Early Headship Coaching Offer (EHCO)

The EHCO provides you with tailored, personalised support to apply knowledge from the NPQH to your school context.

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 you want to develop expertise in. Each participant 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 behaviour 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:

From September 2024, the DfE has changed NPQ funding. For EHCO, funding is available to new headteachers serving in all publicly funded schools and 16 to 19 educational organisations in England. 

New headteachers are eligible for this targeted support package if you are in your first five years of headship and have previously completed an NPQH (or currently doing an NPQH).

Fully-funded spaces are filled up quickly, therefore we always advice early applications. If you do not work in an eligible school, or all fully-funded spaces have been filled, the cost of the EHCO is £800 + VAT.

Facilitators:

David Moody

Raphael Moss

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.