Specialist NPQs: The next step in your leadership development?

Specialist National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) offer domain-specific development to support leaders with a range of responsibilities across all schools and settings. Specialist NPQs can help school leaders at every level to improve their leadership of literacy, teaching, teacher development, primary maths or behaviour and culture.

If you are a school leader who wants to develop your leadership capabilities, doing a specialist NPQ is a great choice – whether it’s your first NPQ or following a leadership NPQ.

They are valuable way to deepen your expertise in a specialist domain, and will support you to become an even better school leader.

So, why should you consider a specialist NPQ?

School leadership is challenging for many reasons. Leaders need to know about lots of different areas. A headteacher might find themselves talking to a colleague about curriculum one minute and discussing health and safety the next. An assistant head might consider curriculum, literacy and leading teaching in the same meeting.

Leadership is full of moments like this: shifting from thinking about one subject to another. It’s complex and multifaceted. And that’s why NPQ leadership programmes, and the frameworks they are based on, focus on breadth. They provide school leaders with foundational knowledge across nine key domains.

But genuine expertise requires more than breadth: it requires depth too.

To make the best decisions when faced with challenges, you will benefit from more specialist knowledge. Challenges like how to support pupils to read and write, or how to motivate and support staff to be even better teachers, are complex.

On a specialist NPQ you will have more time to dive into the detail of a narrower topic. In fact, a specialist NPQ offers six times as many modules on one area as a leadership NPQ does.

Doing a specialist NPQ gives you a more expert edge which makes them a fantastic career development tool.

Because they are focused on areas that represent the most pressing areas for school improvement, specialist programmes help you to develop the deep – and valuable – expertise leadership teams need.

For example, the NPQ for Leading Teacher Development (NPQLTD) helps leaders to develop the knowledge and skills they need to support their staff to get better through professional development. Professional development is a cost-effective school improvement solution, if done well, when compared to alternative strategies (Education Policy Institute, 2020). But it is far from straightforward. Getting people to change long-held habits is hard. Making those changes stick is even harder.

The NPQLTD has 18 modules dedicated to helping leaders understand how they can create great professional development experiences for their staff. This includes learning how to sequence professional development curricula and individual professional development sessions, and creating an environment which enables staff to take new ideas and run with them.

Investing in professional development is crucial to school improvement: all schools want and need their teachers to keep getting better. By completing the NPQLTD, you can become the expert schools are looking for to make those investments pay off.

The quality of leadership in a school goes a long way to determining outcomes for its pupils (Kraft & Papay, 2014).

As a school leader you are well-positioned to implement the changes that a specialist NPQ might push you to think about at whole school level. This means the depth of learning you get from your NPQ can be used improve things for all staff and pupils in your school.

To unlock the potential of leadership to improve outcomes, schools need their activities to be expertly planned, evidence-informed and implemented with energy and skill. These are approaches you can learn on a specialist NPQ.

A good example is the NPQ for Leading Literacy. On this programme, leaders will gain knowledge to build their school’s approach to reading and literacy around the best available evidence. They will explore evidence in great depth, discuss it with other passionate leaders of literacy, and learn from expert facilitators. Combined with the breadth of knowledge they may have already built on a leadership NPQ, this leader has the potential to develop a truly rigorous, rich and successful approach to literacy in their school.

And great literacy, like great behaviour and great teaching, underpins so much of children’s success at school. It’s particularly important for schools in areas of high disadvantage where poor literacy skills drive much of the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers.

By becoming an expert in combination with your broad leadership knowledge, you will have even more potential to transform the life chances of pupils in your school.

Are you facing a specific challenge in your school? Do you want to deepen your knowledge in an area that you know something about? Or to expand your understanding in an area that you have less experience in? If so, consider making your next move into one of our NPQ specialist programmes.

To learn more, visit our programmes page.