Early Headship Coaching Offer (EHCO)

Are you a new headteacher? Available alongside the NPQ in Headship (NPQH), our Early Headship Coaching Offer provides you with personalised support to help you solve problems relevant in your school context.

Registrations are now open for November 2025. No other NPQ cohorts will be available in the 2025/26 academic year.

While we are not currently delivering the EHCO programme, you can still apply directly through the Ambition Insitute website.

Eligibility: The Early Headship Coaching Offer is designed for headteachers in their first 5 years of leadership. It is designed to be completed alongside or after completion of an NPQH.

Duration: 12 months

Curriculum:

Over three terms, you’ll receive guidance guidance from an experienced, serving headteacher who works in a similar setting or phase, to help you apply expertise from the NPQH, to overcome the challenges and complex problems you face in your day-to-day role.

It’s structured around the persistent problems of school leadership. You will select from these topics and personalise the course to support areas they want to develop expertise in. Each headteacher will select three persistent problems over the duration of the course:

• School culture: Establishing a professional and supportive school culture and encouraging staff to contribute.
• Learning and development: Ensuring effective approaches to professional learning and development.
• Curriculum: Organising and teaching the curriculum.
• Behaviour: Attending to pupil behavior and wider circumstances.
• School improvement: Analysing and diagnosing problems, planning and implementing strategies for continuous educational improvement.
• Administration: Managing an efficient and effective organisation.

How you will learn:

• Content is shared via workbooks situated on Ambition’s online development platform where you will access a workbook for each persistent problem you choose to focus on.
• The workbook shares an expert edit to build on the expertise developed in the NPQH. You will use this knowledge to focus on and define a context-specific problem.
• This course focuses on developmental opportunities for you. Your context specific problem will be developed through one-to-one coaching sessions with an experienced headteacher.
• You’ll be able to shadow the expert headteacher, engaging in a range of activities which will help you to better understand your problem and possible solutions. You will also have regular peer-group discussions with other headteachers via online video conferencing, to work through work-related dilemmas.

Cost:

For our autumn 2025 cohort, teachers and leaders from all state schools in England are eligible to register for a funded place on the EHCO.

There are a limited number of funded places, which are available to those who:

• Be in your first five years of headship.
• Have previously completed an NPQH, are registering for an NPQH, or are currently doing an NPQH with us or another NPQ provider.
• Work in a state funded school in England.

Check your funding eligibility
To check whether you are eligible for funding, you can use our eligibility checker tool.

If you don’t work in an eligible school, the Early Headship Coaching Offer costs £800 plus VAT.

*Currently nurseries are not available yet on the tool. If you work in a nursery, please contact us directly at npqadmissions@ambition.org.uk

Facilitators:

Raphael Moss

Elsley Primary School

Further Info:

Only in exceptional circumstances may a participant request either a deferral or withdrawal from their programme. Participants should be aware that there is a process to follow which is outlined in Ambition’s Institute’s Deferral and Withdrawal Policy

A participant considering withdrawal from an NPQ Programme should be aware that it is Department for Education Policy to only fund an NPQ course for a participant once. This means that a participant who starts a Department for Education funded NPQ course, and then withdraws from that course, will not be funded again for the same programme.