The Leadership Intensive, run as a private cohort for your school or group. Ten weeks, your own leaders, your real situations. We systematise the fundamentals so your whole leadership layer ends up speaking the same language, not just one person who went on a course.
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Australian International School Saigon
British International School HCMC
Brighton College Hanoi
The British School Kathmandu
Dwight School Seoul
Dulwich International, Suzhou
Hangzhou International School
Harrow International School Shanghai
ISA International Education Group
Malvern College Qingdao
Sedbergh School Fuzhou
Sino-Canada School
UWC Changshu China
Wycombe Abbey School Hangzhou
Yew Chung Yew Wah (YCYW)
University of Warwick
St Mary’s University College Belfast
Teaching WalkThrus
Teacher Development Trust
CollectivEd
International Curriculum Association
EducationScape
Venture Education
PD Academia
The OLLIE Foundation
40+ schools & organisations · 30+ countries · and thousands more leaders reached every week through the chart-topping podcast.
You pick your most promising leader, invest in a programme, and they come back energised, with new language and new ideas. Then they walk into a system that hasn't changed. The frameworks stay in one head. The accountability has no one to land on. Within a term, the energy quietly drains back to how things were.
It isn't that the development didn't work. It's that one person can't shift a culture alone. When your leaders learn together, the language becomes shared, the practice becomes normal, and the change is carried by the team rather than by one tired champion.
The most unique and thought-provoking community-based leadership development program out there.Jean-Pierre Adamson FCCT · International school leader, Hong Kong · Leadership Intensive, Cohort 1
Most leadership overwhelm isn't a shortage of ability. It's cognitive load from the basics that were never made into systems: how meetings run, how feedback is given, how decisions get made. We take ten leadership fundamentals and turn them into shared, repeatable systems your team builds into daily practice.
One research-backed lever per week, distilled from over a hundred peer-reviewed studies and stripped of anything that doesn't change Monday morning. Your team practises each one inside their real job that week.
When the basics run on autopilot, your leaders stop firefighting the mechanics and get the mental space to lead. Less decision fatigue, fewer dropped balls, more room for the work only they can do.
Because the whole team learns the same frameworks at the same time, they leave with a common vocabulary for feedback, delegation, meetings and change, the thing that actually makes a leadership culture stick.
A 90-minute session before week one to understand your context, your people and your priorities, so the scenarios and emphasis are tuned to your organisation.
Every lever is practised against your real situations (anonymised where needed), not a generic corporate case study. The work is immediately useful.
Small circles drawn from your own team, with Shane actively involved, so the peer support and accountability stay inside your organisation after the programme ends.
A live space for your cohort to keep the conversation going between sessions, with daily voice-note prompts and twice-weekly AI summaries so no one falls behind.
Workbooks, prompt cards and templates based on validated instruments, so the whole team ends up with one common vocabulary for how you lead.
Every participant completes their own Personal Leadership Playbook and earns a digital certificate and LinkedIn badge from Education Leaders.
We talk through your context, who you want in the room and what you need the programme to shift. If it’s a fit, we agree cohort size, dates and a live session time that works for your team.
Before week one, a working session to map your people and priorities and tune the curriculum, scenarios and emphasis to your organisation.
One leadership lever per week, taught live by Shane, practised on your real situations between sessions, supported by coaching circles, voice notes and AI summaries.
A closing session to consolidate each leader’s Playbook and certify the cohort, plus an optional plan for what keeps the shared language alive afterwards.
A welcome week, ten leadership levers, and a closing week. Each lever is one research-backed system your leaders build into daily practice, anchored in evidence from over a hundred peer-reviewed studies.
Meet the cohort, set up your coaching circles, agree the rhythms, and lock in the daily voice-note practice that runs through the whole programme.
Use your values as automatic decision-shortcuts, not posters on a wall. When values are clear and practised, they become the filter that cuts decision fatigue.
Draw on the expertise your team already has. Stop treating leadership as a blank slate. Map what you already know and use it on purpose.
