Welcome from our Director of Development

Andrea Berkeley

"My involvement in Teaching Leaders stems from personal conviction and experience as well as compelling evidence arising from research, in the UK and USA, on what really makes a difference to improving educational achievement and life chances for children in an urban context.

Having taught, managed or held a consultant or system leader role across London schools all my working life, I know the challenges and complexities of the urban context well. Fortunate in having excellent role models and opportunities to develop myself professionally throughout my career, when I became a Headteacher I knew what to do to transform a failing school into an outstanding one, because of the support and encouragement I had received.

Middle leaders really are at the heart of schooling. When later as a head, I set about improving my school I knew that I had to invest in my middle leaders, training them, empowering them to build their teams - and then trusting them. It is not always possible for schools, particularly urban ones, to do this on their own. There are so many conflicting needs and demands. Frequently middle leaders have no focused induction or specific training for their new roles, which they tend to learn on the job. They have to cope with the change of role, status and relationship with their colleagues - managing upwards and laterally as well as downwards. Mostly high achievers themselves, they have to shift to achieving through and for others. Research shows that middle leaders are most likely to spend time developing, training, supporting, promoting and looking after others but are least likely to be at the front of the queue for training themselves.

In recent years excellent new programmes have been developed for middle leaders but there is room for more - notably for those with a customized experiential approach and a strong focus on pupil outcomes in an urban context.
Teaching Leaders has been designed with this specific focus, taking into account not only what NCSL and other academic research tells us about the needs of middle leaders in schools, but also the views of middle leaders and their heads across London and the experience of other urban programmes such as Teach First and Future Leaders.

Building on this base of experience and best practice we know that in order to buck the national trend in the attainment of children from poor backgrounds we need a particular kind of school leadership at the middle level. As a recent report on this topic says, ‘Such leaders believe in themselves... and they know how to combine teaching and learning with social and emotional intelligence'' (Mongon, NUT/NCSL, November 2008). The Teaching Leaders programme aims to nurture middle leaders in post with development and support in two intellectually challenging strands.

Firstly, a strong emphasis on performance-data driven teaching and learning interventions, including literacy, emotionally intelligent approaches to understanding adolescence and promoting positive behavior and new findings in learning science in the leading teaching strand. Secondly, building the capacity of participants to lead and motivate others, understand team dynamics and how to get the best out of their teams and to raise their performance.

All clever heads know that it is middle leaders who are the key to school improvement so we have had no difficulty in recruiting high calibre participants onto the programme. Our team of coaches - similarly high calibre former or current senior leaders - and I feel privileged to be working closely with them and also having fun learning together. They are an extraordinary group of committed and idealistic, bright and responsive people keen to make a difference. We make no secret of wanting to recruit high potential participants, because we also want them to see this programme as part of the leadership journey towards headship. Children from disadvantaged homes in the capital need and deserve the very best. I hope that you will think of joining them."