Leadership of Innovation Residential

The Innovation Challenge

Local leaders who can demonstrate they run excellent organisations rarely get the chance to directly influence strategy and policy at a local or national level. Our Local Fellowship programme provides exceptional local leaders with the chance to shape overall strategy and policy in their Local Authority and its Local Strategic Partnership.

Our Approach

We help identify a cohort of local leaders (usually 8 - 16) who have been recognised as good or outstanding and task them with solving a significant policy challenge requiring a synthesis of their own practical knowledge with research and other expertise.

Our most recent Fellowship Commission tackled this question: "How can our school system develop the most effective Trusts, federations and chains of schools, and what should be their accountability framework?"

Innovation Unit designs and delivers an intensive professional development and support programme to enable the group of leaders to solve the problem together: a blend of expert witnesses, research exhibits, and interactive sessions provide a structured enquiry and an immersive leadership development experience. This programme is a way of creating a committed cohort of local leaders capable of creating change beyond the organisation they currently run.

The last Fellowship Commission was successful at influencing the national government's Education White Paper.

Project contacts

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