The three communication routines that close the gap between what was said and what was heard.
Five meeting types, one design pattern for each. Your leaders redesign their own during the week.
SBI and future-focused feedback. Conversations that develop people rather than wound them, and that your team stops dreading.
Trust triangle, micro-affirmations, and naming the potential in people you’ve been seeing but not yet said out loud.
The STEAMS handover model and the five levels of delegation. Build team capacity without creating new monitoring work.
Tuckman, PLCs, and one piece of professional development your leaders design and run using the EEF model.
WRAP, Cynefin, the pre-mortem. Match the process to the size of the decision. Protect the work only leaders can do.
Kotter, ADKAR, Switch. Map your change, design the narrative, anticipate resistance. Finalise each Personal Leadership Playbook.
Consolidate the Playbooks, certify the cohort, and agree how the shared language and coaching circles continue inside your organisation.
Running the Intensive inside one organisation has a real strength and a real tension, and it’s worth naming both up front.
In the open cohort, leaders are candid precisely because their peers are strangers. With colleagues in the room, some honesty is harder won, and a coaching circle that happens to contain someone’s line manager changes what gets said. We design around this deliberately: circles are built to protect psychological safety, line-management pairings are avoided where it matters, and the diagnostic is where we agree the ground rules with you. The pay-off, a whole team that shares a language and holds each other to it, is worth doing carefully.
Shane is an organisational coach and the host of the Education Leaders Podcast, which sits in the top 10% of podcasts globally. His book Change Starts Here is published by Routledge (2025). As Regional Head of Teacher Development for a major international schools group, he has led leadership development at scale across more than thirty countries.
He is a TEDx speaker and a CollectivEd Fellow, and he teaches every session of the Intensive himself. The programme is the distillation of that work: evidence-based, radically practical, and built from years of working alongside school leaders rather than lecturing them.
A closed cohort is a single investment for your organisation, not a per-seat ticket. Both options run the full ten-week bespoke programme and include the 90-minute diagnostic.
If your question isn’t here, email [email protected] or book a strategy call. Shane reads every message.
A closed cohort runs best with eight to fifteen leaders. Eight to twelve is the standard band; thirteen to fifteen is the larger band. Below eight you lose the cross-conversation that makes coaching circles work, and we’d usually suggest sending those leaders to the open Intensive instead. Above fifteen we’d talk about running two linked cohorts.
A mix of levels works well, and is often better. Middle leaders, deputies and heads on the same programme build a shared language that crosses the layers of your organisation. The 90-minute diagnostic at the start is where we map who’s in the room and tune the scenarios so they’re useful for everyone.
Because it’s a closed cohort built only for your organisation, the live slot is set with you to fit your team. For a single school that’s straightforward. For a group spread across regions, we agree a time that works for the majority and lean on recordings, AI summaries and the coaching circles for anyone who can’t always make it live.
In the open Intensive each person changes and returns to a system that hasn’t. Here the whole team moves together. The scenarios are your real situations, the frameworks become your team’s shared operating language, and the coaching circles are built from within your own people, so the change is embedded across the leadership layer rather than carried by one champion. It’s also a single flat investment for the group rather than a per-seat fee.
Yes. We invoice schools and groups directly in GBP, USD or EUR, work to purchase orders, and provide whatever documentation your finance team needs. The cohort is a single flat fee, so budgeting is simple.
Every leader leaves with their Personal Leadership Playbook and a certificate, and your team keeps the shared frameworks and the coaching-circle habit. We can layer on continuity: an on-site “Leading as a Coach” workshop, or a block of 1:1 coaching with Shane for individuals who want to go further. The aim is that the language and the practice outlast the programme.
The best place to start is a 30-minute strategy call. We’ll talk through your context, who you’d want in the room and what you need the programme to shift, and whether a closed cohort is the right fit. No pitch, no pressure.
Prefer to develop one leader rather than a team? The open Leadership Intensive may be the better fit.
