About the qualification

Worth 90 credits at Master’s level (Level 7), PACES-EL is practice-based and designed to directly impact your work as you learn to apply leadership theories, approaches and evidence to your professional context. As a student on the course, you'll develop an in-depth understanding of leadership and reflect on all aspects of your current and professional practice. You'll also learn from other participants and build networks of diverse educational leaders.

The course is designed for education professionals wishing to develop their understanding of leadership and apply the latest approaches their day to day working practice. It may be particularly useful to current and aspiring school leaders, HE professionals, and those working in leadership roles in educational organisations, professional institutions, and regulatory authorities.

Course overview

PACES-EL is a part-time one year (three term) modular course which is designed to provide educational professionals in leadership or aspiring to leadership roles with a thorough grounding in theoretical frameworks and evidence from a range of contexts, applied to their current and future practice.

The course guides students through a critical exploration of the academic literature and supports them in engaging with experts from diverse fields of educational research relevant to their leadership practice and challenges facing education professionals (e.g. inclusion, wellbeing, artificial intelligence).

Drawing on sociological, psychological, philosophical and social justice perspectives, the course prepares educational professionals to lead their organisation, team or institution through future challenges with academic skills that support continued critical engagement with research, policy, evidence and theories.

Module 1: Becoming a Successful Educational Leader

This module considers what it means to be a successful leader in educational contexts. We start the module by critically exploring theories of effective leadership, including the psychology of motivation, agency and persuasion. We then explore core aspects of leadership in depth, including ways to engage stakeholders and support professional development in your team. We draw on a range of evidence to consider the challenges of leading through periods of educational disruption, before considering ethical dimensions of leadership.

Module 2: Leading Educational Futures

This module addresses the questions of how and where you are leading your organisation, through emerging and future challenges. We consider the ways in which you can support the learners and staff in your school to thrive, exploring debates around wellbeing and attainment. We then explore approaches to inclusion, critically evaluating current research on the science of learning and individual learner differences to support leading for equity. Finally, we tackle the complexity of leading on artificial intelligence (AI) through building knowledge of the impact of AI on learning and its role in shaping our schools, organisations and societies.

Module 3: Leading Innovation and Transformation

This module addresses how you can lead improvements in your school or organisation through innovation and transformation. We explore the role of vision in shaping educational change before considering the process of leading innovation and transformative change at the level of classroom practice, the whole school community, and beyond. We consider the agency and engagement of teachers and stakeholders in the process of change, before extending our exploration of educational leadership beyond the school, to consider leadership of educational change at the regional, national at global scale.