Building the Capacity of Your Senior Leadership Team

Every school needs a strong, highly skilled team of senior leaders working alongside the headteacher to inspire, lead and sustain improvement.

Every senior leader working in the current educational landscape is subject to considerable scrutiny and pressure to raise standards and ensure a quality learning experience for all students.

This school-based programme is designed to build and strengthen individual and team capacity, helping to ensure that every member of a school or academy’s senior leadership team is sufficiently well supported and appropriately challenged so that they can:

• be strong, confident, sharply focused and principled as individuals and as a team
• believe that though they may encounter significant challenge they can make a difference that positively impacts progress, achievement and culture
• be better leaders of strategic change, better equipped to sustain improvement and develop others.

Staying Strong: Ethos and culture

A collection of practical ideas and tips submitted by schools across the SSAT network designed to positively impact on ethos and culture.

Free download

How the programme works

Timed flexibly to suit the needs of your school, the programme is ideally phased over two terms, with training and coaching sessions delivered in-school.

The programme begins with an in-depth review of your school’s context, priorities and current SLT structure, developing a picture of their individual experience, skills and needs.

The team will then embark on 4 in-school training sessions covering the key themes below. The training is combined with 12 one-to-one coaching sessions which can be distributed across your team according to individual needs.

A typical programme would involve:

Optional stage

To supplement the programme you may want to opt for a further session offering practical guidance and support tailored to your context. An SSAT Education Lead could work with your team on one of the following focus areas:

• Curriculum
• Accountability
• Using data to drive school improvement
• Leading a school through inspection

Who should take part?
The programme has been designed for secondary school and academy senior leadership teams. Primary and special schools are encouraged to contact us to discuss whether this programme is suitable for your senior leaders.

If you are part of a MAT or local authority and feel this programme is right for a group of your schools, get in touch.

Teams we have worked with previously have been looking to address the following challenges:

• Changes to the SLT bringing a mix of long-standing and new leaders together
• Outstanding schools looking to refresh their approach and keep striving for excellence
• A new headteacher looking to build a strong team ethos
• Schools looking to make rapid improvement through strong and cohesive leadership

Register your interest in the SSAT Building the Capacity of Your Senior Leadership Team Programme to discuss your priorities and find out more about how SSAT can help you and your team achieve your goals.