Improving leadership diversity: Five lessons from two women’s leadership programmes
First published by the Teaching Schools Council in July 2017. In 2016 Southwark Teaching School Alliance won an award from the NCTL Leadership Equality and Diversity Fund for two programmes exclusively for female leaders, which we ran in collaboration with United Learning and the Gipsy Hill Federation. The programmes are a response to the historic underrepresentation of women in headship and executive leadership [1] , seeking to unlock talent that could help meet the demand for more great leaders and ensure every child goes to a school led by a great headteacher. We will run them again in 2017/18. The programmes Our two programmes – Headship Beyond One School , for serving heads and executive heads, and Senior Leadership Development for Women , for those on their journey to headship – tackled some of the barriers that can hold women back. A central theme was how it is possible for women to lead in a way that is both consistent with their values, and compatible with the other