This two-year project, which is led by one of the main Headteacher organisations in England and Wales, addresses the problem of how to improve the performance of school leaders, particularly in their first few years of leadership. It builds a partnership of six organisations from five countries, all of whom have direct influence on the practice of school leaders. The overall aim is to develop an induction, coaching and mentoring programme for newly appointed school leaders, which exploits the proven expertise and capacity of experienced and recently retired members of partner organisations/associations. The partner organisations are in a unique position to exploit this expertise and already have a clear picture of need at a national level. Three of them have a dedicated 'retired members section'. They all have substantial experience of offering professional development. The objectives are to: • establish a database in partner countries of high quality recently retired successful school leaders and select a team of trainers • audit the priority needs of new school leaders across the partnership • set up an online platform about the project and to host the resources • create a coaching and mentoring programme for new school leaders • train the trainers • pilot the coaching and mentoring programme with 150 new headteachers • evaluate and finalise the resources • create a set of case studies • disseminate and promote the resources • expand the programme into other countries There is much room for improvement to professionalise school leadership, to support current school leaders and to make school leadership an attractive career for future candidates. School leadership is a priority for the EU. This project focuses on how to up-skill school leaders, particularly in their early years of leadership. This is seen as a priority in the ET 2020 agenda if progress to meet targets on school performance is to be accelerated. The project has a number of main stages each with their own milestones and indicators and is divided into 3 sets of Intellectual Outputs. These will be: • An Integrated Platform, to host the project website, online resources and virtual community and network building tool • A coaching and mentoring programme for new school leaders and a set of pilot training modules • A set of final downloadable training modules for coaches, mentors and newly appointed school leaders, supported by an e-handbook In total there will be 50 coaches and mentors and 150 newly qualified Headteachers involved. An additional 30 key stakeholders per partner country will be targeted in the multiplier events, a total of 180 across the partnership. The final international conference will target 60 stakeholders at national and EU levels.
This two-year project, which was led by one of the main Headteacher organisations in England and Wales, addressed the problem of how to improve the performance of school leaders, particularly in their first few years of leadership. It built a partnership of six organisations from six countries, all of whom had direct influence on the practice of school leaders. The overall aim was to develop an induction, coaching and mentoring programme for newly appointed school leaders, which exploited the proven expertise and capacity of experienced and recently retired members of partner organisations/associations. The partner organisations were in a unique position to exploit this expertise and already had a clear picture of need at a national level. Three of them had a dedicated 'retired members section' to their organisations, which enabled the retired members to keep in touch with developments. All partner organisations had substantial experience of offering professional development. The objectives were to: • establish a database in partner countries of high quality recently retired successful school leaders and select a team of trainers • audit the priority needs of new school leaders across the partnership • set up an online platform about the project and to host the resources • create a coaching and mentoring programme for new school leaders • train the trainers • pilot the coaching and mentoring programme • evaluate and finalise the resources • create a set of case studies • disseminate and promote the resources • expand the programme into other countries There is much room for improvement to professionalise school leadership, to support current school leaders and to make school leadership an attractive career for future candidates. School leadership is a priority for the EU. This project focused on how to up-skill school leaders, particularly in their early years of leadership. This is seen as a priority in the ET 2020 agenda if progress to meet targets on school performance is to be accelerated. The project had a number of main stages each with their own milestones and indicators and was divided into 3 sets of Intellectual Outputs. These were: • An Integrated Platform, to host the project website, online resources and virtual community and network building tool • A coaching and mentoring programme for new school leaders and a set of pilot training modules • A set of final downloadable training modules for coaches, mentors and newly appointed school leaders, supported by an e-handbook The outcomes have been welcomed by members of the organisations and have been adopted into practice in the longer term.