In conversation with Shane Leaning: What’s new for the International Leadership and Management Programme

As the role of a school leader continues to shift, effective leadership development has never been more important. We recently spoke to Founder & Organisational Coach at Education Leaders, Shane Leaning, to get his perspective on how the refreshed International Leadership and Management Programme (ILMP) can support senior leaders in international schools.

What has been your role in re-shaping the ILMP for senior leaders and what did the process look like for you?

I was really pleased to be approached about the ILMP refresh. The International Curriculum Association runs high-quality professional development programmes for international educators. Through my podcast and my book, I’ve been lucky to meet a lot of people who work in and research school leadership, and I was able to draw on that network to help inform the new ILMP. The benefit for participants is that they’re getting current research and practical ideas they can use straight away in their own context.

While we were reviewing the programme, we kept our audience, senior leaders in international schools, front and centre, so they can take what they learn straight back to school and use it. We also know how busy a leadership role is, and that it rarely leaves dedicated time for your own development. So, we deliberately made the course bite-sized and flexible.

Course modules and assignments can often be dense and time-consuming. From personal experience, I know what happens then: you leave it to the last minute, the deadline looms and you end up cramming. That isn’t when people learn best, so tasks are deliberately small. It might be a five-minute video, an infographic to annotate if you’ve got a few minutes spare, or a post on the community platform.

“We also know how busy a leadership role is, and that it rarely leaves dedicated time for your own development. So we deliberately made the course bite-sized and flexible.”

How did you use research and evidence to shape the redesign of the ILMP?

Leadership development is a very uneven field of research. Many leadership books are story-based, anecdotal, first-person accounts, and there’s much less data telling leaders what actually works. In redesigning the ILMP, it was important to us to make that distinction clear, and participants will notice it as they go further into the course. I think that’s far more useful for leadership development, because there’s a lot of noise out there. We’ve tried to be clear and constructive, and the programme is built on a spine of evidence that supports the claims it makes.

What are the tangible benefits of the new ILMP for school leaders?

I think ‘tangible’ is the right word, because across the topics the programme covers, we provide tools that senior leaders can take straight back to school. For example, if a leader is looking at culture in their school, there’s a tool for auditing the cultural assumptions they’re working with. In the unit on working with parents, there’s a tool that helps a leader set clear expectations for how their school talks to parents. For budgeting, there’s a tool to help leaders weigh spending against their school’s mission. There’s also a template for writing an AI position statement, a five-level psychological safety strategy document, and tools that help participants assess their own resilience as a leader.

For every module there are live mentor hours for support, and the reading lists are accessible, so if you want to go into the reading, it’s freely available. The course is delivered as individual modules, so you can take one at a time without feeling overwhelmed by the literature. We’ve tried hard to make the programme accessible and useful, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed working with the team on it. I think it’s a very practical course for school leaders.

What are the benefits for schools for investing in senior leaders?

It’s hard to overstate how much impact a leader can have. After classroom teaching, school leadership is the biggest influence within a school on what pupils learn (Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2008), so investing in good-quality, ethical, evidence-informed leadership development is one of the best investments a school can make. There is a caveat, though: it must be the right kind of development. Schools can run away days and send leaders to conferences, but unless the focus is on evidence-informed practice, it may not have the effect they want.

Are you ready to invest in your leadership?