Successful bid for Outstanding Leaders Partnership

Successful bid for Outstanding Leaders Partnership

Outstanding Leaders Partnership (OLP) has successfully bid for approved provider status with the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) to offer the National Professional Leadership Qualifications.

OLP, a school-led leadership qualification provider, is expanding in a move that will make it one of the largest professional development organisations of its kind in England. The expanded OLP will continue to be led by a partnership of Best Practice Network and Ashton-on-Mersey Teaching School, which is part of the Dean Trust.

The expansion will see two other former NPQ licensees, Nottinghamshire based LEAD Urban TSA and West Hertfordshire Teaching School Partnership, coming under the OLP brand. It means that OLP will now encompass 48 teaching school alliances and MATs - comprising over 1,000 schools - using experienced leaders from across the partnership to deliver leadership development programmes in their areas and beyond.

OLP will provide the updated NPQH, NPQSL and NPQML programmes together with the new NPQEL (National Professional Qualification in Executive Leadership) from September 2017.

Best Practice Network leads on the design and development of the programmes as well as training, support and quality assurance of facilitators and back office support. This includes the management of all training events, candidate support, marketing and the provision of an online learning platform and online diagnostic tools for candidates.

Phil Haslett, business development director at Best Practice Network, said: “OLP is a great example of a sustainable, school-led leadership development model working on a regional level. We’re looking forward to the continued growth of OLP as the brand moves into other areas of the country, building on the success already forged by school partnerships in West Hertfordshire and Nottinghamshire.”

Tarun Kapur, CEO of the Dean Trust MAT, said: ‘We all know that we need to tackle the challenge of making sure that enough people become heads and senior school leaders but we can’t do it if we continue to gather together in small clusters.

“The small-scale approach can be costly. The logistics of delivering professional development can also stretch limited back office resources of schools. Small scale can make it more difficult to gather the detailed local intelligence you need to understand in any detail what local pressure points and needs are.

“The approach we are already taking with OLP in the north west could show the way. We believe this expansion of the OLP brand will strengthen everyone in the partnership, and enable us to deliver high quality leadership development on a large scale, in a cost-effective way.”

Registration for NPQ courses commencing Autumn 2017 is now open. We also invite teaching schools that share our values to join the partnership.

Further information can be found on the OLP website.