school’s improvement strategy

Our programme’s mix of learning and support equips your senior team with the latest leadership knowledge and the ability to apply it effectively in your school. Once they’ve identified sustainable improvements that need to be made, they’ll have the support and access to expertise to start making them, positively influencing pupils’ learning as soon as possible.

Learn and implement evidence-based best practice

Designed to make a real, long-term impact, the programme’s learning modules are built around the latest research and best practice. Delivered face-to-face and online, they’re focused on key aspects of school leadership such as curriculum, assessment, developing others, strategic planning and implementing change.

• 89% of participants rate the programme good or even better
• 86% said that Leading Together developed their team's leadership skills.
• 85% found it helped their school create an improvement plan.

What’s the cost?

There isn’t one. Not only is our programme fully funded, your school will have a £10,000 learning pot to pay for expert training in areas that need strengthening. You’ll work with your Achievement Partner to identify what these are and which specialists can help.

Built around your school’s needs

Leading Together is delivered in four phases over two years. During each, one of your senior leaders will address the challenges your school faces, supported closely by your Achievement Partner whose objective guidance will help you identify the best solutions.

• Diagnose – analyse your school’s priorities and strengths to identify strategic improvement goals. 
• Build – devise, test and implement new ways to achieve these goals. Individual senior leaders will build knowledge of key areas identified in the first stage through a series of learning modules. 
• Embed and drive – further learning modules and coaching will help school leaders turn knowledge into positive habits that provide day-to-day benefits for all teachers and pupils. 
• Sustain – leaders reflect on what’s worked and how to weave a permanent culture of ongoing development throughout your school.

A mix of training and support

Combining academic and practical learning as well as mentoring and networking, our programme is delivered in several ways:    

By your Achievement Partner – an experienced coach, facilitator and school leader that we match with your school. The Achievement Partner works alongside your senior leadership team for the full two years. They won’t tell you what to do but they will support and challenge you, helping your senior leaders create plans and pinpoint expertise that your school really needs.

Along the way they will work alongside your senior leadership team to:

• understand your school's needs 
• create a robust improvement plan
• implement strategies that will have a lasting impact across the whole school

Through learning modules – focusing on key aspects of school leadership, modules can be spread across the senior leadership team to fit in with their responsibilities. Each module has two levels:

• First, to build knowledge of good leadership 
• Second, to apply that knowledge to your school’s specific circumstances. 

With bespoke school support – bring in additional expertise to address your school’s priorities. You’ll have access to the £10,000 learning pot mentioned above to help you do this.

Your school will also be connected to the Teach First community, a goldmine of support and resources. For example, our corporate supporters can provide pro-bono business advisers and coaches. Plus, our NPQ-accredited leadership programmes are open to all teachers and leaders in your school.

Through school-to-school collaboration – create lasting support networks with schools in your local community and beyond. This includes working with other schools on the programme and visiting those that have been on a similar journey.

We also hold regular events and networking opportunities that bring your senior leaders together with educational experts, leaders from other schools across the UK and the wider Teach First community – all well-positioned to help your school improve.
 

Eligibility

Leading Together is about making a lasting difference to the lives of young people from low income backgrounds. So we work with primary and secondary schools in areas of greatest need. If your school is in an Achieving Excellence Area 5 or 6 – a government measure identifying where children persistently underperform – graded 3 or 4 by Ofsted or at risk of falling into a lower Ofsted category, talk to us about how we can help.

These criteria are slightly different to our school partnership eligibility requirements. Even if you’re a Teach First partner you’ll need to double check with your regional Teach First team that your school qualifies for this programme.

For the programme starting in Spring 2020, we’ll be working with eligible areas in Kent, South Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Derby and Nottingham, the Black Country and Merseyside.

How to apply

Fill in our online form if you think our programme could make a difference to your school. We’ll get in touch to talk about next steps.

Leadership matters

That’s a fact. But leaders in schools that teach the most disadvantaged pupils don’t always get the support and development they need. We’ve researched the issue extensively and found that strong school leadership really makes a difference:

• Schools are ten times more likely to improve at their next Ofsted inspection with effective leadership.
• Improving the whole leadership team has up to four times greater impact on pupil outcomes than focusing on individual ‘super heads’.
• Nearly nine out of ten teachers and leaders say leadership training should involve the whole team.
• Nine out of ten teachers say they’re more likely to stay at their school if they’re supported into leadership roles.

Our research also shows there are plenty of teachers and leaders eager to step up if given the opportunity. That’s where Leading Together comes in – it creates opportunities for teachers and leaders across entire schools, as well as for the young people who’ll benefit from their greater expertise.

Leading Together drives change

It may be a new programme, but it’s already effectively addressing the issues our research identified and is proving popular with school leaders.

In a survey of those who’ve taken part so far, 89% of programme members rated the programme good or better. Plus, a large majority either strongly agreed or agreed that it’s succeeding in several key areas, for example:

• 86% said the programme developed their team’s leadership skills 
• 85% found it helped their school create an improvement plan 
• 80% of responses said it identified where their school most needed to improve
• 79% said it improved how leadership teams talk about the changes their school needs  
• 85% would recommend the programme to another school leader