Curriculum for Senior Leaders

Equip yourself with theoretical understanding and practical know how to reach new heights in curriculum design and implementation. If you are currently a senior leader with curriculum responsibility across all subjects in your school, this is the programme for you.

  • Develop your expertise in curriculum design
  • Leverage the expertise of your subject leaders
  • Access and apply the latest curriculum research
  • Gain peer-to-peer support from our network
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Why us?

Ambition Institute is a national education charity that helps schools tackling educational disadvantage to keep getting better, and help their teachers and school leaders to become more expert over time.

We have designed a robust, research-informed Curriculum for Senior Leaders programme which will help you improve and refine your curriculum design and therefore improve outcomes for your pupils.

Who is the Curriculum for Senior Leaders programme designed for?
You need to be responsible for the curriculum across all of your school or trust to be eligible for this programme.

Benefits for you

Drive curriculum change
You will develop the skills and knowledge to confidently change the curriculum in your school. We will help you to work with your senior leadership team to create a ‘vision of intent’ for your school-wide curriculum and use this to support middle leaders in their subject areas. We will provide you with support to develop your curriculum intent, and its implementation, to deliver meaningful impact.

Improve pupil outcomes
This training will help you develop a clear cross-subject curriculum framework for your school. It will help you provide your pupils, particularly the most disadvantaged, with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.

Leverage the expertise of subject leaders
We will help you to train up your subject leaders, leveraging their expertise so they develop high quality curricula for each subject area.

Access industry-leading resources
You will learn from the latest research and have access to top-quality examples and models across subjects and stages. These include school-wide vision statements, progression maps, long-term plans and teacher educator materials.

Gain peer-to-peer support
Build close relationships with colleagues facing the same challenges. Peer groups give you the opportunity to practice taking concepts you’ve learnt from training into practice, to embed your learning.

Benefits for your school

Enquire here to learn more about how this programme can benefit multiple educators or staff in your school. A member of the Ambition team will be in touch.

Lead school-wide improvement
Your senior leaders will develop a clearly thought out, consistent vision for a whole-school curriculum.

School-wide impact
This programme will help your senior leaders develop a curriculum framework for their school. It will help you provide your pupils, particularly the most disadvantaged, with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.

Promote professional development
Senior leaders will share their learning with colleagues, helping make sure the new curriculum model is understood by your school’s middle leadership team and introduced across all subjects.

Improve quality of education.
This training on curriculum intent, assessment and impact, is designed to tackle some of the key problems schools have experienced since there has been a renewed focus on Curriculum in the Ofsted framework.

Curriculum

What is the duration of this programme?

This 18-month programme features high quality professional development steeped in rigorous curriculum scholarship.

Can I implement the skills and knowledge learned in the programme across other subjects?
This programme will equip you with the skills and knowledge you need to develop and implement a vision for your whole-school curriculum and will give you the tools to train middle leaders to apply your curriculum vision.

How will Curriculum for Senior Leaders help me enhance my curriculum design and implementation skills?
What you’ll learn

  • Curriculum leadership and the science of learning
  • Principles of effective curriculum design
  • Curriculum intent: key concepts and end points
  • Long term planning
  • Teacher education and leading change
  • Medium term planning
  • The implemented curriculum
  • Curriculum-driven assessment
  • Your curriculum impact

How you'll learn

The total time commitment of the programme is 1 day and 2 twilights per half term. This consists of:

  • 9 Development Days: Facilitated sessions that usually run 10 am-4 pm. You’ll use the latest evidence from key practitioners, such as Willingham, Oates and Young, to learn effective curriculum design skills.
  • 10 Virtual Twilight sessions: 1.5 hour long facilitated sessions held on Zoom. These sessions further build on learning from Development Days and support you to contextualise them for your school.
  • Independent work: 1-2 hours per module consisting mostly of reading and curriculum review. All resources will be accessible through our learning platform, Canvas.

There are no formal assessments for the programme. Participants receive a certificate upon completion of the programme.

Eligibility

Who is the Curriculum for Senior Leaders programme designed for?

Individual eligibility
This programme is designed to support participants to lead and implement changes to a whole-school curriculum. If you are currently a senior leader with curriculum responsibility across all subjects in your school, this is the programme for you. Previous participants have included Whole school curriculum leaders, Headteachers, Trust Leaders or Assistant Principals.

If you are a head of year or subject who is responsible for a specific curriculum area, we would recommend the NPQ in Leading Teaching instead.

School eligibility
Ambition’s aim is to help educators serving children from disadvantaged backgrounds to keep getting better. Because of this, we prioritise applications from state-funded schools.

Are there any prerequisites or qualifications required to enroll in Curriculum for Senior Leaders programme?
The Curriculum for Senior Leaders programme is designed for senior leaders in mainstream schools. It supports them to train individual subject leaders to develop subject curricula that align with the requirements of the national curriculum.

School wide

Are you looking to develop colleagues across your school or trust?
Ambition Institute can work with you to design a professional development package that will focus on your setting's specific development needs and priorities.

Enquire here to learn more about how this programme can benefit multiple colleagues across your school or trust and arrange a meeting with a member of the Ambition Institute team.

Research shows that the impact of professional development can be even greater if whole schools or groups of schools invest in it. School and trust-wide professional development influences whole systems (Wiggins et al., 2019) and mobilises peer influence to drive and sustain change (Cialdini, 2007).

Apply

Find out more
Complete this form if you are interested in the programme for yourself.
Complete this form to nominate a colleague or colleagues for the programme.

Apply

  1. Login or sign up to My Ambition
  2. Complete the application form on the ‘My Application’ tab – it’ll only take 30 minutes
  3. We’ll let you know the outcome within two weeks

You can also contact us via:
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 020 3846 5828

This programme will be paid for by the school or trust in a single payment of £3,500 + VAT per participant.

Ambition Institute operates a waitlist where any programme receives more successful applications than there are places available. Applicants will be automatically added to the waitlist upon successful application once a programme is oversubscribed. You can find more information on how our waitlist operate here.

Interested in the programme?